Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
Will the self-taught photographers of the world please raise their hands?
There may have been a time, even as recent as 10 or 20 years ago, where photography was an artform for the rich and those studying it in school. Before camera phones and cheap DSLR cameras for beginners, it was much more difficult to get into photography.
Today, the world has changed.
Photography is more accessible than it’s ever been.
While there still are traditional routes to learn about photography through college classes and the like, more-and-more people are teaching themselves.
Given the number of resources available (both free and paid ones), you can learn about photography on your own.
Making photography a hobby can be a really rewarding thing. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll be the next great professional photographer, making photography not just something you enjoy – but something you turn into a career for life.
4 Key Areas of Focus
If you want to teach yourself about photography, it is very easy to do.
We have broken it down into 4 simple areas to focus:
- Get a Camera
- Self-Education
- Practice
- Sharpen Your Skills
In each of these sections, we’ll give you some simple tips for finding the right photography gear as you’re just starting out, show you where to find useful information to brush up on photography, walk you through how you can practice effectively, and finally give you some tools to continue refining your skills as a photographer.
Ready?
Get a Camera (Any Will Do!)
Every photographer needs a camera. While you, no doubt, will read somewhere online about how you need a certain camera to take great pictures – the reality is far simpler. Just get a camera!
You’re just starting out. You don’t need to put some crazy pressure on yourself to buy the latest camera model out there. You also don’t need to break the bank.
You can start photography with your cell phone camera if you want to. If you really want some recommendations, we’d suggest checking out our Beginner Photography Gear Guide. On that page, we showcase some great starter cameras that take great photographs and are in an affordable price range.
No matter what you decide to use – with a camera at your side, you’re ready to move on to the next step.
Self-Education – What are the Best Resources to Do This?
While you are not going through a formal photography education, there is still much to learn.
We are mostly self-taught photographers ourselves.
Fortunately, thanks heavily to the internet, there are literally a million resources you can find to help teach you about photography. The number of articles we read and videos we watched (and still do) can show you a whole lot.
Because there are so many things out there, we wanted to highlight a few that we find really beneficial.
Free Photography Resources:
The best free photography education resources are those produced by photographers. Today, very many photography sites actually have content created by ghost writers. While we’re not meaning to suggest this is all bad, there is more authenticity to be found in places where you know without a shadow of the doubt that what you are reading will be helpful because the people producing the content know what they are talking about.
With this said, some excellent free resources start on this website. We’ve put together a lot of content that gives away information we’ve learned over years of doing photography as a hobby and as professionals.
- 101 Digital Photography Tips – A Guide to Taking Great Photos (extremely comprehensive!!)
- The Ultimate Portrait Photography Guide
- How to Take Good Landscape Photos
- Is Photography an Expensive Hobby?
- When is the Best Time to Shoot Photos Outside?
- Photography Basics – The Exposure Triangle
These posts will help you form a solid basis of knowledge.
If there is anything you need more information on, contact us or leave a comment on this post and we’ll help you out!!
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Other Great Photography Resources
In addition to our content, we also want to share a few things from other websites that we’ve found helpful.
Remember: we were starting out at one point too, so we had to do the same exact thing you are: looking for and finding great educational resources to learn photography.
The first two recommendations are for you to check out two landscape photographers with Youtube channels. They don’t do a whole lot of blogging from what we’ve seen, but there video content is where it’s at. They are:
What we like about learning from these photographers is that they seem very genuine and passionate for photography, aren’t sales people, and produce content that is both educational and entertaining. Some of their videos helped inspire us to travel to Iceland for photography.
Another recommendation is Sean Tucker – a professional photographer who does a wide range of photography including portraits, landscapes, travel, etc. He is very inspirational – even to seasoned photographers like ourselves.
Admittedly, having been around the photography community for a long time, it’s easy to get jaded when discussions revolve so heavily around camera equipment. His content does more to emphasize the art behind photography. It borders on philosophical at time, and really challenges us to ask why we are wanting to do photography in the first place.
A great video of his to start out with:
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Paid Photography Resources:
The quality of free resources is really high these days. The truth is, you could manage to teach yourself reasonably well by just referring to these free options.
The value of paid resources from what we have experienced is that they tend to be more refined and offer content that is more comprehensive. Instead of having to look at 20 different articles, you instead can check out one online course OR one photography book. In a lot of ways, you pay for convenience, and for some people – that’s well worth the cost.
The best paid options tend to come in the form of either online courses or books.
The Best Online Photography Courses:
Online courses in photography might feel close to going the route of formal education, but we promise you – it’s not!
The courses we recommend are designed to be digested in just a couple hours. They are also self-paced, so there is no pressure of waiting on a teacher to set the pace of things.
- DFS Landscape & Nature Photography Course
- DFS Night Photography Course
- DFS Photo Nuts and Shots Course
- DFS Photo Nuts and Bolts Course
Our Favorite Photography Education Books:
As great as online content can be, sometimes we like to dig into a good book. Books have always been a more comprehensive medium for relaying information in writing. While there are a crazy number of books on photography, we’ve narrowed it down to just a few that we can suggest if you are just starting out and wanting to learn the basics.
We’ve compiled all of our recommendations for those of you just starting out in photography on our Resources page.
- How to Create Stunning Digital Photography
- Digital Photography Complete Course: Learn Everything You Need to Know in 20 Weeks
- The Photographer’s Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone
- Understanding Exposure, Fourth Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera
- Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs
Practice
All right. With a solid amount of knowledge tucked away in your brain, going out and starting to take some pictures will make a lot more sense.
The reason why we suggest you educate yourself beforehand is because you would otherwise start taking pictures without having even the slightest sense of what you are doing. While this is certainly one way to learn, we find that people can learn bad habits this way.
So…how do I practice photography effectively?
That is the big question!
There are beginner photographers who just don’t know how to practice the craft. If you’re not practicing well, you’ll end up not learning much, burnt out, and even quitting – all in a short period of time.
Speaking for ourselves, we have pretty small attention spans. If we feel discouraged, it’s easy to want to give up and go back to doing things we are comfortable with.
To make practicing easier, follow a slightly rigid step-by-step guide of instructions like this:
1). Choose your photography style
Every photographer has to choose their subject. By no means do you have to strictly stick to one subject, but when just learning, it can be helpful to pick one to practice to start out.
You might consider starting out learning portrait photography. Spend one day just practicing this.
Another day, maybe you decide to explore landscape photography.
And so on.
Choosing a style – even if it’s just for one outing to take pictures – can help you narrow your mindset. You know what you want to practice taking pictures of, now you can shape the rest of your practicing around it.
2). Choose a good practice location
The environment you are photographing in will play a huge role in how much you are able to learn.
Not only that, but it will also directly impact the look of your pictures.
A good tip is to find a place that has meaning for you – or that you find to be visually appealing.
It could be a local park, a close-by hiking location, a special alley in your city, even in your home.
When we photograph at places we find visually interesting, it shows heavily in our pictures.
3). Pick a specific aspect of photography to practice
Every time you go out to experiment with photography, try to give yourself something to really focus in on. You could try specifically practicing things like:
- Photography rules (like the Rule of Thirds)
- Special gear/accessories (you might want to try playing around with a cheap crystal prism to make cool effects)
- Picking a different subject
4). Experiment with manual mode
Modern cameras come equipped with automatic exposure modes. These are absolutely great if you are just starting out.
But!
The real journey of photography begins by learning how to manipulate the settings to get the exact image you want.
Our guide to the Exposure Triangle is a good starting point for learning how to use ISO, shutter speed, and aperture together.
As far as technical things go, you will spend a lot of time tweaking your settings to get them just right.
Don’t worry – this is probably the hardest part about photography. Once you have this down – things get much easier as you can begin to focus more of your energy on nailing great compositions.
5). Always make time to just have fun!
Just remember, you are teaching yourself how to be a photographer.
Growing up, we always hated classes in school that bored us to tears. We also loved classes where the instructor was engaging, interesting, and (you guessed it) fun!
Photography can feel like an unwelcome burden if you just stress yourself out over and over. Don’t get us wrong – frustration will come, but you need to remind yourself to let it subside and go back to engaging photography as a fun activity you are participating in.
If you are having with with your photography, you will be able to keep up with it even when it’s hard!!
Sharpening Your Skills as a Photographer
Becoming a better photographer takes a combination of time, dedication, and practice.
These 3 things are very simple on the surface, but actually effectively using them to become a photographer with a diverse skill-set and capabilities – that can take some fine tuning.
In order to sharpen your photo skills, think about these things:
Time
One of the few things we do not have control over in our lives is…time…
As we all know, time can often feel like it’s moving very fast. This can feel very detrimental at times (no pun intended!) because we can want to do so much, yet feel so limited.
When picking up a new hobby like photography, it is a big time investment. There is a lot of joy to get out of it, but there will also be struggles as you move towards becoming a better and better photographer.
To really get good at photography, you need to make time for it.
For some people, it’s easy to find this down time. For others, you may have to do more scheduling to actually make time between all of the other things going on.
Dedication
To become a skilled photographer, you will need to dedicate yourself to the craft. You don’t have to go as far as being totally obsessed, but it can help 🙂
How dedicated you want to be to photography is entirely up to you – and what you are getting out of it.
For us, our dedication started as a pretty minimal thing. We enjoyed taking photos – it was a simple thing. Only in recent years did it really take off and require more devotion from us as photography became our career pursuit.
Practice
We already talked about some ways you can practice better as a photographer.
We want to really highlight why practice is so critical to your success in photography.
Having been into photography for a combined 30+ years now, we have started to feel like it is much easier than it once was. We can walk around, take in a scene going on in front of our faces, and know in our minds how we would set our camera settings in that instant. It’s kind of crazy to think about!
We didn’t get to this stage just by sitting around.
Yes, we absorbed a lot of information from reading and watching videos, but all of this only will take you so far. Going out and taking pictures will make you a better photographer.
Every time we go out to shoot, we continue to practice and refine our craft. It gets a little easier, often challenges us a little bit, and we work to create results we are happy to have photographed.
If you invest yourself into pursuing photography as a passion, we guarantee you’ll succeed at taking some beautiful pictures in the time to come!