My List of the Most Effective Photography Resources for Learning the Basics (and Beyond)
There is an innumerable amount of educational material available at your disposal for anything you could possibly want to learn, and photography is no exception. While paid specialized training and classes are available on folks’ Patreon accounts, online classes, and various subscriptions, there’s plenty of free material that is very effective at teaching you the basics (and beyond). I’ve never paid for any education, which isn’t to say that they aren’t worth buying, but I’ve learned plenty just from YouTube channels and blogs from business’ websites, and those two sources make up 99% of my photography education. Plus, with my membership to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR®), I have access to a whole library of ebooks for free as well, ranging from photography itself to complementary stuff such as design and business management. There’s also my local library that has a lending program with other counties, so I’m able to access lots of material from that as well.
I’ll organize this blog to discuss the sources I’ve used, why I like them, and what I learned from them:
Books
Books are awesome in that they provide you with a bunch of technical knowledge depending on the topic. There’s so many books out there about photography and all the concepts that go with it. I’ve read a lot of books, and some of them were helpful and some were kind of redundant.
1)
YouTube Channels
There’s countless YouTube channels out there. Although some will choose to keep their best secrets to themselves (unless you buy their online course), you’re bound to find that same kind of “insider’s information” from others. I try to stray away from buying people’s courses/guides, especially when photography is semi-expensive to get into, depending on the level of gear you want to purchase. YouTube is awesome, it’s free, and there’s so much information available that if you just write down the key bits of interesting stuff, you could pretty much create your own course over time. Here’s the channels that I have used regularly over the years:
1)
Websites/Online Blogs
As with YouTube, there’s just as many websites available devoted to teaching photography and how to acquire the necessary skills. It is staggering the amount of websites that are at your fingertips, and most are pretty awesome. My process for finding these sites was a little haphazard. I never searched out for these websites themselves. I would simply type my search in Google and the SEO did the rest. After skimming through a few articles, I would eventually find one that matched most with what I was looking for, and then if I was feeling curious I would explore around the website to see what else it provided. And that’s pretty much how I came to develop this list that I’m sharing now:
1) PetaPixel
2)