education

Starting this month, select Chromebook users will be able to download and use a full suite of Chromebook-optimized Adobe Android applications for free. From Photoshop Mix to Lightroom Mobile and more, Adobe wants to give students the tools they need to unlock their creativity inside the classroom and beyond.

Everybody knows tilt-shift lenses can be used to get a "miniature" effect, but many photographers are oblivious to their other, more traditional applications, and even fewer understand exactly how these lenses work. The folks at LensPro ToGo are here to clear things up.

After 70 years of providing aspiring photographers with a formal education, Brooks Institute announced this month that it will be permanently closing its doors. The sudden closure came as a shock, especially to current students who may now face a difficult challenge in transferring their credits and salvaging their degrees elsewhere.

Mia McCormick and RC Concepcion, two of the most beloved photo and video educators in the world, are starting fresh. After being laid off from Kelby Media Group in February, RC and Mia have become co-owners of Fotopromos, where they'll bring their expertise to bear adding a top-notch educational element to the website.

Guess who's getting into the world of photography workshops? Apple.

That's right: the company wants people to be more adept at shooting photos with their iPhones and editing photos on their Macs, so it's now launching free 1-hour workshops on those subjects (and more) in its sleek Apple Stores.

At some early point in my 4-year stint as a film student at the University of Miami, in Florida, an advisor explained I’d have to dual-major in a field outside the school of communications. This seemed a perfectly reasonable request of the school to make; after all, the advisor said, as communication students we needed something to communicate about.

Did you know that when you capture a natural light photo, it took those photons about 8.3 minutes to …

An ignite is a type of event in which presenters are given 5 minutes to talk about a subject in just 20 slides. Each slide is shown for only 15 seconds before the slideshow is automatically advanced. It's a rapid fire of learning and inspiration that has the motto: "Enlighten us, but make it quick!"

In 2010, photographer Kevin Kubota launched a Photographers Ignite event at WPPI, and the show has since become a staple of the expo.

A few weeks ago, we shared what 7 top photographers said they wished they had learned in school. Unsurprisingly, many mentioned a desire to have learned more about business and marketing. But beyond the selection of course subject, there is a more fundamental aspect of learning in the 21st century that should be addressed.

Recently, I attended a lecture by Dr. Yong Zhao, a renown researcher in education, who has espoused many progressive ideas about the education system and how it is failing us. His thoughts made me reconsider the role of school for photographers and other creatives. Here’s what you really should be learning in photo school.

Hindsight is always 20/20, which is why if you’re a photography student or about to launch your photo business, you should turn to those who have already completed the right of passage for a little first-hand, grade-A advice on how to go about the whole thing.

With experience comes great wisdom, so we asked seven professional photographers what advice they would give to the graduating class of 2015 photographers, and what they would have done differently if they had known what they know now. From business and gear advice to staying true to your inner artist, and just simply being nice - take notes, cause these nuggets of wisdom are pure gold.

It’s not unusual for colleges with large open-source programs to put out a number of courses free for the world to browse through online. In the past we’ve featured courses from both MIT and Stanford.

Taking a picture has never been as easy as it is now. But just because you can snap a photo doesn’t mean you’re going to capture a photograph that’s thought provoking and tells a story the way many of the best images do.

When it comes to the world of photography lighting education, one name that comes up more than most is Strobist. With the simple tagline, “learn how to light,” photographer David Hobby’s publication has come a long way since its inception in April of 2006... and it went a little further still today.

This post contains absolutely no mathematics. Explaining MTF without math is sort of like doing a high-wire act without a net. It’s dangerous, but for any number of reasons is more likely to keep the audience interested.

Sticking to their mantra "by creatives, for creatives", Visual Supply Co. has announced the VSCO Artist Initiative fund: a $100,000 scholarship fund that seeks to "provide artists the resources to pursue their creative vision."

Online resources for learning about photography are anything but lacking. But every so often a new one comes around that changes things up a bit -- usually because it's created by a well-known, respected pro.

Last week we told you about Zack Arias' new site DEDPXL, and this week we have yet another educational resource to share. Joey Lawrence (affectionately known as Joey L), one of my personal favorite photographers, has put out his own aptly titled resource: Learn From Joey L.

With a name like SelfiePolice and a tagline like 'you owe humanity a dollar,' we have a feeling the charitable organization Selfie Police is going to go far -- in fact, we really hope it does.

Kibera is a division of Nairobi, Kenya, and as a rule, girls there don't have much of a shot at an education. Kenya is still very patriarchal, and if a family has both boys and girls, it's the boys who will be granted the opportunity to attend secondary school.

The Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA) is trying to fix that by providing girls in the area with a free secondary education, and photographer Jake Naughton has been fortunate enough to spend time there helping with the school and documenting its impact on the students who attend it.

Located in the city of Toronto, ALPHA Alter­na­tive School is one of Canada's oldest free schools. For the school's 40th anniversary last year, photographer Michael Barker worked on a project titled Alpha Alternative School 1972/2012. It's a series of diptychs with portraits of students shot back in the 1970s/1980s placed next to new portraits of the students captured around four decades later.

As the recipient of a great education (thanks in no small part to my parents), I’m always fascinated by discussions of how college influence what we do and achieve later in life. As a music major, I could have never fathomed that I would one day become an entrepreneur, and when I think back to college, it had very little to do with the acquisition of technical knowledge, and more about being exposed to a wide range of subjects, people, and social situations.

Smartphones are being used more and more to capture daily life photography, but many of its loyal users are perpetually stuck at the point-and-shoot level of photographic know-how. If that describes you, and you'd like to add a little more technical understanding to your brain, Photojojo has a new service designed just for you. It's called Photojojo University, a new educational service that teaches you photography lessons through bite-sized tutorials and assignments delivered into your email inbox.

Gamification -- the application of game design elements to non-game contexts -- is a pretty hot idea right now in the online startup world. More and more startups are introducing things like badgets, achievements, leaderboards, points, and progress bars to encourage users to do things such as visit new businesses, answer questions, and, of course, play games. One particularly interesting application of gameification is in the area of education, using fun to motivate learning.

Lunchbox is a stealthy startup that's planning to introduce this kind of learning to the world of photography.

Is a college photography degree worth it? It depends on who you ask. There are plenty of successful photographers out there who have never set foot inside a university photography lecture, while others have done just as well after earning that diploma.

This may be a rare case in which a $695 class might actually save your life: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is offering a safety course for journalists who cover war, conflict and disaster zones.

Copyright laws get pretty specific. A photographer can not only give a green light on a work, he or she can license a work for use only during specific years, or in a specific area, or for a specific publication medium (i.e. print vs electronic); and now it looks like massive publisher Pearson Education is in trouble for breaking these sort of terms one too many times.

The digital photography course offered by Stanford (CS 178, which we …

If you’re a fan of learning things through Khan Academy, then you might …

In a paper published in Science this week, Japanese researchers reported on a discovery that jumping spiders use a method for gauging distance called "image defocus", which no other living organism is known to use. Rather than use focusing and stereoscopic vision like humans or head-wobbling motion parallax like birds, the spiders have two green-detecting layers in their eyes -- one in focus and one not. By comparing the two, the spiders can determine the distance from objects. Scientists discovered that bathing spiders in pure red light "breaks" their distance measuring ability.

Phonar, the free and open undergraduate photo class we wrote about …

The Art Institutes, one of the nation's largest for-profit school systems where people can receive an education in photography, has come under fire. Last month, the US Department of Justice filed a massive lawsuit against the company behind the schools, Education Management Corporation, accusing it of fraudulently collecting $11 billion in government aid by recruiting low-income students for the purpose of collecting student aid money. Whistleblowers claim that students graduate loaded with debt and without the means to pay off the loans, which are then paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Marc Levoy, the Stanford professor behind the “Frankencamera” project, teaches a …

#phonar, short for “Photography and Narrative”, is a free and open undergraduate …

Canon created this short but interesting video showing how its SLR cameras evolved from the Canon Flex in 1959 …

Shooting in JPG mode is convenient because you instantly have a file you can throw onto the Internet, but …

Learning how to control depth of field with your camera isn’t too difficult, but do you know the science …

Google's new Books Ngram Viewer is a cool new site that allows you to search for words and view a graph of how the usage of that word has fluctuated over time. A quick search of the word "photography" in books published between 1835 and 2008 provides a pretty interesting look at the history of photography.