People usually want to know what a session is actually like before they book one. That is a fair question, and I do not think it gets answered honestly very often, because most of what gets written about photography lessons is written to sell them.
So here is a plain description of what private instruction is, what it can do, and what it cannot. This applies whether you book with me or with anyone else in Minnesota. If it talks you out of it, that is a fine outcome too.
It should start with a question, not a curriculum
Anyone worth paying should ask what you want to get better at before they tell you what you are going to learn. If the first thing you receive is a fixed syllabus, you are buying a class that happens to have one student in it.
Your answer does not have to be sophisticated. “My pictures look flat.” “I don’t understand why the camera keeps focusing on the wrong thing.” “I’ve been shooting for six years and nothing has gotten better.” Those are good answers. They are specific about the problem even when they are vague about the cause, and working out the cause is the instructor’s job, not yours.
If you genuinely do not know what is wrong, say that. It is a common starting point and a workable one.
Most of it happens outside
Photography is a field skill. A room can teach you menus and buttons. It cannot teach you to look at a scene and know where the picture is, because there is no scene in the room.
Expect to be outdoors, expect to walk, and expect the conditions to be whatever they are. This matters more here than in most places. Minnesota weather does not consult the calendar, and a session booked three weeks out will land on whatever day it lands on.
A good instructor uses the conditions instead of apologizing for them. Flat grey light is not a wasted morning, it is a lesson in what flat grey light is good for, which is more than people think. If someone spends the session telling you how much better it would have been yesterday, you are not being taught.
What usually gets covered
The specifics depend on you, but most sessions end up somewhere in this territory:
Exposure, and why your camera disagrees with you. The meter is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and once you understand what that is, you stop fighting it.
Focus. Which mode, which point, and why the camera keeps choosing the branch instead of the bird.
Light. Direction, quality, and what time to be standing there. This is the one that changes people’s work the most and gets the least attention.
Composition. Not rules. Where to stand, what to leave out, and when the thing you drove an hour for is not the picture and the thing behind you is.
Getting the camera to do what you assumed it would do when you bought it. A lot of frustration is not skill, it is a setting.
When to leave. Underrated. Knowing a scene is not going to give you anything today saves the hours you need for the one that will.
What it feels like when it is working
You should be the one making decisions. If the instructor takes your camera and shoots with it for most of the session, you have watched a demonstration. Demonstrations are useful for about ten minutes and then they stop being useful, because the thing you need to practice is the deciding, not the pressing.
The other marker is that you can explain yourself afterward. Not “I got a nice one,” but “I moved left because the background was busy, and I dropped to a third of a second because I wanted the water to go soft.” When you can say why, it transfers to the next place you stand. When you cannot, it does not.
Expect to be a little worse before you are better, too. If you have been shooting on autopilot for years, being asked to think about every frame is slower and more uncomfortable than what you were doing. That is the point.
What it will not do
It will not make you good in an afternoon. Nobody can sell you that, and anyone implying otherwise is selling something.
It will not fix a gear problem, because you almost certainly do not have one. Most people arrive with more camera than they are currently using.
It will not substitute for going out by yourself. A session can show you what to work on and save you a year of guessing. The actual improvement happens in the weeks afterward, alone, in mediocre light, shooting things nobody will ever see. That part cannot be bought.
And it will not produce a portfolio. You may come home with something you like. You may not. Treat any frame you get as a bonus rather than the deliverable, because the deliverable is what you now know how to do.
On wildlife, if that is what you are after
A brief word, because it matters. Instruction should make you better at getting close to animals without disturbing them, not better at disturbing them.
Nobody worth learning from will push you to bait, flush, crowd, or block an animal for a frame, or to leave a trail where leaving it is not allowed. If a session is built around doing that, the problem is not the ethics lecture you will get from strangers on the internet. The problem is that you will learn a technique that stops working the moment you are somewhere with rules, and you will not have learned fieldcraft at all.
Ask about this before you book. The answer tells you a lot.
Questions worth asking whoever you book
- What will we actually be doing for the time I am paying for?
- Is it one on one, or is this a group?
- Will I be shooting, or watching?
- What happens if the weather is bad, and who decides?
- What should I bring, and what am I expected to already own?
- Do I get anything after the session, or is it done when we part ways?
You do not need clever answers to these. You need answers. Vagueness at the booking stage tends to be vagueness later.
How to tell if it was worth it
Not by the photographs you took that day. By what you do the following week.
Go out on your own, somewhere ordinary, and notice whether you are making different decisions. Whether you check the light before you lift the camera. Whether you walk around the subject before settling. Whether you leave earlier or stay longer than you used to. If something in how you approach a scene has shifted, the session did its job, and it will keep paying out for years.
If nothing changed, it did not, and you should say so to the person who taught you.
I teach one on one, in the field, built around whatever you actually want to get better at. Beginners are welcome, and so is anyone who has been shooting for years and quietly stalled. There is a form on the home page. Tell me what you want to learn and I will get back to you.