On the advice of Scott Kelby, I purchased David Ziser's Digital Wakeup Call DVD. David Ziser is a well known and successful wedding photographer who teaches techniques at various seminars across the States. The DVD was fairly inexpensive $69 and I figured I'd easily spend that on a local photography course should one be available (which it isn't) and while the DVDs are wedding oriented, I figured that weddings mostly consist of portraits and group shots which is what I am interested in.
Anyway, the DVDs are very informative. You get around 4 1/2 hours of instruction (David talks with a powerpoint presentation but also demonstrates with his camera on screen) and I made 21 pages (these are small page, mind you) of notes.
David starts by talking about the wedding photography industry in general but quickly moves on to a discussion of different views of the face, basic lighting, composition, various techniques such as speeding/dragging the shutter and why you'd do this, on and off camera flash lighting as well as multi strobe, lens selection. He continues the DVDs with a discussion/demo of several software programs including his own photoshop dashboard, Fotofusion Pro. Finally he concludes with a discussion of how to market yourself in the wedding photography business.
The DVDs are well done, he is a good presenter that makes the subject matter interesting. There are plenty of diagrams and sample photos to illustrate his points. Also included in the package is a CD with several photoshop training videos (that I haven't watched yet).
I would give Digital Wakeup Call 10/10 for training and information about wedding photography (and portrait/group photography) and recommend these DVDs to an intermediate/advanced photographer (they are not beginner level). Great value for money!
David's blog can be found here
You can purchase the DVDs here
Anyway, the DVDs are very informative. You get around 4 1/2 hours of instruction (David talks with a powerpoint presentation but also demonstrates with his camera on screen) and I made 21 pages (these are small page, mind you) of notes.
David starts by talking about the wedding photography industry in general but quickly moves on to a discussion of different views of the face, basic lighting, composition, various techniques such as speeding/dragging the shutter and why you'd do this, on and off camera flash lighting as well as multi strobe, lens selection. He continues the DVDs with a discussion/demo of several software programs including his own photoshop dashboard, Fotofusion Pro. Finally he concludes with a discussion of how to market yourself in the wedding photography business.
The DVDs are well done, he is a good presenter that makes the subject matter interesting. There are plenty of diagrams and sample photos to illustrate his points. Also included in the package is a CD with several photoshop training videos (that I haven't watched yet).
I would give Digital Wakeup Call 10/10 for training and information about wedding photography (and portrait/group photography) and recommend these DVDs to an intermediate/advanced photographer (they are not beginner level). Great value for money!
David's blog can be found here
You can purchase the DVDs here
