Do you live in or near Yokohama and want to learn photography in English? Read here about our lessons, for people of all skill levels.

Announcement

Japanorama is also pleased to announce a new series of flash and studio classes for the advanced photographer! Click here for details.

About The Classes

You may be someone who already knows something about photography, or who has a new digital SLR camera and wants to learn more. Or perhaps you are an absolute beginner and need some advice and a few lessons on how to get the most from the hobby? Whatever your needs,we are able to help you get the most from your camera and have, since starting our lessons a year ago, had more than 60 students sign-up.

My students are currently a mixture of beginners and more seasoned hobbyist photographers, each with their own list of things they want to learn more about. With a lesson or two all of them have felt not only more comfortable with their camera andmore able to get the best from it, but also slightly more switched on to the world around them. Enough for it to begin to better feed their new-found skills with some extra creativity.

Here’s a gallery of some of my own recent work to give you an idea of what I shoot

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I teach all levels of photographer. For beginners it would be, first, just going over what you grasp about the basics of aperture, speed and ISO [i.e. exposure] and then going through establishing a way of you being able to measure and play with exposure in your photography. Understanding light, shadow, tone, contrast, dynamic range; these things are key to be able to get yourself to a point where you can feel in total control of the camera, rather then feeling like the camera is controlling you. This is the first objective.

Then we try to work on subjects that you like shooting and work on how you can get better at them. I generally do this through little projects and by us shooting together during the lessons. After that I might introduce an area of photography, in terms of subject, that you may never of thought about pursuing; macro, nature, people, still-life, architecture for example.

I also work a little on how you ‘see’ things. This is not exactly the same for everyone as we all see the world around us differently. The aim here is to, at least, get you seeing some new things about the world around you which you can then feel confident about capturing with your camera.

There are some technical and creative aspects to every lesson.

Classes take place at a location convenient to you and me. I live in Omori, just 20mins from Yokohama on the Keihin-Tohoku Line, travel down to the Yokohama area for lessons and already have some students in the area so group classes are possible too.

The first lesson is 90-minutes long. The extra half-hour gives me a chance to figure out a little about your level of skill and experience. The lessons can be subject or technique based. For example we can shoot people or we could explore the topic of creative use of depth of field. Sometimes we do both subject and technique based things at the same time.

I try to teach people with little projects. It is more productive to shoot for a purpose than to aimlessly walk around shooting everything we see. It is better if you have a DSLR [Digital SLR] camera but it isnt the end of the world if you don’t.

I shoot a Nikon D300 and have a lot of lenses for it. If you also shoot Nikon, great, as you can use some of my lenses for the lesson. But as many of my students shoot Canon as anything else and I am the last person to get snobby about gear. It’s just gear. It’s what you do with it that counts.

I can teach weekdays or weekends; mornings, afternoons or evenings. Whatever suits you.

Get in touch, drop me an email using my contact page ask me any questions you would like to and let’s compare diaries!

Details of our Tokyo classes are here.

Here’s a rough idea of costs:

• One-to-one tuition: JPY5000 / hour
• Group lessons: between JPY2000 and JPY3500 / hour, each, depending on the number in the group.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Alfie Goodrich