 Hello and welcome to the all-versity photography course my name is Shane and I am going to be your teacher for the next couple days weeks or years however long it takes you to finish this course. We're building this course for beginners and it's meant for people from the age of sixth grade and up but if you're really interested in photography and you're in the fourth grade or younger or if you're a lot older it doesn't matter this course is designed for people who are just wanting to get started. Now it's also designed for people using any type of camera for example you could do it with my old rollie here which is an old film camera from the 50s or you could do it with this you know a couple year old cell phone camera that I got for five bucks or cell phone that has a camera on it sorry I always mix that up so the thing is about these lessons is that they're designed for people with lots of different types of cameras so sometimes that cell phone camera like this one here is not going to be able to do everything that the lesson asks of but I would encourage you when that happens to just watch the video anyways and do what you can to learn from it because all of the same principles apply to all cameras no matter what kind of camera it is the principles are the same how they work the way that you construct photographs it's all the same and right up here up front I think that that's an important point to make that photography no matter what camera you're using is a combination of science and of art and so you really want to make sure that on the artistic side that you're learning your composition that you're following good technique and on the technical side you want to make sure that you understand your camera and how it's working and why it's doing the thing that it's doing right now at this moment so I'll try to explain all of those things in this course it's a lot of information to pack into a very small amount of time I've worked as a photographer for over 10 years now almost 15 years and I'm still learning stuff every single day so don't feel bad if you get to the end of the course and you don't feel like you've understood everything just go back and watch the videos again do a little bit more reading go to the website go check out all versity.org and do lots of reading answer questions there's going to be lots of forums and things like that where people can talk about the things that are in the photography lessons that we're going to be making for you so I would encourage you to use all the resources that you have available I also encourage you to make sure that you check out lots of good photography it's one of the things that a lot of people don't think of when they think about making good photographs in order to be able to do something you have to seek good examples of it in order to maybe reach that level yourself you don't know what's possible unless you've seen it so I would encourage you if you're taking this lesson also spend lots of time just trolling the web and looking for great photographs that you would aspire to make yourself all right so I think that that's a good introduction to the course make sure that as you're going through you're enjoying the lectures the practice videos the real-life examples make sure that you're working on your composition and going out and shooting just remember everybody in the world who's out there taking good photographs it's a good thing because we all profit from good images of each other good times good memories and so we want to make sure that we're encouraging lots of other photographers in making good photographs as well so go out do these lessons join the photography community and take really great photographs