As somebody interested in photography, this is really useful.
I'm wondering if anybody else is interested in working through the 'course'. We could do a lecture and an exercise each week, then setup some kind of discussion forum? I know it would probably improve my photography a lot.
You could check out the Reddit photo class -http://www.reddit.com/r/photoclass/ lots of people there do it together to get a better "learning experience".
How so? I took a (very) quick look through the lecture notes and exercises and they seemed to relate mainly to the art of taking photos. The first exercise seems to be about learning to use aperture, focus, and shutter speed to produce different effects. The first lecture is about "natural & linear perspective, pinholes and lenses,
aperture, shutter, motion blur, depth of field, ISO" which is pretty much what I would expect of a photography course.
Right. Well, with a digital camera you can probably figure out all of that on your own just by futzing around with the camera for a weekend.
The difficult part comes in understanding light and understanding composition, neither of which the course really seems to talk about.
No one has ever needed to know about 3d colourspaces ( http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs178-11/applets/locus.... ) in order to take a good picture. However, good editing is about 30% of the effort behind a good photo; you might come out a better PHOTOGRAPHER but your photos won't necessarily be that much improved.
Anyways, the secret is to look at what other people are doing and to take as many pictures as possible.
I'm wondering if anybody else is interested in working through the 'course'. We could do a lecture and an exercise each week, then setup some kind of discussion forum? I know it would probably improve my photography a lot.