creative live course review | pets and people
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Recently I posted about Creative Live – an online creative learning resource. Creative Live has all sorts of courses – FREE if you can watch them live! And all of them can be purchased after broadcast. The thing I love about CL photography courses is that you can watch how photographers work and see their knowledge and advice in action. Photography is obviously a visual art and most of us are visual learners, so it really helps me personally to feel like I’m tagging along with the photographer on their live shoot.
This review is for the Pets and People Photography course with photographer Vicki Taufer. Photographing pets (particularly dogs) is one of my favorite things to do and I love incorporating the family dog into my sessions. I’m always interested to learn more tips, tricks, and ideas for successfully incorporating dogs into shoots with their people. It’s one thing to photography people, another to photography pets. Mix them together, and you have a lot going on! From that chaos always comes great shots though, so I loved learning Vicki’s tips.
This was a 3 day course just loaded with information. Vicki had a ton to share about her business, business development, and technical aspects of shooting pets and people in all sorts of situations (studio, studio lights, natural light, outside, multiple dogs and people, etc.) There are several Q&A sessions too – Creative Live courses have a live audience and online audience and questions are answered as the course progresses. The nice thing about that is they are many of the same questions I had while watching!
I really liked how Vicki went into detail on how she developed the pet side of her business, and was very open about both successes she has had as well as mistakes made along the way. Her idea to host a “dog days of summer” promotional event was an a-ha moment for me. I love doing shoots for shelters of homeless pets and this is something I can work into my current business.
I also find it fascinating and extremely helpful to watch other photographers working. There were many live shoots filmed as part of this course, in lots of different situations so that you could see how Vicki worked under various circumstances. It’s always interesting to see which lenses and settings other photographers use as well, I always learn something. In several of the shoots, Vicki used a pretty high ladder, climbed on and shot down from there. I can’t wait to try that. I use step ladders quite often but haven’t used something that high and I loved that perspective.
If you are interested in learning how to incorporate pets into your photography business, or simply how to take better photographs of pets, I would highly recommend this course!
You can check out all that Creative Live offers for photography classes here: Online Photography Classes
