photography education courses I stand by - washington state wedding photographer - wedding photographers education
I have made a long list of topics on top of topics for my blog posts this year! Along with engagement sessions and weddings, I want my blog to be a place other photographers come to for tips and tricks or just inspiration, especially when they are first starting out.
So to start out, since I had a huge business growth year in 2017, I want to share with you the education courses that I invested in and what I got out of them! Yay! Let's do it!
Here is a list, it is every course I have taken in these first 2 years of business, in case you want to jump straight to researching them on your own!
Creative Live: Jasmine Star The Complete Wedding Photography Experience
Justin & Marys Lighting Guide
Ben Sassos Posing & Directing and Edited & Consistency Courses
Along with those main 5 courses, I have watching a lot of Jasmine Stars Facebook Lives, some of Ben Sassos Instagram lives as well. Watching and absorbing as much as i could (and still do) is on the top of my list.
Jasmines Stars course: The Complete Wedding Photography Experience over on Creative Live was a fundamental course for me. I knew I wanted to focus on wedding photography and this was SO SO helpful to go through this course when I was beginning. I took so many notes, I even wrote down what settings she was using at what times, it was a little crazy, but helped! And I believe I still have snippets of, and may make a blog post of all my notes throughout the time I was dedicated to my education. (should i do that?) Anyway, if you just starting in wedding photography, this is the course for you, it doesnt matter that it is years old, it is so helpful and super relevant!
Jasmine Stars INSTA 180 - this course changed my Instagram completely. I did a 7 day challenge Jasmine Star was putting on and at the end invested in this course, from then on I was curating my feed, focusing on meaningful and helpful captions (well sometimes) But this course really helped me learn about using social media/instagram to its potential. Although the algorithm changes so often this course is still amazingly helpful to go through, especially with all of the exercises each module gives you!
My second year into business I had some fundamentals down but I wanted to be well rounded in every aspect of photography. Therefore I found Justin & Mary's Lighting Guide which COMPLETELY changed the way I see light, it helped me pay attention SO MUCH more to light, where it is coming from, where I need to place my subject etc. On top of that, I learned so many things about using flash when you do not have natural light to use. I HIGHLY recommend this course!
Thanks to KJ's Posing Course and Ben Sasso's Posing & Directing Course, my posing has come SO far from what it was! I was excited and confident to meet my couples for their engagement session. I now know what I do to get the reactions I want. After taking these two courses, this is when I felt completely and 100% confident in my photography capabilities. If you are struggling with posing - check both of these out!!
I also invested in Ben Sasso's Editing & Consistency course. I really look up to Ben's work with his couples, the feel of ease and comfort in his photos especially, after learning so much from the posing & directing course, I knew there was only more to learn from him and started the editing & consistency course. Ben walks through how he edits his photos, and not that I needed exact ways to edit there were amazing things I took away from this course like some tools in Lightroom that I did not know how to use and Ben explains and uses them in such a great way that translates into many types of editing!
There you have it! These photography education courses paved my way into a confident and knowledgable photographer. I only hope it is the same for you!
Cheers ya'll!
