My niece is twelve. She loves taking photos with whatever’s in her pocket, but the 550D I gave her sits mostly untouched in a drawer. Too much camera. Too serious. Too intimidating. That fact made me think carefully about how in my opinion photography should be taught and what order things should happen in.
I’ll make this another Sunday mini-series.
Half of this is a concrete plan to teach her, and half is thinking about how I would have wanted to learn.
Most photography teaching starts with gear and technique; have a look around books, YouTube, or even Substack. That’s how I started teaching myself. Here’s how a camera works, here’s the exposure triangle, here’s the composition rules, now go take photos. The implicit message is that photography is primarily a technical skill. Master the equipment and the craft follows naturally.
But this sequence produces photographers who think gear is the answer and technique is the goal. It explains the endless obsession with equipment upgrades and the prevalence of technically perfect but emotionally empty images. People who can expose correctly and compose competently but have nothing particular to say.
I’d want her to learn differently. Purpose first, but not purpose as abstract theory divorced from practice. Purpose learned through doing, through taking photographs from day one, but with assignments and conversations that establish why we’re doing this rather than just accumulating images.
The sequence I’m thinking of goes like this: from the very first session, she’ll have a camera in hand and be taking photographs. Alongside the doing, we’ll talk about what photography is for. The assignments won’t be “take 100 photos of anything.” They’ll have specific goals: show me what loneliness looks like, make me feel heat, capture movement. Each one establishes that photography is about making someone see or feel something.
Technique enters gradually as she needs it. Start with everything automatic, no technical instruction, just point and shoot, and focus on seeing and capturing. Exposure control comes in when automatic undermines her message. Focus control arrives when she needs to direct attention. Each technical element enters exactly when it’s needed, not before.
This keeps the camera from becoming the subject of study. It’s a tool she uses from day one, but the focus remains on what she’s trying to communicate and whether she’s achieving it. Gear stays proportional and subordinated to purpose. She can start with her point-and-shoot, which is completely adequate for learning purpose and seeing. Better equipment becomes relevant only when her vision outgrows her tools, probably years from now.
Starting this way also protects her from gear obsession. If she learns from the first session that seeing and purpose matter far more than equipment, that any adequate camera can capture what you show it, she’s inoculated against the marketing that tells young people better gear makes better photographers.
The plan isn’t rigid. Teaching adapts to what interests her and where she struggles. I know she’ll have difficulties articulating her thinking. She might be a strong visualiser, something to establish early on. But the core sequence remains: purpose and practice together from the start, technique introduced gradually as needed, gear kept firmly in its proper place as tool rather than object of desire.
This requires more from me as teacher. It’s easier to teach technique mechanically and systematically. Teaching purpose alongside practice means engaging with what she’s actually interested in, helping her develop her own vision, adapting assignments to her responses. Harder and less standardisable, but more likely to produce someone who actually cares about photography beyond technical competence.
If you learn technique first, you can become skilled without developing anything to say. If you learn purpose alongside practice, technique develops in service of your actual photographic interests. That’s what I want her to understand. Photography is seeing something worth showing and knowing how to show it effectively. The camera is just the instrument, learned through use rather than study.
Over the next several posts I’ll lay out how this teaching might work in practice: what the first conversations look like, what assignments combine seeing with doing, when technical controls get introduced and how they stay proportional, how we assess work based on communication rather than technical perfection.
Looking at photography teaching as it exists, it’s been stuck in a gear-first, technique-first mode for too long. Starting from purpose while doing from day one might produce photographers who actually have something to say and develop technique specifically to say it.
That’s the goal anyway. We’ll see how it goes.
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion #Teaching #TeachingPhotography