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Online Photography Course
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| Benefits: You get direct feedback on your photos from world-acclaimed, professional photographers. You can learn photography in this way from anywhere in the world. |
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Rob SheppardHe is also the author/photographer of over thirty photo books, including The Magic of Digital Landscape Photography, The National Geographic Field Guide to Photography - Digital, and Adobe® Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only. He writes regularly for Outdoor Photographer and teaches around the country, including workshops for the Palm Beach Photographic Centre and the Light Photographic Workshops. His Web site for workshops, books and photo tips is at www.robshepppardphoto.com, and his blog on nature and photography is at www.natureandphotography.com.
As a photographer, Rob worked for many years in Minnesota (before moving to Los Angeles), including doing work for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, Norwest Banks (now Wells Fargo), Pillsbury, 3M, General Mills, Lutheran Brotherhood, Ciba-Geigy, Anderson Windows, and others. His photography has been published in many magazines, ranging from National Geographic to The Farmer to, of course, Outdoor Photographer and PCPhoto.
He and his wife, Vicky (married 30+ years), live in the Los Angeles area. They have a son working on his Ph.D. in youth sports and education, and a daughter studying communications/journalism.
Also see Rob's Nature and Photography blog.
 © Rob Sheppard |  © Rob Sheppard |
Lesson 1: What Are F-stops and How They Work
This course will start out with the basics of f-stops in this lesson and help you understand what they are and how they work. Then it will progress through uses of f-stops in controlled and creative ways starting with the next lesson. That is where you will really start to gain the benefit of f-stops. But we need to start with everyone having a basic understanding of what f-stops are.
Assignment: Take lots of photos of different subjects, at different distances and even different focal lengths while you experiment while you change your f-stop. You will find this easiest to do with Aperture priority auto exposure. This is simply an exercise to get you playing with f-stops and to share some of those experiments with others in the class. We will start getting creative in the next week.
Lesson 2: Working with Large f-stops and Shallow Depth-of-Field
Knowing what f-stops are is only the first step in really being able to use f-stops effectively. In this lesson you're going to learn a lot about using f-stops for very specific purpose, affecting depth-of-field to have less sharpness of the picture. I know that many times photographers think they always need to have more sharpness in the picture, more depth- of- field but sometimes that is counterproductive to what you're really trying to do with your photo. We will be talking about using increased depth-of-field in the next lesson.
Assignment: Take lots of photos while you try to find ways to make shallow depth-of-field work for you. Try shooting both up close and distant subjects. Look and see what happens to the photograph. What can you do to really make that subject pop from the background? How do colors change depending if they are sharp or out-of-focus?
Lesson 3: Working with Small f-stops to Get Deep Depth of Field
Now we’re going to talk about deep depth-of-field, the kind of depth-of-field that everyone seems to want all the time! As the last lesson showed, deep depth-of- field is not desirable all the time. But there will be times you want to have everything in focus from close to far. When this is a distinct and deliberate decision, you will be thinking photographically rather than using arbitrary formulas that don’t always work for every situation. Being able to control depth-of-field, from shallow to deep, is the mark of a photographer who knows his or her craft.
Assignment: Take lots of photos while you try to find ways to make deep depth of field work for you. Try shooting both up close and distant subjects. Look and see what happens to the photograph. What can you do to really make that subject work against a sharp background? How do colors change depending if they are sharp or out-of-focus?
Lesson 4: Working with F-stops for Special Effects
Now you have learned some key techniques to control depth-of-field, from shallow to deep. You have also learned a bit about f-stops – how to choose and use them. In this lesson, we’re going to look at some unique ways of using f-stops that will give you special effects. These are effects that come from the use of technology, not from the real world. These techniques will give you unique and special images, but this image only exists because of the way the camera sees the world, not because that is the way the world really is.
Assignment: Take lots of photos while you try to find ways to make these depth-of-field effects work for you. Once again, you will find this easiest to do with Aperture priority auto exposure.Show us what you found with these techniques. Have fun!
 © Rob Sheppard |  © Rob Sheppard |
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Also, we will also cover topics and do assignments that would require the following. While you do not need all of these functions and tools, the more you have will have a direct relationship on how much you enjoy the class:
 © Rob Sheppard |  © Rob Sheppard |
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