Recommended Photography DVDs

Question

Are there any good Photography DVDs that you would recommend?

ie inside the DVD, the photographer actually explains how certain pictures are been taken, the steps and settings behind it...and show the audience how the picture is actually been taken. And also Pitfalls and mistakes to aviod.

Cheers!

Answer 1

The strobist lighting seminar DVDs are very good if you are at all interested in lighting (which all aspiring photographers should be in my opinion!)

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/05/now-available-strobist-lighting-dvds.html

Answer 2

Karl Taylor's DVDs are great (and there are free videos on the site as well). I've reviewed them for friends who are new to photography. There's no outright misinformation, and there's a lot that transfers across genres. They're not particularly cheap, but I'd say they're a decent value (especially if you can split the cost among a few people).

Some of the KelbyTraining course videos are very good as well -- and some are really not so good. The ones I've seen with Jack Reznicki as the instructor (One Light Lighting, Photographing Children), in particular, are worth the trouble. Others have been a complete waste of time (or maybe they just covered something I think should be so blindingly obvious that spending an hour explaining it over and over again just seems like a waste of time to me -- I don't have the advantage of actually being a neophyte).

If you're into studio portraiture, you can always cruise YouTube for name brand professional product videos. If you ignore the sales pitch aspect, there's often a lot of technical goodness to be had -- remember, these people want you to keep buying their stuff, and the only way to do that is to show you how to make the best use of it. Elinchrom's product videos, for instance, are great even if you don't plan to buy or use any Elinchrom gear.

Answer 3

I have not seen many videos as good as Zack Arias' OneLight Workshop DVD's, which is based on the OneLight Workshop. Mr. Arias is a master in using one light source for creating superbly dramatic portraits and glamor shoots.

CreativeLIVE offers some fantastic videos of photography classes and workshops. The ones I have seen in full, and fully recommend are John Greengo's class for beginners, Tamara Lackey's workshop for children photography, Vincent Laforet's workshop on HDDSLR videography and David DuChemin's workshop on vision driven photography. I partially saw Zack Arias' workshop on CL, and from what I saw, it looks great as well.

Answer 4

Try checking out the web site of your camera manufacturer as some have very good video tutorials which are free to view. An example of this is Nikon's Learn & Explore site ... http://www.nikonusa.com/Learn-And-Explore/index.page