| Since Ken is being brought up in this thread, I think I'll share my favorite view of his: you should take a painting class. http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/what-is-photography.htm I think it's especially valuable as it approaches the problem from the opposite end. In photography, you have a scene and you're trying to frame it. In painting, you start with just a frame and decide how to fill it. That forces you to start with a few strong compositional elements and elaborate from there. It gives you an intuition for the minimum needed for a coherent image. The problem with teaching this stuff with photography, and the reason the classes you seek don't really exist, is that it's very difficult to communicate about it via a camera. On a painting, you can sketch to start and have an instructor come by and ask questions about why things are positioned in certain ways, what else you might do, etc. With photography, you have to instead select and pare down to the desired image. Painting is about intention. Photography is about selection. In the end, they become the same thing, reach the same goal, but the learning process is dramatically different. Chances are really good that your favorite photographer has a background in art, too. |