Enhancing Your Photography Skills

As faculty members, educators, or staff members, your unique expertise is highly sought by customers of Penn State Extension from industry to homeowners; but expertise alone is not enough to make you accessible or relevant to your audience. Other skills are critical to be able to communicate what you know to the people who need and want to know. In addition to spoken and written words, photography is an essential skill to communicate visually in person and online. Solid photo skills will help strengthen your public presentations, articles, LearnNow videos, and online courses.

Developing foundational skills in photography will help you consistently produce images to support the ideas and processes you wish to communicate. These skills will help you whether using a camera on your smartphone, or an expensive digital, single lens, reflex camera.

Penn State provides access for all employees to the Lynda.com library of online tutorials that covers a vast array of subjects. You can use your Penn State user ID and password to access these learning resources including some excellent training for photography.

An excellent place to start is a two-hour Introduction to Photography with Ben Long. The course covers everything from camera operation to composition and lighting. Again, you can access this course using your Penn State login.

While visiting Lynda.com, take few minutes to explore the many other opportunities to enhance your skills in video, Camtasia, PowerPoint, writing, and more. The courses can be found by navigating the topics via the "Library" drop-down menu, or directly by using the search bar.