Show HN: Interactive Photography Lessons

https://www.courserock.com/photography/intro/

by nspeller • 9 years ago

9 3 9 years ago

nspeller• 9 years ago

Hi, I'm the guy making this course. A little more about this project: I'm looking to help people who know almost nothing about photography. Maybe they've only taken photos with their smartphone, or maybe they own a DSLR but never really learned to use it.

My goal was to create an interactive course to "show them what they're missing" and what they can do with photography at a very high level. In later lessons I'll dive deeper into the each of the topics briefly covered in this first lesson.

I'd love any feedback you might have on my first lesson! Is it engaging? Do you know people who would benefit from this? If you were starting over in photography do you think this would be a good beginner approach? Thanks in advance!

lecarore• 9 years ago

I've had a look, it's pretty great stuff. The gamification is a nice plus (the quizz at least, i'm not sure about the "coins" thing ^^). I guess generating content is for this is quite time consuming, but it's a nice goal. I'm not sure if there's a lot of similar websites on the internet, do you have some serious concurrence ? You could post it on the photography stackexchange site (probably in the meta) to ask for some help. I once made a small answer on the role of a beauty dish (https://is.gd/VHkS7t) and could help you on the lighting topic.

I'd suggest avoiding the "before / after" js thingy for the zoom pictures. Everybody knows what zoom does, and the sliding system only makes sense to me when showing variations of the same image.

Make sure to make it ready for internationalization also :)

asiojosh• 9 years ago

I love the way the quiz questions add more info and sort of unite concepts into ideas that people can use. I agree that the coins are a little much.

I think you could explain a little more the benefits of RAW, and the benefits of smartphones editing photos automatically. It's hard to put my finger on it since I'm a photographer so I can fill in whatever blanks there are.. but it feels like it's missing a little bit of information. Maybe there's a link that takes you to a tutorial for disabling destructive auto-contrast and saturation on DSLRs?

Maybe there's a way to show what resolution really means? It seems trivial but people don't know what resolution is, or pixel count. They don't know what compression is. Ken Rockwell has really great detail—if you could capture that in this nice course format, that could be useful.

Keep up the good work!

Show HN: Interactive Photography Lessons

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