Over five weeks (Tuesdays at 12pm MST, recorded sessions available), we’ll cover the basic elements of photography starting with camera operation, and moving on to settings, exposure, field techniques, composition for landscape and wildlife, and post-processing in Adobe’s Lightroom software.

The course is free, with an optional donation, and will take place over Zoom. Each class will last an hour to ninety minutes and will offer the chance for questions and discussion.

And don’t forget your homework! Prior to the first class and after each lesson, there will be homework assignments designed to provide a practical application to what we’ve covered in class.

For those who wish to contribute $100 or more, there will be the option of one-on-one sessions, private photo critique, advanced post-processing lessons, or simply the opportunity to get direct answers to your photo questions.

Taking the class? If you’d like, please feel free to contribute. No obligation, but I’d appreciate it!

Course Description

Each session of this 5-part course will introduce you to a different aspect of creative photography. But unlike other classes out there, we won’t get bogged down by the details. Rather, you’ll learn what you need to know in order to create the images you’ve been dreaming of. But more importantly, you’ll discover how to apply your learning to develop ideas and create images that, right now, you can’t even imagine.

Early in the course, we’ll cover camera use and settings, certainly. And we’ll learn how to apply those in any given photographic situation to create unique, compelling, and creative images. And we’ll talk about exposure, focal lengths, and equipment so you know how all those tools will change the outcome of your photo.

Then we’ll dive into the deeper subjects of nature photography: field strategies and composition for landscape and wildlife. In these sessions, you’ll learn how to apply what we’ve learned about camera use, exposure, settings, and lenses to practical use. We’ll study successful (and unsuccessful) photos to learn how and why they succeed or fail. To improve our wildlife photography, we’ll learn ethics, focus strategies, and field techniques for commonly encountered situations: wildlife portraiture, action shots, birds in flight, and other scenarios.

We’ll dedicate our final lesson to post-processing. Specifically, we’ll be working in Adobe’s Lightroom. While it’s possible to dedicate a dozen lessons to learning all the details of a program like Lightroom, the reality is, the majority of images can be processed with a good understanding of the basics. So we’ll be covering how to get images into (and out of ) Lightroom, organizing your files, and most importantly, the key elements of the Develop module. From exposure to color to basic filters, by the end of the class you’ll be taking your photos to a new level.

Join me in January and take your next year of photography to a new level!

If you are taking the class and wish to contribute, you can do so here:

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