I am searching for the best way to learn what I need to learn about photography. I've reviewed the New York Institute of Photography, they offer quite a few programs, it would be 'on -line' ranging from 500.00 to 1000.00 depending on how extensive I want to get into it right now, or I can sign up & take classes @ my college here locally for 129.00 for 5 classes, they start w/ beginners to intermediate, & so on. the one thing I do like about this one, is the class is taught by a professional photographer, & I think it would help me being hands on w/ my camera. Can I get some others tell me how you took your classes, I realize that some are just a natural @ photography, but I am not & I want to learn as much as possible. I've been doing a lot of online studying with Internet searching & reading articles to help me out as much as possible, but I feel like it's not enough. I know a lot of what I learn will come w/' experience , getting out there & shooting , making lots of mistakes & learning from my mistakes. Does anyone have an opinion on this subject ?
I often recommend student photographers look into a class at a local community college so I tend to stick with that suggestion here. The only caveat being, know what you are getting into.
A professional photographer can still be a lousy instructor. I've taken lessons from local musicians and many times found myself unsure of what the "lesson" was for the next class and ultimately saying I was just not learning anything because they're coming into class unprepared because this is not what they do to make a living. Their next session or their next tour was far more important than I was as a student. An instructor who sees this as an easy way to make a few bucks probably isn't worth your time or money.
To be fair, I've also had classes where we spent most of the time talking and I learned a few things I would not have picked up from a by-the-book "teacher". There's just a lot of stuff that never finds its way into an organized book. Do some research into the instructor's teaching style and how many students would take the class again.
Look at the syllabus for the class to determine whether you're going to cover aspects of photography you already comprehend. Some areas are important to cover more than once and at least get everyone on the same course of understanding and utilizing the concepts. If the course is too basic though, you'll lose interest in most cases.
That is the single most common impediment I've seen when it comes to learning a skill or craft. Most people who take on line courses where self instruction is at stake don't tend to know enough to know what to learn, when to learn it and how to learn it. So they bounce around from lesson to lesson and subject to subject and never put together a cohesive plan for learning where you set a foundation and then build upwards from there. That's a major portion of what a good class should give you, a plan that forces you to stay on track and pay attention to what you did last week because it feeds into what you're about to do next week. A class in stage acting where you only read about how to build stage settings would be pretty worthless. So too, IMO, would be a photography class where you spent weeks covering a single topic such as "how your lens works".
A good instructor keeps you on track if you can't make yourself do that on your own.
So realize learning is 95% you and only 5% the instructor. If you get bored easily, then you will likely get bored in a class also. If you can't take criticism, especially the sort of dumb criticism of the "I like it because ... " type, then you'll find yourself not caring about the work. If you can find the way to use group criticism as a guide and add to that some personal mentoring from a good instructor, then a class can be very beneficial IMO. If the instructor is not available outside of class, then I feel you will have reduced the advantages of a class.
Photography though is a lot of inner dialogue stuff. A class of any type can teach rules but it is your interpretation of those rules that go into the mental function which inspires your result. A musician is likely to say this is "playing what you hear in your head". You can't really teach that any more than you can teach the micro-second difference between putting an emphasis on the 2-4 beat of a measure vs playing a toe tapping rhythm line. IMO all that comes from paying attention to what others do that pulls you to their work and then applying what's in your head to what comes out of your fingers.
Bottom line is, the class is cheap enough and the personal contact can be a good thing. You can find the same type of education elsewhere since 95% of how you learn is based on you. You can walk away from the class without feeling you've wasted much more than the cost of a good polarizing filter.
If you want contacts, make them yourself. Don't pay someone to give a list of contacts they hand out to everyone who pays their price.
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