Exposing Digital Photography (2015)

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/photography-basics you can audit individual courseware for free if that helps

Ask around in your local arts scene. Many professional photographers offer short courses to small groups of people.

I agree this HES course's, umm, focus, is about camera engineering rather than how to use the camera.

They could have mentioned how to use nice glass for composition. For example, mobile phone cameras are great. The best reason these days to schlep a CAMERA camera instead of a phone is the lens. Do you want a big aperture (narrow depth of field)? Bring your CAMERA. Do you want a super long lens for making pictures of faraway stuff. Bring your CAMERA.

Some CAMERAs have another cool hack. You can put them in to black-and-white mode and their viewfinders show black and white. That's a great way for an amateur photog to learn to see light unconfused by color.

The Bastard's Book of Photography might be what you want :)

http://photography.bastardsbook.com/toc/

Since Ken is being brought up in this thread, I think I'll share my favorite view of his: you should take a painting class.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/what-is-photography.htm

I think it's especially valuable as it approaches the problem from the opposite end. In photography, you have a scene and you're trying to frame it. In painting, you start with just a frame and decide how to fill it. That forces you to start with a few strong compositional elements and elaborate from there. It gives you an intuition for the minimum needed for a coherent image.

The problem with teaching this stuff with photography, and the reason the classes you seek don't really exist, is that it's very difficult to communicate about it via a camera. On a painting, you can sketch to start and have an instructor come by and ask questions about why things are positioned in certain ways, what else you might do, etc. With photography, you have to instead select and pare down to the desired image.

Painting is about intention.

Photography is about selection.

In the end, they become the same thing, reach the same goal, but the learning process is dramatically different.

Chances are really good that your favorite photographer has a background in art, too.

It's fashionable to hate on him, but a lot of his advice is very good. The blog post you link to is quite silly and petty, honestly. A lot of people don't like to be told that their $5000 equipment is only slightly superior in terms of image quality to much cheaper equipment, but it's true.

Those photographic circles are kind of a joke (pixel-peepers, measurebators, etc) in themselves.

The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable.

It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear.

He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1]

His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs.

Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times.

The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences.

There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here.

[0]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

[1]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm