One of my final images in lighting.

This class was a disappointment.

I have some more about that in another post here.

The review here isn’t going to discuss the person that was supposed to teach this course.  I’m going to stick to the curriculum.

I’ve also been told this class is being revised so I can only speak to the course I took in Spring ’10. This course seems to take an in-person studio class and turns it online without much consideration to the differences between on-site and online courses.

The videos are very boring and do a barely adequate job in demonstrating most of the concepts that want to be taught.  The videos and the bulk of the course material and the course assignments are targeted towards studio photographers and the generally larger and more expensive lights and light modifying tools that studio photographers use.

The course requires studio strobes, light modifiers, gels, and an incident light meter.   However, the bulk of the assignments can be done with small hotshoe strobes.  The exception here would be a large softbox but there are rigs that can use 2,3 or more hotshoe flashes to light a large softbox.  True, you lose the modeling light capabilities but the use of LCD screens on DSLRs and computer to camera tethered solutions make more sense and would be very helpful in teaching the building up of lighting for a scene.

The incident light meter is fine and useful, yet most students are using DSLRs and learning how to read histograms for high and low-key lighting and how to use the in-camera reflective meter in difficult lighting situations seems more useful than the 250 bucks spent on an infrequently used Sekonic.

The basics of lighting apply from small desktop sets to large staged productions.  Only a fraction of photographers become F/T studio-only photographers and this course would greatly benefit from covering a much wider gamut of shooting situations.

I can and did get more value out of a $45 Scott Kelby book/DVD on lighting and I could see teaching a class using that as a course supplement.  I also recommend Joe McNally’s “Hot Shoe Diaries” to those with a bit of lighting experience.  If you are interested in lighting I can also suggest the free courses on Strobist.

Again, the online version of this course as I took it in Spring ’10 is not recommended…Strongly not recommended.