Nature Boy and the Photography Course

Got pretty ill this week with a stomach virus and for several days the only thing of any interest aside from watch Curb Your Enthusiasm replays on HBO was taking Goldie for long walks with my camera. As such, this week’s photos feature a lot of shot of Discovery Bay wildlife. In fact I started taking lots of pictures of birds, then spending my days trying to identify them. Yes, I was very bored. To pass the time, I thought I would read through a decent looking free online photography course that I found. Lesson one of the course focuses entirely on composition, making no mention at all of camera technicalities, and finishes up with a couple of assignments based on the lesson content. Going out with my camera and this lesson fresh in my mind really changed the way I approached my photographs, and particularly how I chose and cropped a few of the final shots.

The full course, by Jodie Coston, is available here.

It's well written, easy to follow and is essentially a very basic photography course. It seems to me that if you are a beginner, it would be a perfect place to start. If you are at my stage of starting to become comfortable composing, capturing and cropping photographs yet far from considering yourself a photographer, it really helps re-enforce some vital rules. Even if you are a bit of a pro it never hurts to revisit the basics. However, if you are perfect, just ignore it.

With that, here are last weeks photographs. FYI photos 5 & 6 are my attempts at the assignments for the course.















- Joe