Next month, students at the Kensington and Chelsea College in West London will be able to sign up for a course on iPhoneography. Anyone can do the course: all you need is an iPhone, £115 ($182) for the course and all your Thursday nights free throughout March.
The course is called iPhoneography: Photography with your iPhone, and it’s a smart move for the college. You have to be a pretty enthusiastic photographer to sign up for regular evening class, but most everyone uses a phone to take photos these days. Add in the fact that there is a bewilderment of photo apps available for the iPhone, and you have a study course that’s likely to fill up very quickly.
It’s not just the students who will be using iDevices, either. The course will be taught using an “overhead projector linked to an iPad,” where tutor Richard Gray will presumably demo techniques to the class.
“I developed the course after discovering there were a lot of people who had an iPhone who didn’t really know how to use the camera.” says Gray. “With the right apps and skills the iPhone can be a powerful creative tool.” To this end, students will need to budget another £20 for apps. Compare that to the hundreds you’d need to spend on Photoshop for a “real” photography course.
The only thing that makes me keep considering an iPhone purchase is the camera. For everything else, my iPad is better. For now I use an Eye-Fi card to beam pictures from my Panasonic GF1 to the iPad. But if the iPad 3 has the improved camera everybody is expecting, maybe next year the Kensington and Chelsea College will be starting up an iPadography course too.
[Thanks, Lisa H!]