Despite my resolution to post more, I clear have not. Obviously, this is an issue and I am going to start remedying it by posting something, hopefully useful, at least once a fortnight! For my first topic, let's talk online training website.
Online training is one of the greatest things about the internet. Lifelong learning is more important than ever and thanks to the internet, easier than ever. Or is it! Well, yes, it is but I think it is important to find the right way to learn.
To that end, I looked into a few online training and tutorials related to digital photography. I, of course, am an avid photographer but I have mostly been taking photos in automatic mode with point and shoot cameras. This is okay for photos I take merely as a memento but not ideal when I do want to capture a scene because it invoked a particular emotion in me. If I had a dollar for all the times I took a picture of a fairly ordinary scene because I was feeling something, only to come home and realise that I had totally failed to capture it, I would have money enough for a lot of different lenses.
There was also the time the photographer for my brother's Bangladeshi wedding reception was in a car crash the day of the wedding. Thankfully he is okay but it did mean that we didn't have a photographer for the wedding. So I stepped in as the unofficial official photographer. Most of the photos were okay but a few too many had blurry parts. Also, I was shooting by trial and error, which is a silly thing to do when you have a wealth of knowledge just a few mouse clicks away!
As a result, I decided to look into some online training. I tried reading some photography tips and tricks websites, as well as watch some YouTube videos. But I do better under more structured teaching environments. It can't be too structured, I need time and space to go off and try things on my own, but completely informal makes me procrastinate too much.
So far, I have tried taking online photography courses through Alison and Udemy. I also had a poke around Lynda but decided to avoid triggering the free trial at the moment. Alison was completely free, but you could pay a fee to remove ads. But honestly, I do not think Alison is worth even the effort of disabling AdBlocker. The courses seemed cobbled together with the photography course I was looking at literally being a recording of a university lecture. A particularly bad recording I might add. Making it a complete waste of time. I ended up asking the Alison support to delete my account because I could not see myself ever returning.
On the other hand, Udemy has proven to be much more useful. The photography course I am taking is currently offered for free. Yet it is clearly a planned lecture designed for an online environment. As such, I am getting much more out of it. I would definitely recommend Udemy to others. I certainly hope my photography becomes more intentional, and less at the mercy of whatever the camera decides to capture after I finish the course. We shall see.
I would like to point out that all three website I mentioned also offer extensive courses on programming, software design and other computer science topics. Even for these, I would recommend Udemy with the caveat that I haven't tried Lynda. I would like to try Lynda at some future time and do a proper comparison between them and Udemy. But for now, I will be concentrating on Udemy.
