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.
LOVE the last sentence … (as I am a recent drop-out-of-school…)
Thank you for letting me stand on your shoulders!
I would also add that people who choose to go the self-taught route should NOT assume that their journey will be shorter. It’s definitely not the easy way out.
realizing this now.there is a lot to learn A LOT and either i have the discipline, drive and perseverance, and appetite to learn or not.
this is a craft and there is only one way and that is through it. otherwise hang it up.
After watching creativeLIVE all last weekend, really can’t compare any kind of classroom learning to the amazing on-the-fly, in-real-time education from the CL courses. Watching the CL instructors, you not only get to see the concepts explained, but you also get to see demonstrations of how those ideas are manifested in best practices around the industry. Opinions vary, but the live chat room is also filled with tons of help (from novice to expert) on almost every topic you can think of. I don’t know who said it, but someone commented this past weekend that Gale Tattersall taught more than a year of film school in just a couple of days… Everyone has to make their own choice — but many people will probably find that learning online from resources like creativeLIVE are all that are needed to get to the next level of where you want your education to go……
Lovely. I shouldn’t go then. Like to teach myself and get hard but fair critique after presenting a couple of shots to other people than my friends and family.
Now off to shoot some fireworks from a top secret location which is my house as the weather isn’t very welcoming for the upcoming 21cc fireworks for The Tall Ship Race 2011 in Greenock, Scotland.
Take care everyone!
I like the idea of getting a mentor. The only problem to that suggestion for me is finding someone who has the time and willingness to mentor me. I have no desire to mentor the local wedding photographer or portrait photographer. I would love to have someone like Zach Arias or Chase Jarvis mentor me, but there are probably thousands of people thinking the exact same thing.
I chose not to go to photography school. I do better with hands on learning. I like to go at a pace that caters to how quickly or slowly I’m learning. I took a course in college in Visual Basic. The professor did not teach me Visual Basic. He taught me how to teach myself Visual Basic. As a result I passed at the top of the class and everyone else missed the very important lesson he tried to teach us; that you won’t always have someone there to show you how to do something. His lesson was that in the real world, you won’t have a teacher holding your hand showing you what to do, you need to learn how to find the right resources that will provide you with the knowledge to help you get to where you want to go.
I find that in the classroom environment, if you’re not picking up on something quick enough, the class goes on and you’re left behind. If you catch on faster then everyone, the class still goes at the same pace and what you learn is limited by what everyone as a group has the capacity to learn in one semester.
What works for me may not work for someone else. To each their own.