In this live online photography course, you’ll refine your composition skills and improve your photographic seeing to help you tell stronger stories with your pictures. Through weekly exercises, including taking pictures in urban environments, you’ll learn a variety of compositional tools that will help you develop a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings. We’ll also cover how you can creatively incorporate lines, shadows, colors, and people into the composition of your image, and during group critique we’ll discuss effective editing techniques and analyze what works in an image — and what doesn’t. For inspiration we’ll take a look at historical and contemporary photographers and study their approaches to image composition and storytelling. By the end of the course, students will have stronger visual skills and will perceive their surroundings in new ways.

A special highlight of this class will be a live online tour through the exhibition Paparazzi! at WestLicht Photography Museum in Vienna with curator Fabian Knierim. This exhibition explores the history and aesthetics of paparazzi photography, its uses, and its controversies. It features works by some of the most iconic figures in the genre like Ron Galella, Tazio Secchiaroli, and Marcello Geppetti, among others, as well as appropriations of the paparazzi style by the likes of Helmut Newton, Anton Corbijn, and Alison Jackson. WestLicht, located in the heart of Vienna, is one of Austria’s premier venues for showcasing photography.

This class is presented in a new collaboration between StrudelmediaLive and WestLicht Photography Museum in Vienna, Austria.