Who can teach photography best?

I have been a photographer for about 7 years and I am 100% self taught. I think the only thing I can recommend is if you think you're good enough, you should focus on taking a business class related to your craft. Talk to other photographers and ask what they did to get to their level of success. You can ask this girl if you have any more photography related questions- https://www.facebook.com/claireallisonphoto

Me, lol. Well, I'm serous, but mainly you can follow formal studies or let's being selftaught. Just I can recommend you being in any good workshop. Osmosis is a process that just comes with a personal touch

That would all depend a lot on the way you learn. Some people learn best by throwing a basic theory book at them and tell them to come back next month to show what they've done. Others will need handholding almost troughout every step. One thing I would recommend and which will probably be fairly cheap is to check if there's a photography club in your area. Quite a lot of these will organise workshops and course and meet up to discuss work. Honest, brutally honest but constructive criticism is in my opinion essential to learning photography but it's difficult to find online.

Best is experience, under the wing of a pro photographer being their helper. That will teach you allot! Photography in the PRO level is allot of work, allot of investment and you need allot of experience. Experience you can get by doing it, how? By becoming an assistant to a Pro Photographer, expect nothing less then having to be doing a 110% job! Yes you can go to courses that teaches you the basics, the art, the technical part and so on. A very good basis yes I agree but Experience is just something that comes with time. I am not a pro, I am not even that far an amateur, I have had a few very simple lessons and I do it because I like it. I do though keep an eye on what the pro's do and use and I see where they are coming from. You don't see me do a wedding that is sure! So really be a helper of a wedding photographer! That gives you experience!

What's good is you've planned things out quite well. You also has quite a realistic outlook on things. Personally I don't see that you need any degrees or qualifications, if you have can demontrate the quality of your work. The real reason doing a degree is about the learning environment, having tutors on hand to grill...ahem advise you, additionally the student environment is extremely positive to get your thinking going, that's why I'm not sure if a correspondence degree is particarly useful, however a part time degree would prove to be more useful.

Don't go to online schools. You pay 10 time more than a real school to read from a text book. It is frankly a way to scam desperate single mothers out of money. If you do want a formal education, as far as technical knowledge goes, a textbook is enough. I think most people can "know" everything there is to possibly know in under a year. But the experience to deal with problems takes time. For creativity and relevance, you need to study art history formally. In photography, the young photographers hate staged, indoor studio shots because it dates the work to the 1990's. I think in a few years people will hate kids at the park because it dates it to the 2000's. Indoor studios with natural light were the pinnacle of class in Bohemian Paris. The grit of angst--driven American in the 1960's made photographers stay with celebrities in their homes, indoor candid shots. The romance era- "capture your essence." The pictorialists - "we are real art unlike those snapshots." The modernists- "because it's in a museum this toilet is art." The postmodernists- "buy pepsi." .... You can do 16 dissertations on the historical contexts, motivation, style..... of art. I think the one thing 99% of photographers are missing is that context. If you want to stand out there is one thing to know even if you don't know the reasoning behind it. Do NOT do what everyone else is doing. Everyone does kids at the park, you have a formal studio. Not butterfly with a marble backdrop, that is the victim of schmoes with 35mm SLRs in the 90's opening businesses without a clue. And kids in parks is the modern equivalent. I don't care what you do but do something different.

The largest repository of photographic knowledge in the UK is in the local clubs, join one of these and it is all available to you. The quickest and cheapest way to learn photography is to go on a photo shoot with a knowledgeable photographer. You'll learn more in an afternoon than in a whole term at college. All you need to learn is the craft of camera control, then, with practise, controlling your camera to give the results you want you can unleash the creativity inside you. It's not rocket science, but it can be counter intuitive initially, and you never stop learning, but getting to the point of taking control of the camera is quickly learnt, it just needs practise from you to make it autonomous, so you can set your camera without having to think and analyse it, a little like you drive your car, you don't have to think about when to change gear, you just do it when necessary, same with the camera controls. Most of our new members get to this stage within a year. Chris