Please note The Academy is not currently accepting new members.
Please join my mailing list to be notified if/when the academy will reopen.
Join The Academy
“Ian’s Studio Photo Academy – Helping Photographers Develop”
The Academy is the cornerstone of how we deliver photography training. The key elements to The Academy are: weekly email with Inspiration Sheets, Lighting Sheets or Post-production techniques. Academy members benefit from discounts for Training Events, plus opportunities to have your photographs critiqued. Other benefits include access to marketing and sales data to help to develop your business and occasional member exclusive postings.
Currently, we offer two levels of membership. Monthly Membership (£6 per month) and Annual Membership (£60 per year). The price you pay when you join is the price you continue to pay for as long as you remain a member…. even if the price goes up for new sign-ups!
Let’s look at some of the benefits of being a member…..
Academy Members have access to a library of 50+ Inspiration Sheets. Each is a four-page PDF file on a specific theme. These inspiration sheets cover a wide range of topics including: Autumn, Bokeh, Crowds, Intentional Camera Blur, Food, Negative Space, Posing People, Flash Techniques, Quirky Angles and many more besides. More are planned and will be added to the library shortly.
Why not take a look at a sample Inspiration Sheet all about photographing fireworks.
Every other day, Academy Members receive an email which we call an “Academy Bite” – each Academy consists of one image (occasionally two) and full details on the technical and creative decisions involved in how it was created. The exposure settings are provided and where appropriate settings, composition, and post-production techniques are discussed in the email. This is learning photography by ‘drip feed’.
All members have access to the growing archive of past Academy Bites and we are currently looking at combining all the bites in a particular theme into downloadable PDFs for you to keep for reference.
Academy Members have access to a growing library of studio & strobist lighting sheets. These 4-page PDF documents show you how to create a particular studio lighting effect. Each sheet has a lighting diagram, a behind-the-scenes image showing exactly how the lights were arranged, a kit list, advice on posing your subject when using the lighting set-up, example images created with the lighting and often suggestions of other things to try with the set-up.
The lighting sheets cover both studio and strobist (speedlight) photography and cover a range of styles including portraiture, pin-up, fashion and soon to be added art nude and glamour lighting set-ups.
*** NEW ***
We have recently started to add exclusive video tutorials on post-production topics. The tutorials typically including video and documents. Some tutorials will also include the files used in the tutorial so that you can follow along and learn. Tutorials include things like how to create spotlight effects in Lightroom, digital rain effects in Photoshop, how to set-up and use Metadata Presets in Lightroom.
Other Benefits of being an Academy Member include:
- Download and keep PDF Magazine Style versions of Ian’s weekly Photography Blog.
- A “Members’s Only” dedicated forum where you can ask questions and get help from your fellow Academy Members and from Ian.
- Annual Members get access to occasional Marketing posts about how effective different techniques have been for promoting a photography business
- Stock Photography data – Ian posts details of images that he has sold through his Stock Photography libraries – all members get details, but Annual Members also get see what the images sold for.
- For those who can travel to “Ian’s Studio” in Stockport, all academy members get discounts on training events at the Studio, this discount will be extended to online training when that becomes available.
- Feedback on your images – you can request feedback and critique on your images from Ian via the members’ forum, or face-to-face at our regular PhotoDoctor sessions at the studio which are free to Academy Members.