31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer – Course Review

Every photographer wants to be a better photographer. Whatever your motivation – fame, fortune, or just the love of creating art – you want to get better at taking great photos more consistently.

The road is different for everybody, but there are a number of lessons every photographer must learn that lay down the necessary foundations that will take you past the beginner or intermediate photographer phase and set you up to find your own path.

There are many ways to learn these lessons. Read some photography books. Watch some instructional videos. Enrol in some classes. These are all great resources for learning photography, but how do you know what you don’t know? And where to start?

31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer

You take a month-long online course that covers all of the photography basics and more. Digital Photography School (DPS) have put together a photography course called 31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer, and it’s what you need to learn photography.

DPS has been teaching photography for a number of years now and has become one of the biggest photography blogs in the world. They’ve produced a fantastic collection of ebooks on everything from shooting portraits and landscape photography to post-production workflow. DPS has also started producing some pretty sweet photography courses, including 31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer (31DBBP).

The 31DBBP Course

The course is taught by Jim Hamel, a photography instructor with more than enough teaching experience to know how to pass on his wealth of knowledge gained from many years as a professional photographer. He also taught DPS’s Night Photography course, which I haven’t had the opportunity to try out yet.

As the name suggests, 31DBBP is broken up into 31 lessons, or days. Of course, you can take it at your own pace, you don’t have to do a lesson every day. Each section includes an instructional video on the day’s lesson and an assignment, so you actually get up from in front of the screen, pick up your camera, and put the day’s lesson into practice.

I was expecting the lessons to be pretty basic, but I was pleasantly surprised to find them to be very thorough. Jim covers Photography 101 stuff like setting up your camera, exposure and composition early on, but then quite quickly moves into some more interesting and creative techniques like slower shutter speeds for motion blur and using flash.

Post-Processing

I was also pleased to see he didn’t neglect to spend time on teaching post-processing, which is such an important skill for photographers to master today. Jim uses Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC to edit images in this course, which is the industry standard, although the principles can be applied to whatever photo editing software you choose.

Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC are incredibly powerful, so this is understandably not a comprehensive LR/PS course, but the post-processing lessons will give you a solid understanding of the software and the skills you need to edit your photos well. Jim covers all the basics including exposure control, local adjustments, colour-management, and finishing details such as noise-reduction and sharpening. He also includes some more creative post-processing techniques such as black and white conversions.

Should you buy 31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer?

31DBBP is one of the most comprehensive beginner-to-intermediate photography courses I have come across. If you want to learn photography, learn how to edit your photos, or just improve upon the knowledge and skill you already have, you couldn’t do much better than this course.

Jim Hamel is a fantastic teacher who is easy to follow and breaks things down into easily understandable chunks of information. His passion and knowledge are very enjoyable to absorb, and really make you want to grab your camera and go out to put the lessons into practice.

The course comes with a 3-month membership in a closed Facebook group where you can ask Jim questions that you will inevitably have and share the images you create while taking the course.

Course files are available forever so if you decide you want a refresher in a year or two, it will always be available to view. As with all of DPS’s products it comes with a 60-day guarantee.

The 31 Days To Becoming A Better Photographer course was initially $199, but you can now grab it for $99, which is a steal.

Do you have any questions, or have you taken the 31DBBP course? I would love to hear your thoughts and see the images you made in the comments below 🙂

THANKS FOR READING!

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