How did you learn Photography?

fiveub

fiveub

fiveub

OcUK Staff
Joined
12 Apr 2008
Posts
49,306
Location
OcUK HQ
Did you learn at college, take a course at a local school, learn online for free, or learnt from magazines or something else?

How did/do you learn?

Currently, I am just reading what I see online and playing with my camera with settings and going out and about and shooting, but I feel I could learn a lot more.

Posting more in here would help I guess! :D
 
I joined a local Photography club which was very friendly and the people there taught me lots and while we were 'on the job' so to speak. :)

Initially I tried to read about as much as I could but learned more than any book could teach by getting out with some people that did know what to do.
 
Hyburnate said:
Watching Mike Browne on YouTube and trial and error :) Still lots to learn!
Click to expand...
This. His vids are excellent. I also watch Matt Granger, DigitalRev and Tony Northrup. Read a few tutorials online from time to time and also have Understanding Exposure.
 
Spent £27 on film in 1980 for my 35mm, did nothing for 20 years, spent thousands on new stuff and clicked away. Still suck, still practising :D
 
Bit of a depressing one, but I purchased my first DSLR back in 2009 before we had our daughter. She had a heart condition and we knew she would pass away so I wanted a decent camera to get as many pics/videos as I could for the 6 days she was alive. To date, I've never taken so many photos in that short time-scale. Needless to say I fell in love with photography. After she passed away, I decided to buy a nice camera (7D) as I'd fallen in love with the concept of capturing images the way I see the world :)

I also was given the opportunity to attend a college course, at the expense of work through an incentive, which gave me some great photography hints and tips.
 
I actually learn most of it through using the Canon A60. It was a £100 camera but the fundamentals are the same, I shot with it all throughout uni, with my friends as subjects. The camera has a awful shutter lag, terrible flash so had to embrace it all. I also had all that time a film SLR but being a student I couldn't afford the running cost of it.

What amazed even myself was how it all clicked together when I got my 5Dmkii, everything I had learned in the 6 years shooting a tiny compact just exploded with a DSLR.
 
Raymond Lin said:
I actually learn most of it through using the Canon A60. It was a £100 camera but the fundamentals are the same, I shot with it all throughout uni, with my friends as subjects. The camera has a awful shutter lag, terrible flash so had to embrace it all. I also had all that time a film SLR but being a student I couldn't afford the running cost of it.

What amazed even myself was how it all clicked together when I got my 5Dmkii, everything I had learned in the 6 years shooting a tiny compact just exploded with a DSLR.
Click to expand...

Pretty much the same as me, I inherited a Minolta Maxxum 7 which was a beast for the time and that's how I started.

It wasn't however until I bought a Sony A100 that it began to 'click'.
 
I started secondary school in 1970 and met a guy that changed my life. Like most kids then, i had never done physics or science at school prior to secondary school. Our physics/science teacher was a keen photographer and one of his ways of getting us interested in science, was to give us the chance of joining the photography club. Once i joined, i never looked back. He was the first guy to teach me about exposure, composition, focusing (no auto focus then) and even more important (then), darkroom technique. He died about 15 years ago, but right up to then, he still held open days at his house for 100's of us ex pupils. I was in my 30's when on one of his open days, he taught us how to develop and print color photographs.
Any skills i have learned over the years have been down to him and practice. If you have a local photography club, join it. Act like a sponge and absorb as much as you can from other members, they will want to share there knowledge with you. When i started out, practice was an expensive thing to do, because of the cost of processing, even if you did your own. Nowdays, practice is just a matter of finding the time and subject. So, practice, practice and practice again.
 
Some 30 odd years ago my school didn't have enough support to run a class, so a mate an I self taught ourselves in the darkroom.. (his older brother had taught him). I then joined the adult centre evening courses aged 15!!! I was by far the youngest student :D ... That was part of the local club I attended for several years...
I started with a Yashica range finder and a roll of Ilford FP4 .... ... moved unto a Practika LTL3... then a Minolta X300 ...... Those were the days.

All this time was also supported by reading and trying, and learning from the older club members..... Been practicing ever since......

Now my 21 year daughter has joined an evening college course, so I teach her now... (I seem to know more about the darkroom than her teacher !!!)...
 
I have to admit that most of my photography learning journey so far has been trial and error. Granted I've viewed (and posted on) quite a few different photography websites and I've been quite lucky in getting a few of my shots published in sites ranging from local newspapers to national photography magazines :)

But the majority of my learning has been self taught with additional support from friends and family. I still consider myself a relative newcomer to the world of photography and I'm learning every day and while I might not always get it right I'm enjoying my journey and that's all that counts as far as I'm concerned :)
 
I learned an amazing amount online reading both this forum and Talkphotography, the photography section here was going through a bit of a boom in those days as the afordable SLR market really picked up and decent cameras started to appear on the second hand market. I vividly remember the macro's that Messiah Khan used to shoot with a sigma lens and a D40x they were really inspiring and showed you didn't need the most expensive kit to get the best shots.

Beyond that I've read a few books, lots of blogs and practiced! I'm nowhere near as good as I should be after all these years but I only tend to pick my camera up if I'm going on Holiday or for a walk in the peaks I very rarely make dedicated photo trips. My post processing lets me down too, I want to move over to lightroom but the latest version isn't even windows XP compatible and my machine struggles processing the 5dmkii raws as it is!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom