I don’t know if you read my two previous posts: How I became a Photographer and How I’ve chosen my First DSLR camera that I published, so, in case you read me for the first time, this is the third one where I share my story of how Photography changed my life. I hope I could inspire you a little and give you some useful advice.
… €600 later I was finally home keeping that beloved gear in my hands. when I realized that, I didn’t know how to shoot. Except the automatic mode. So, I started to read the manual that was in the box, was that useful? Not really as I could not understand a clue, I could clarify my some fog concerning some buttons, but not really when I was supposed to use them, so what?
I needed a course, a school, a book, youtube, or someone patient that could explain me from A to Z of digital photography. Here in Brussels, I knew an academy of arts where I had already followed painting and sculpture, and I knew that there were also photography classes. My i-first move was to look at their program, there were classes on Wednesday evening from 5 PM to 9 PM, I was so happy, at least until I saw the program. I realized that the course was not a class for beginners or people like me, someone who already had done photography the old way but was holding a DSLR camera in her hands for the first time.
I suddenly realised another little problem; I have an 18 months daughter at home with me, and my husband who is in the scientific researches field had such irregular working hours, that it was too just impossible to regularly attend classes. So, the only thing left was my best friends Internet. I started looking for tutorials on youtube, but I didn’t find anything that corresponded to myself until I arrived on the Creative Live website. There were live courses which were for free, and then in their courses list, I’ve seen this one: Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014 with John Greengo. $99 ( Now you’ll find Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2015) . That was almost the price of one year at the academy, and at the end of the course I had not even a piece of paper telling that I followed a course, moreover, who was that Mr. Greengo? Was that a useful class? I looked at Mr. Greengo website, actually yes, there were beautiful photographs, and then I looked at reviews ( a thing that I learned to do almost on everything I buy on the internet). I checked to see if someone was disappointed about that creative live website, and there were no negative articles, comments or reviews, then I looked in the Creative Live discussions about the Fundamentals of Photography course, and there were only a few, and a woman wrote this:
“This has been probably the best introduction course to digital photography that I’ve ever viewed. It blows away all the other courses I’ve taken, including NYIP.”
This comment was what gave me confidence in buying the course, this what pushed me to choose it, and I was right. I love John Greengo way of teaching, I love his course, couldn’t stop to watching the classes, every day as soon as the baby was at the nap, I was in front of my computer watching his classes, doing the exercises and having fun.
30 hours later, what did I learn from that course? It’s simple: everything. How to use my camera in manual mode (exactly what I was looking for). I also discovered that I had a crop sensor and not a full frame, I learned how to choose my lenses, how to set the exposition, the ISO, the focus, how to have a shallow depth of field or the opposite and how to have sharp photos. All the technical knowledge that you need to start using your camera and the firsts steps of the composition.
What happened next? It’s not really difficult to guess, as soon as I begun to understand how my camera was working and what I could do with it I felt the need of having a new lens. Because suddenly I was too limited with only my 18-55 mm, and that was the beginning of a great buying & selling lenses love story.
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