Do you have a bush league grasp of photography’s technical fundamentals? Get an Ivy League education with a free online photo class from the hallowed halls of Stanford University.
Although this class (known as CS 178) wasn’t designed to be a public resource, instructor Marc Levoy has posted enough online that anyone with sufficient motivation can follow along. You can even feel like you’re part of a group by browsing through the students’ photo albums on Picasa and the pictures that best fulfilled each weekly assignment.
My favorite parts of the course are the animated demonstrations of some technical aspects of photography, including exposure variables, depth of field,
and color theory.
The eight weekly assignments cover the basics, including architecture, landscape, and portraiture. Here are some of the top picks for those three assignments:
Shot by Nic Dahlquist.
Shot by Lingyun Liu.
Shot by Rehan Hameed.
Thanks to Brain Pickings, a wonderful blog, newsletter, and corresponding Twitter account, for alerting me to CS 178 so I could share it with all of you.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on September 7, 2011
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