Picturing the End

Well, the time has come to put an end to my photography project. It feels like only yesterday that I excitedly opened the box of my new camera, brimming with potential for all of the beautiful photos I could take. During the past couple of months, I feel that I have come a long way in understanding certain features and capabilities of my camera. However, as with any learning project, there are ups and downs. Here is a compilation of the positive and negative points of my project:

Positives:

• I had the opportunity to purchase the type of camera I always have wanted!
• I participated in my first MOOC. 
• I can't wait to continue to learn more about my camera and use it to document life's adventures.

Negatives:

• The learning curve has been much steeper than anticipated. I still have SO much to learn before I can even hope my photos will be somewhat professional looking. 
• I wanted to take more shots of nature, however October and November have been rather dull months, in terms of natural beauty. 

The primary tool which I used to learn about photography was a MOOC. Here is a screenshot I took of one of the videos in the course.

I found the course to be satisfactory. There were some useful videos and textual information. I found that the course had some introductory material (which was free), then often cut out the important parts that were offered in the course which you had to pay for. Also, some of the topics seemed disjointed and did not transition well from one to the other. Furthermore, I felt that some of the vocabulary used was quite advanced for a novice photographer. At times, the instructor seemed to assume that the students already learned how to use their camera, which defeats the purpose, in my opinion.

I made the decision to not complete the MOOC, as there were several lessons that did not serve the original intent (see post from October 2) I had for learning about photography. Some of the titles of these lessons include "Converting Images to Black and White in Photoshop," "Polarizing Filters," and "High End Studio Product Photo Shoot." In the end, I completed about 50% of the course. Details of what I learned from the MOOC can be found in my earlier blog posts.

Some of the other tools I used for my project were a blog, Twitter  @digitalps, a forum, and YouTube. The blog, called Best Photo Lessons, was very useful in supporting the information I had learned in the MOOC. Many of the topics overlapped, which helped as I could get two points of view on the same subject. The Twitter feed that I followed was informative. I felt the topics were a bit too random for my purposes, as I was taking a more linear course. However, I will continue to subscribe to this feed in the future, as there are many good tips. The forum provided some technical knowledge on my Canon camera, which was quite helpful when I couldn't figure out how to do certain things! Finally, YouTube provided me with a couple of instructional videos to better understand both my camera itself, and photography basics in general. I found that if I didn't understand something I was learning in the MOOC, I often turned to YouTube to get a second dose of information. Please reference my previous blog posts for more information on how I used the above tools.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about photography through Social Media. It allowed me to learn at my own pace. There is such a wealth of information about photography on the Internet! I hope that when I become more proficient at photography I will be able to create an instructional video to help others, so that I can give back to the community that has helped me to learn. To reflect back to the title of my blog, "The End is Only the Beginning", this couldn't be more true for my desire to learn more about photography.