The Fundamentals of Digital Photography

A few weeks ago I was cruising my list of photography blogs when I came across a post to Chase Jarvis' blog. He was going to announce something big on a live video feed. I managed to catch a bit of the live feed before it became overwhelmed with connections. The announcement was that creative Live was expanding their course line up. If you haven't heard check out this post on Chase's site:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2010/04/introducing-creativelive-com-worldwide-free-creative-education-updated/



Since hearing about this I have been following John Greengo's Fundamentals of Digital Photography course. This is an excellent photography fundamentals course. This class has taught me quite a bit, even after feeling I had a pretty good understanding of the basics. What happens with this course is that each week the course is broadcast live from the the creative live website. This live broadcast is free for anyone to watch. If you'd like to watch the lectures again, you can purchase the entire course. The purchased course includes full videos you can download (not stream) to your preferred mobile device or computer. While the course is still in progress the cost of the full course is discounted; at $79 this course is well worth the money. It is really detailed and contains very clear graphics and explanations. You can tell that John has invested some serious time into making an excellent course, and has adapted it very well to the video format. For more information on this course (including the calendar) see:

http://creativelive.com/courses/digitalphotography/

I was inspired to start this blog after watching the course and chatting with several other students. My fellow students has several questions that were not answered, or could not easily be answered in the simple Q and A format of the online course. To help them and other people in their shoes I decided to launch this blog.

One topic I plan to tackle here is how do I decide how to setup my camera on the fly. The underlying concern here is that modern digital cameras have so many different settings, how does one get ready for the event so they don't miss any of the action. The fear is that the settings will be wrong, the parent or family photographer will forget what to change and the whole thing will be missed. As I shoot family events, I'll plan to do several walk-throughs showing a bad photography and what I changed quickly to make the photo better. I will also talk about how I planned for the event.

Another post I have planned is how to get the best portraits of your children, and how to fix up the portraits when you have the look you want, but the room they are in is a mess (i.e. a bad background).

Again, stayed tuned.

-Heath