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One of the biggest things I learned from the Photography with Annie Liebowitz MasterClass is that Annie very seldomly presses the shutter or even looks through the viewfinder - she has an assistant that does camera operation, hooked up to a monitor. Then she has a digital editor that does all the post-processing and editing.

She'd more accurately be referred to as a creative director. In the class, she even says, "I don't even know what camera or lenses I use." You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important, but unless exaggerated for effect, this says something.

"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

There is a lesson there, even if it’s unintentional: successful photographers don’t obsess over the technical details. Photography is sometimes better thought of as ‘image-making with a camera’ than ‘pointing a camera and pressing shoot.’

I assume her assistant does the obsessing for her.

Not really the point I’m making. Plenty of successful photographers have become successful by taking interesting photos, not by being a technical wizard of their camera.

An appropriate quote you've probably heard:

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

You can get some nice stuff with just an iPhone these days, but there's probably a risk of the software making it look very samey.

Still not really my point. Leibowitz is a good example. Certainly she knows how to use a camera, but she is mostly famous because of her subject matter: celebrities. She took John Lennon’s photo five hours before he was killed.

That's a great quote but you have to remember that he said it a long time ago, long before the advent of digital photography. It's more like "Your first million photographs are your worst" now.

No, I do agree with that - to an extent:

> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important

But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.

If you just bought the latest Canon body whenever it came out you probably would lose track of the spec sheet pretty fast, other than having a line item in your budget to buy a $5000 body every now and then.

Disclaimer: to be quite clear, while not a full-time photographer, and certainly not a world class one, I do make five digits a year from my photography on the side, and while I may not remember how many fps a body is, or whether it's 26 megapixels or 28, but I could tell you about each of the 8 lenses I own, focal range, f-stop, and whether a given body's high ISO performance compares to another. I think at this point I probably have $40K of camera gear. Whilst it's not about the camera, as such, it is a known aspect. It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

It's not about the gear, as long as you have a lot of really expensive gear.

Until you can afford to employ someone to look after your cameras you aren't in the category where you'll start ignoring the specs.

It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

Beyond the fact it's a 2015 Macbook Pro I couldn't tell you the specs of the laptop I'm using right now. It just doesn't matter to me what the specs are. So long as it's fast enough to do what I want when I ask it to I don't care. Plus I'm old and forgetful.

You actually don’t need to know that either. Your employer gives you a laptop, for example. You don’t need to know what the specs are to do good work.

There’s always the gear heads in everything you do. They’re rarely the best

You’ll soon know if it only has 4gb of ram!

> akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory

which is definitely not unheard of -- particularly for some of us who use a number of different devices any day.

Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.

Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.

World famous guitarists have guitar tech assistants to tune, fix, and customise their guitars.

World-class racing drivers don't maintain their own cars.

Michelin star chefs don't do their own veg prep.

Etc.

The lesson to learn is that stardom is about branding (marketing/advertisers) and being the boss of workers, putting your name on it to fake authenticity and singular genius in what is a team effort.

Steve Jobs feels relevant here. The first iPhone wasn't built by Steve. He didn't design components in CAD, he didn't write software, he didn't create icons in photoshop. He was the art director with the vision that made the phone a revolutionary device.

I recently heard an anecdote about how Steve didn't like the plastic screen on his prototype, only a couple of months before the phone would go on sale. So he said it would go on sale with a glass screen. There was no glass available in the market at that time which would work. Fortunately Corning had something in their research department which worked out perfectly. Steve's (unreasonable at the time) demand, ended up being the seed for gorilla glass being in pretty much every phone now. He didn't invent the glass, he didn't get in touch with Corning, he just got the right team put together to make his vision become reality.

>he didn't get in touch with Corning

He did and het got schooled on glass chemistry and composition.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40493737/how-cornings-crash-proj...

We all see great things. Life is full of amazing spectacles. The art of photography to me is how you capture it and that inherently depends on what you capture it with. A lot of people try capture what they see on holidays with their phones. The outcome is usually mediocre that’s not to say that was their desired outcome. They themselves are directors and are let down by their ability to use their gear properly.

You may not need to be a gear head but selecting the correct lense and settings is part of photography art itself. For example capturing the stars, this is a long trial and error process of getting your shutter speed right. I can imagine the photo looking great and directing someone else to capture it but the art is matching the photo to your vision and that comes with using the right settings and using the appropriate post processing.

I was slightly interested in Jimmy Chin's Adventure Photography class and so googled around. One of the Reddit comments described the ingest/review procedure as basically having an assistant do the cull. Obviously you can easily adapt to a single-operator environment, but it does kill the charm a little when part of the lesson is "This bit is so mundane I get someone else to do it for me."

"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

If you had a couple of hours with Paul McCartney teaching you how to play a guitar you wouldn't want to waste time getting him to teach you how to tune it. If you had a few hours with Da Vinci you wouldn't want him to spend the first half an hour on mixing paint. The same is true for all the Masterclass courses. If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.

Most photography courses have the opposite problem. When a course is basically "Learn what an F stop is and use the rule of thirds for everything and then you'll be an amazing photographer!" it's often not teaching people what they want to know. People already know how to use their camera. When you pay money to take a photography course you want to know how to compose an incredible picture.

Masterclass is not about teaching people the basics. The expectation is that students are already knowledgable to some extent, want to become a master at their chosen skill, and want to learn from people who have perfected it.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers. I believe that is only rarely the case and thus the exception, not the norm.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers.

I don't think it does. It assumes that people can pick up something useful from listening to someone who's perfected their art regardless of how good or bad they are at speaking about it, which might not be true, but I don't think it assumes anything about quality of the 'teacher'.

I would hope that Masterclass filter out the people who are genuinely bad at teaching. I would also hope that they don't just stick the person in a room with a camera and let them get on with it. They presumably have people on hand to help the celebrity make a good series of teaching videos.

> If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.

In my experience, the thing that usually elevates experts above everyone else is their mastery of the basics. You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained that they always go right, and usually intermediate practitioners’ failures can be traced to technical rather than conceptual issues.

> You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained

Generally advice around art I have seen tended to be quite opposite. You need to train creativity as a skill itself. Plus you need to experiment and train courage to "just do it even if imperfect".

If you focus on basics only, you will quit out of boredom and never challenge yourself.

The experts know basics. But you are not supposed to be doing only basics until you achieved some kind of perfection.

This is a good example of why learning from a master is not necessarily a good thing. Liebowitz has no doubt pressed the shutter and fussed over lenses a lot in her her life, but she's at the point where she has transcended those details.

However, as students, we need to learn about those details ourselves so we can cross the chasm and make it over to her side. So for nearly everyone, it would be way better to save some money and just read Light: Science and Magic if they actually want to learn how to take a descent picture.

I honestly don't think that teaching ability is that important for MasterClass, because I think the videos are primarily consumed for entertainment and creative inspiration, and less for earnestly learning a skill. Charisma and/or starpower, along with excellent production values, is probably exactly what they want and what they need. It's not Khan Academy.

That's certainly how I consume lots of similar educational content. I watch lots of videos of people who are passionate and experienced in some discipline simply talking about, demonstrating, or teaching that discipline, even when I have little or no interest in actually learning the discipline myself. For me it's cooking, 3d modeling, filmmaking and photography, musicianship, home construction, electronics, bushcraft and wilderness survival, and many more that I can't recall at the moment.

I would agree with that, and think it is valuable in itself. But the pedant in me gets frustrated at that, combined with the whole "I'm X, and I'm going to teach you Y".

Like Colbert's truthiness, MC is educationaliness. Infotainment.

There is a pedagogical precedent for working professionals sharing their craft.

+1 for The Great Courses, at least the few that I’ve picked up on Audible. I listened to a course entitled Law School for Everyone that is 25 hours of four different law professors giving a very clear and coherent introduction to law. It was worth at least 10x the cost of the Audible credit, and I probably only used 1/2 credit after picking it up during a 2-for-1 sale.

Thanks, didn't realize the great courses were available on audible. Reduces the friction just that much more.

They also have a Roku channel and an iPhone app. The iphone app lets you do audio only to cut down on BW. But with a course like Understanding Greek and Roman Technology (one of my all-time faves), the video is pretty invaluable. https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/understanding-greek-and-...

Wow, same here. I have an audible membership and several unused credits. After browsing the great courses (which I hadn't heard of before this), definitely going to try one.

The Great Courses is also available on Kanopy, if your library or university has a subscription.

+1 for this. Use your library. They are awesome.

This is a game changer! Thank you for letting me know. Kanopy is a deeply underapprciated gem.

I had no idea I had access to this, thank you!

It also doesn't use your Kanopy credits, which is an added bonus also, so you can basically watch however many as you want at any time.

+1 Great Courses. Often taught by university professors and academically respected people.

I just went through the Hinduism course and it was an amazingly deep insight into how the country of India works and worked in the past when it comes to social fabric as religion is quite tightly weaved into the culture.

It is much much better than any of this fancy high production value celebrity tabloid thing we call "MasterClass". Nothing masterful about it.

I don't know about this particular course but almost anything on Hinduism comes with huge biases from western institutions. This is explained in the book 'Academic Hinduphobia' available recently as a free PDF.

I would recommend reading the book 'Being Different' by Rajiv Malhotra to balance out any such courses on Hinduism.

Disclaimer - Indian hindu

I don't think this deserved to be downvoted. Foreign analysis of a local phenomenon always has a slant. It can't be avoided.

Explication of local culture in a foreign language for the benefit of foreigners will also have a slant. But it will be a very different slant, and it's a lot more accessible than the native materials. If the goal is "deep insight into how India works [today]", then Being Different is probably a pretty valuable thing to read even if the scholarship is shoddy. (On which question I have no opinion whatever.)

I'm quite skeptical that any kind of deep insight can come from reading a prototypical Bharat Tyagi[0]. Reading Swami Vivekananda or even Gandhi would be a far better use of time.

0: https://devdutt.com/articles/hiss-of-the-pio-bharat-tyagi/

I think when the comment said basically "[I have no exposure to or experience with the course you're referring to but let's assume it's biased]", it attracts downvotes. This isn't "foreign analysis", in context it's just a proudly uninformed opinion.

> Rajiv Malhotra

I would very strongly recommend staying away from anything written by this person. Here's a sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/2t8ze3/a_fe...

One offering from The Great Courses that the HN crowd might appreciate is "Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature":

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/great-utopian-and-dy...

The professor is excellent.

I'll chime in for The Great Courses too! I have learned history, how to cook, literature, music theory, among other topics from it. I highly recommend them.

My local library has tons of Great Courses available as audio books. Check the Libby app and Overdrive (same company).

Agreed that Great Courses has a sweet spot... they bring in great professors who are particularly engaging and good at teaching. So, much more engaging than Coursera on average but still a high level of expertise. For a tough technical subject, the lack of exercises makes GC a poor fit, but for high-quality "edutainment," I think it's a perfect balance. (I particularly liked this class on the Etruscans https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-mysterious-etrus...)

If an author/artist/celebrity you particularly love is on MasterClass, it may still be worthwhile to pay for access to their bit. But you learn much less. I took the Annie Leibovitz photography class and absolutely enjoyed it. I still think about a few things she said. But I don't think it improved my photo portraiture skills at all. If anything, it sort of demoralized me to see the incredible level of input required for portraiture at her level.

It does literally call itself 'master class' - a class with a master - so it's pretty upfront about this.

Yes I agree - this sounds exactly like what you get from e.g. a master class in music. There's no promise that the person you watch is any good at teaching, but they're gonna be pretty good at doing the thing.

A master class isn't supposed to give you foundational or comprehensive knowledge about a thing. A master class is supposed to

a) give you some random-ish insights from an expert

b) be marketing for the expert

You don't go into a masterclass not knowing how to do XYZ and then leave knowing how to do it. You go into a masterclass with a fairly good base knowledge of XYZ, and then leave knowing a few neat expert-level details about a particular subset of XYZ, but without any practice on actually doing it yourself (unless you're the demo student, but in that case you're probably also nearly an expert yourself).

One of the key awesome things about traditional masterclasses:

You get to ask the master questions.

I agree very much. I am an amateur club chess player and watching the Garry Kasparov MasterClass was painful. It’s a bunch of self-aggrandizing bluster meant to make it seem like a genius is at work, with all this hemming and hawing and grunting and pointing obtusely at this square then that square. Absolutely no connection to the way a skilled player calculates moves, not even Kasparov himself when he played competitively.

On top of this, in most of it, he’s surrounded by children who are clearly instructed to act like their mind is blown by some epiphany if grunting and pointing at some squares.

But I do that with code, am I the Kasparov of Cloud?

> but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking

This is one of the things that has baffled me a bit. I’ve really gotten into cooking lately and learned a lot about the techniques of Michelin starred chefs. Things like cooking vegetables sous vide in aromatic court bouillon followed by searing over binchotan. Or A/B testing the optimal number of days to grill a beet over low heat. Or even starch retrograding potatoes at a precise temperature in their skins followed by passing the final result through a lab grade #60 sieve for ultra smooth pomme purée.

I watched the Masterclass snippet for Thomas Keller and nothing like that is in the video. Instead, it’s “add herbs to the water and brine the chicken”. I can find this anywhere on the internet. I want the real stuff. Surely Thomas Keller doesn’t want people to think his life’s work is so easy that it can be learned overnight. It’s the same with Gordon Ramsay. Almost all of his popular videos for how to cook are different than what his restaurants actually do. He even has two YouTube videos with conflicting instructions on how to cook a steak.

I’m not sure if it’s just specific to cooking, but it seems like the experts massively tone down what they are best at for the masses, and it’s a bit disappointing because I want to learn how they actually do it in practice. My best attempt to learn is to instead dig through archive.org for old blog posts from some of these world renowned chefs before they became famous; you can often find some insight into how they actually think about cooking.

Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated, and Chefsteps are also good resources, but I’m not sure they go quite to the obsessive level of world class cooking (Chefsteps used to, but their recent work seems scaled back a bit for some reason.)

You may be interested in a long series of YouTube videos put out by Chicago Reader called Key Ingredient. In each video a different pro cook from Chicago makes a dish with a different key ingredient chosen for them by the previous episode's cook.

Each video is short, maybe 5min, but is pretty dense with info about coming up with a dish. And you get to see little snippets of pro cooks putting stuff together in quiet hours outside of service, how they move and what they do without time pressures, experimenting with execution. Even better: most of the cooks are not yet famous.

Michael Carlsen's episode is one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/3hTW9jfoCBU

That sounds really interesting. I’ll check it out!

Cooks Illustrated rocks. If you want to go deep on modernist stuff, of course this is a classic: https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-Cooking...

What I'm hearing is: Great Courses for technical content and MasterClass for motivation.

Progress may require different weights of the two for different people.

They do have Tony Trishka for banjo, who's known as the banjo teacher

> but accomplishment in a field does not necessarily equate to expertise and certainly doesn't imply any significant teaching ability.

This is interesting, because you could make the same assessment about famous professors at famous institutions.

There were definitely professors that I had that were well known for their research, but were awful at teaching.

Spot on.

Though I’d say for the cooking masterclasses they meld a little closer towards the middle.

Great courses or brilliant honestly