Mark your calendars! I’ll be offering a free, online, nature photography course starting on the 11th of January. It’s a perfect way to start your year of image-making off right. If you are an advanced photographer, this will be a great way to brush up on your skills and knowledge, while learning some new things. And for new photographers, this course will help you not only understand how all those settings on your camera work, but what they actually DO and how to use them.
From my experience, it’s easy to learn what things like aperture and shutter speed do (control how much light enters the camera). But understanding how these settings impact the final image, and why you might want to adjust them in different photographic situations, is much less clear. In this class we’ll learn how to set up your camera for outdoor photography, and how to apply camera settings to real-world situations, demonstrating their role in the images we create. We’ll take a deep dive into exposure and focus, as we discover how to create sharp, purposefully exposed images in the field.
We’ll take care of all that in the first couple of classes! Then we’ll dive into the depths of real outdoor photography. We’ll dedicate a session to landscape photography, where we’ll analyze how and why an image works. How do your choices of exposure, aperture, and shutter speed impact the image? How do we create an interesting composition out of the scenes we encounter in the field? How can we approach our landscape photography creatively? Above all, we’ll learn to make decisions with purpose, to think through our photos in new ways, taking our landscape images to new levels along the journey.
Another class will be dedicated to wildlife photography. We’ll discuss field ethics, and how to avoid harming our subjects in the field. Then, we’ll dive into the issues that wildlife photographers face: focus strategies and the relevant camera settings, how to cope with rapidly changing lighting and action, composition, and strategies for getting close(without impacting) wild animals. We’ll even touch on tricky subjects like birds in flight, and capturing motion and action in creative ways.
Finally, we’ll spend a lesson on post-processing landscape and wildlife photos in Adobe’s Lightroom software. We’ll quickly cover importing and organizing images in a Lightroom catalog and then dive into the actual techniques for post-processing. We’ll discuss adjustments to light and color, selective adjustments on the image, basic cloning and spot removal, and finally how to export files for printing, sharing as digital files, and making your photos look their best on social media.
After each class, there will be homework assignments where you’ll apply what you’ve learned.
By the time the course wraps up, you should have a solid understanding of your camera, how to make setting and composition choices in the field, and to optimize those photos on your computer. In other words, you’ll be ready to start your new year of photography with new knowledge and creativity!
And it’s free! Sign up for the class HERE. If you can’t make the live broadcast, sign up anyway, because I’ll be archiving the recordings of all the lectures and homework assignments, but the link will be kept private to those registered for the class. Class starts on January 11th! Sign Up!
