Since we all carry a camera with us all the time, it would be a shame not to know how to use it properly. The internet has excellent free photography courses and guides for all skill levels to learn everything you need to know to get a great photo.
Some are interactive and give you assignments and feedback. Some are self-directed and walk you through the photography step by step. And some offer a way to learn more about a subject in photography. The information is out there; It is up to you to use it.
Table of Contents
1. Photo critic (Web): Free email photography course with feedback
Photocritic is one of the best free online photography courses for beginners. It is delivered as an email every ten days and keeps you from the absolute basics to the shutterbug. The best part? You don’t need a professional camera; You can even do the course with a smartphone.
The entire tutorial consists of 21 lessons. When you receive an email, you have ten days to learn the lesson, complete an assignment, and send it to Photocritic for feedback. Haje Jan Kamps and Daniela Bowker take care of all the lessons and the feedback. Both have taught photography and written books about it for over a decade.
This is also the main reason why we recommend only signing up if you are interested. After all, Photocritic is overseen by two people who provide feedback on assignments and are still completely free. Given what they offer, it’s only fair to respect their time and effort.
2. It’s just light (Web): Written Photography Guide for Beginners
The photographer Nic Zantop has been writing on his site It’s Just Light since 2013. In a series of articles, he has put together a beginner’s introduction to photography course that will walk you through all the basics of skills, knowledge, and composition.
During the course you will learn about the camera and lenses, image resolution, focal length and aperture, exposure, cropping, shutter speed, white balance, the use of the histogram, metering and other important aspects of photography. Zantop also devotes an entire article to learning how to develop your creativity as a photographer.
The It’s Just Light photography course is not regulated like other online courses, but you can still do it as a self-paced tutorial. Once you’re done, the website has some other photography tips and tricks that can help you take great pictures.
3. Study with Jared (Web): Cancel automatic mode and start manual recording
The first thing to learn in order to improve your photography is to stop using the automatic mode and switch to manual mode. That means learning the shutter speed, aperture, focus, and other settings. Wedding photographer Jerad Hill offers a free 4-hour video course to help you do this.
The course is broken down into short videos that are broken down into sections such as Introduction, Basics, Getting to Know Your Camera, Understanding Light, Understanding Settings, Getting to Know Your Subjects, and other tips. It is an online self-paced course that is available free of charge for two weeks. If you want to access it after two weeks, it’s a $ 5 lifetime subscription.
Go through Hill’s website and you’ll see tutorials on a variety of subjects besides photography. That actually makes the course unique. A natural teacher, Hill is great at taking what you have learned and explaining it to others to improve their skills. For this reason, the photography course was conducted by over 250,000 people and is often recommended in photo forums and blogs.
4th Photography 101 from SLR Lounge (YouTube): Free photo tutorials in short videos
The SLR Lounge has a well-deserved reputation as a great online resource for learning photography, as well as a photography forum for discussion. It sells several tutorials for different levels of difficulty, but what many don’t know is the playlist of free YouTube videos for beginners.
In Photography 101: Master Manual Mode, the experts at SLR Lounge go into various aspects that you can do with a DSLR. There are a total of 19 videos of very different lengths. For example, there is a 24-minute video to understand white balance and color temperature, and a 3-minute video to capture the perfect sunset photo.
Each video is from a domain expert and is a self-contained tutorial on the subject. In our opinion, they don’t need to be viewed in the order of the playlist. So, if you only want to study a specific topic and skip something else, please feel free to do so.
5. Photography course.net (Web): Free photography courses for all skill levels and types
Photography course is one of the oldest websites on the internet that offers free photography courses. You need to register to access the material, but that’s about it. There are a few premium courses as well, but for most people the free material will be enough as it includes:
- Beginner: Understand the absolute basics of how a camera works and its settings.
- In between: Lighting, silhouettes, white balance, and other photographic skills.
- Progressive: What you need to know for professional photography.
- Composition: Radial balance, asymmetrical balance, guide lines and more.
- Flash: The differences and uses of pop-up flash, fill-flash, diffusers, and synchro-flash.
- Portrait: Lenses, lighting and headshots.
- Landscape: Sunrise, sunset, aerial photography, and other tips for capturing the great outdoors.
The Photography course has many more resources worth reading, including guides on how to improve iPhone photography and in-depth tutorials on using Adobe Lightroom to edit your shots.
Find online photo assignments to practice further
You have to practice, practice and practice no matter what photography class or tutorial you are learning from above. This is the best way to really improve your skills. But it is not easy to find out what to practice.
If you’re struggling for inspiration, a popular tip on online photography forums is to take part in a 52-week challenge or search the web for photo assignments. A quick Google search will give you lots of results, and multiple social media pages will give you a new task every day or week.
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