I just finished taking a class called “Understanding Exposure” at the PPSOP or Picture Perfect School of Photography. This is a review of my experience along with some thoughts about the course I took. First I took the course with the expectation that it would help motivate me to get out and use my Nikon D70s and D200 more. The class did this perfectly! The class instructor, Bryan Peterson, was fabulous at motivating students to get out and shoot! In fact, I have all of his books and DVD. You merely have to sit down a few minutes and suddenly you are drawn to getting up and getting your camera to practice some of the points made in the material.
Other than motivation, was there anything great about the Picture Perfect School of Photography course “Understanding Exposure”? Not really. I found several problems with the course which have caused me to hesitate in continuing with the school. Although I may take another course to see if things improve, I probably will not continue indefinitely. Here are the points that I thought were huge drawbacks in the course.
1. The material covered in the “Understanding Exposure” course is EXACTLY the same as his book and DVD. When I say EXACTLY I mean almost word for word. This was very disappointing because if you have read the books, you are paying $395 to hear the same thing. I’d recommend just paying $25 or so and saving the $395 on the course. You could get yourself a new lense for that money and possibly get more out of the course. Adding more or different content to compliment the book would have been best in my opinion.
2. Comments and Feedback were scarce. There is a Q&A section and a Critique section in the course. The instructor Bryan was never to be found ( except for the introductions ) in the Q&A section. His assistant was left for that. Comments were done on time, but they were very limited and almost seemed to “stroke” the student as if to make them feel good and not necessarily to critique. I felt more “concrete” information such as Aperture, Shutterspeed, White Balance, Composition, Color, Contrast, Time of day, ISO, Special techniques, etc could have been much much better incorporated into the feedback. Afterall, we were encouraged to have this information uploaded along with our photos, but it was rarely used in the critique. This again was very disappointing. I almost felt like I was being enticed to take more courses through these frequent “Wow, great shot” type comments. Anyway, my point here is that more detailed comments along with more constructive criticism would have been better for me.
Other minor points I felt were a bit disappointing were the fact that the site felt very unfinished. I took the course when the school opened so it is very understanding that things would be under construction. However, I do web design and program sites all the time. The speed of development for this site is quite slow in my opinion. There is no gallery for students to display photos. The forum or Q&A section is very primitive compared to schools like Betterphoto and even basic forum scripts in PHP,ASP or ASPX. Hopefully this will change which I’m sure it will. It’s just too awkward as is. Other areas of the site are very brief and it’s very difficult to get any sort of detailed information. There is video streaming in the “Understanding Exposure” course, but it is ALL taken from the DVD so it’s nothing new. Get the DVD and again save your hard earned money.
Other than motivation and inspiration from other students, it’s very hard to find anything super about this course. I took it because it was highly recommended to me by students familiar with Betterphoto classes. After reading all the books and watching “The Picture Perfect” DVD I was convinced the “Understanding Exposure” course was for me. Little did I know that there was nothing new in the class. In fact, I got more from the book and DVD combo than the entire course put together. I could have saved myself $395!! However, to be fair, the course did get me out of the house and shooting my camera much more. This was my original point in taking the course, so in that respect the “Understanding Exposure” course was successful. Thus I give it a thumbs up.Â
Thus I can only recommend the PPSOP ( Picture Perfect School of Photography ) to those who need help in motivation and/or as a source of inspiration to get out and shoot. If you’ve read the material you really don’t need to take this class. In fact if you do need motivation, the books and DVD will do just fine as well. There’s nothing new or different. So save that $395 and get yourself a new lense or a whole library of photography books! It’s hard earned money better spent!
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1 Comment
As a follow-up here, I found out there were 46 students in my PPSOP understanding exposure class. That’s a lot of students, and in my opinion it definitely degraded the quality of the class. Just too many people and not enough quality content for the money. No wonder the comments were lacking. If you had to critique 46 students at 3 photos each, that would come out to 138 photos per week. That’s quite a few photos to look over and offer quality comments for. On the other hand, they raked in $18,170.00 on this class, so you might think comments would have been better. Perhaps I’m missing something.
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