You should go to photo school if you want structured learning. Groundwork from the fundamentals to the bigger concepts. It will move too slowly for many of you, too fast for others. There are lots of great programs, worldwide.
If you don’t do better with structured learning and you are highly motivated and prefer real world experience, don’t go. Instead, teach yourself, take workshops, get mentors, read books, build your support network, work for other people. And most importantly take a helluva lot of photographs. Dig the long ditch that it takes to learn to make a living with photographs.
If this is too simple a post for you, then go to photo school.
Anyone contemplating going to school for photography should consider film school instead. You learn all you need to know and much more for taking stills, plus you’ll learn how to shoot motion, which you at least need to try. And mostly importantly, you’ll learn about story, and how to show them visually, which is the heart of it all.
TimR, what a great point! Seems so obvious, yet I never thought of it.
I went the US Navy School of Photography route. It was a cross between structured and unstructured, self paced. Allowed one to really learn in depth fairly quickly. When assigned to duty station, all of the learning was followed up by on the job experience and plenty of time to be creative and to experiment with the very best equipment money could buy.
I don’t think a photoschool would be the thing for me, I’d much rather go and find out for myself and teach myself 🙂
I did not and had a successful 20+ year career. But if I had I might have had ideas and concepts spoonfed to me I had to learn piecemeal, the hard way. I’d have been exposed to equipment and industry contacts more easily and it’s quite possible my career would have moved more swiftly and I’d have had a wider range of employments options when I was starting out.
Henry Posner
B&H Photo-Video
Photo school will foster a certain type of rigorousness that is hard (but not impossible) to develop on your own. Aside from making sure you get the basics down solidly (you’ll never get past photo 101 without developing your own film), you are constantly in a state where your photos are being critiqued. This is actually quite useful, not only in terms of improving, but also in terms of defining why you as a photographer make certain choices, as well as explaining those choices both visually and literally. It also teaches you how to properly give as well as take criticism; there are SO many photographers out there who take any tiny bit of criticism as an insult, since they can’t separate themselves from their art enough to take a critique and use it to improve.
So I’m a huge fan of learning the basics in a very formal setting (either class, or through a mentor). Once you learn the basics, you learn when and how to bend the rules to get what you want, and have the reasoning to back up why you did it (instead of just saying “it looks pretty”). There’s also a ton of theory usually involved, and it shows you why certain things work more than others (and again, when to break those conventions to achieve something different). Basically you’re given the tools to understand WHY you find one photo better than another, the ability to discuss it, and most importantly, how you can use it to improve yourself.
Now again, this isn’t always just obtained through a formal photo education; there are plenty of ways to approach it. Mentoring is a great way to get these ideas down, especially if you can match that up with a good critique circle and some exhibitions as well as a healthy dose of reading (especially photo history, people never read that stuff on their own it seems). Photo education just lays it all out in a straight line for you.
Too many times I see people who think their photos are untouchably great just can’t handle even the smallest criticism (I blame the mindless “great photo!” flickr phenomena here in part), and they forever live in a bubble where there is no improvement.