Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Overlooked Photography and Photoshop Learning Resource

 There are plenty of online resources for learning about Photography and Photoshop some are free others like Lynda or Kelby will cost you some money. I'm a member of Kelby Training and although it's expensive i've found it to be worth every penny. I've managed to take advantage of some of the member discounts with Kelby's partner companies, which has reduce the cost of my membership by more than half. The first couple of videos of each course are free to review so you check out the content before paying for a membership.
 
  One of the free resources that you may have overlooked is your local library. Here in Toronto the public library has an arrangement with "Safari Books Online" to provide online access  to approximately 4100 of the 9000 books in their electronic catalog. These books are mostly technical reference books dealing with software and IT subjects, but there is a decent collection of photography related items also. Although these titles are only available online, it makes perfect sense for the library to provide this type of access. How often does Adobe release a new version of Photoshop? If they were to buy a dozen copies of each newly released book to circulate amongst their branches it would cost them thousands of dollars, and they would be out of date in less than 2 years. This way they can provide the latest version with unlimited copies and all at a fraction of the cost. 

  Some examples of the resources available here in our library are Digital field guides for most camera models including the newer models (ex: Canon 7D, Nikon 300s). Newly released photography books like "Mastering Canon EOS Flash Photography", which was just released 15-Mar-2010 (13 days ago as of this posting). There are 144 books and 66 videos on Photography and another 68 books and 92 videos on Photoshop related products (Elements, CS4, Lightroom, Camera Raw etc..)

  So CS5 will be released soon, and you will be looking for a book to help you along with the new features. Before you buy get a library card if you don't already have one (they're usually free) login and take a look at what your local library has to offer first.