How to Learn Photography: Which Method Is Right for You?

There’s no single right way to learn photography. Some people teach themselves entirely for free, some take structured courses, some learn by assisting a working pro, and most end up using a mix. What they all have in common is the part nobody can skip: picking up a camera and shooting a lot. The best method is whichever one keeps you doing that.

So this piece isn’t about what to learn (we cover that here). It’s about how to learn photography. We’ll discuss the different methods available and their pros and cons, so you can pick the path that fits how your brain works and what your budget allows.

Go to School

If you need structured learning and a clear plan, going to school might be the best way to approach it. Here are some of the routes you can take.

Enroll in Photography High School/College

This is the most formal route and the biggest commitment. It was one of my options, too, but I ended up choosing architecture instead. A photography degree or diploma from a college, university, or dedicated photography school gives you the most structured education there is. There’s a full curriculum, working darkrooms and studios, expert tutors, deadlines that force you to produce (or add stress), and peers to learn alongside. If you’re a younger member of our audience, you may even consider a high school with a photography program.

The upside is depth and rigor. You’ll cover history, theory, technique, and business in a way no YouTube video marathon can replace. After these several years, you’ll leave with a portfolio and a network. The downsides of this approach are cost and time. A degree is a serious financial and multi-year commitment. For these or other reasons, many successful photographers never took this route at all. It’s worth it if you want the full grounding, the credential, and the structure of formal study, but it’s not the only way in. Which brings us to the following methods I’ll write about.

Take an In-Person Class or Workshop

Instead of college or high school, you can try local photography classes, community college courses, and weekend workshops. They give you immediate, personal feedback on your photos from someone who can watch how you work and correct you on the spot.

Workshops are also brilliant for specific genres. Spending a day shooting landscapes or portraits alongside an expert helps you excel fast in a niche you like best. The trade-off is cost and availability, since good in-person tuition isn’t cheap and isn’t everywhere. But if you learn best with a human guiding you and hate teaching yourself, this is worth the money.

Take an Online Course

There are plenty of online options as well. Platforms like Skillshare, CreativeLive, Udemy, and MasterClass offer structured photography courses, often taught by genuinely accomplished photographers.

The value here is structure and coherence. Instead of random tutorials, you get a curriculum built to layer skills logically. It costs money, but you can even find cheap or free courses that are not bad at all! I suggest you look for courses with practical assignments, since doing beats watching.

Teach Yourself

If you prefer learning at your own pace, teaching yourself photography is absolutely doable. The vast majority of working photographers are largely self-taught, and the resources to learn independently have never been more abundant, available, and cheap. But here’s the catch: learning photography yourself demands self-discipline and a tolerance for figuring things out the hard way. It suits people who are naturally curious and happy to learn by trial and error. If that’s you, we’ve written a whole guide on whether you can teach yourself photography and how to do it well.

Watch YouTube and Free Online Tutorials

If you’re self-teaching, this is probably where most of your learning will actually happen. YouTube is a staggering, free resource, with channels covering every genre, technique, and camera model you can think of.

The upside is obvious: it’s free, endless, and very important for a medium like photography: visual. The downside is quality control. Anyone can post, so you’ll wade through plenty of mediocre or flat-out wrong advice. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of watching photography instead of doing it.

So, I suggest using YouTube to answer specific questions (for example, “how do I use back-button focus“) rather than wandering through tutorials randomly. And remember, a tutorial you watched but never applied teaches you almost nothing.

Read Books

Reading books seems underrated in the video era, but it’s still one of the best ways to learn. Books force you to slow down and absorb a concept rather than half-watch a tutorial while doing something else. With a book, you truly go at your own pace. You can re-read some lines, stare at photos for as long as you need, or just glance over some stuff you already know.

Books are especially good for the artistic, thinking side of photography: how to see, how to compose, how to develop an eye. They’re less good for things like “which button does what,” which is easier shown than described. Although maybe we can consider your camera’s manual a kind of book, too.

Learn by Assisting

The good old apprenticeship model is still one of the most powerful ones. Assisting or second-shooting for an established photographer lets you learn on real jobs. You get to watch how a pro handles light, clients, problems, and pressure, while earning a little and building a network.

You can’t buy this kind of learning, but you also can’t rush it. This is something that can only come once you already have some knowledge and experience. What makes it extremely valuable is that it teaches you the things courses rarely mention: the business, the workflow, the thousand small decisions that separate a hobbyist from a professional photographer. If you’re serious about going pro, finding someone to learn under is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Above All… Learn by Doing

Whichever of the approaches you choose, this is the part you can’t skip. You do not learn photography by consuming information about it. You need to shoot, review your results, work out what went wrong, and then shoot again.

Try to build shooting into a habit: carry a camera everywhere, give yourself projects and challenges, and photograph constantly. We’ve got a whole guide on ways to practice photography to keep that engine running. The people who improve fastest aren’t the ones who watched the most tutorials, but the ones who took the most photos and paid attention to why they worked or didn’t.

So What’s the Best Way to Learn Photography?

If you ask me, I’d say it’s a mix. A realistic, effective way to learn photography looks something like this: teach yourself the fundamentals through free tutorials and a book or two, add a structured course if you want a clearer path, get feedback from a class or a community when you can, and above all, keep shooting.

It’s really important to match the balance to yourself as much as you can. If you’re disciplined and curious, you can lean towards self-teaching. If you need structure and/or deadlines, buy a course, go to a class, or even to photography school. There’s no single best way to learn photography, only the one you’ll actually stick with. After all, it’s consistency, not method, that turns you from a curious noob into a great photographer.

Which way are you learning, or planning to? Self-taught, courses, a mentor, or a bit of everything? Feel free to share in the comments or forum!

---