[Leica] Crazy idea? Getting a photography degree

[tedgrant at shaw.ca (Ted Grant)]

David Mason offered:

> If you can't afford school (or don't want to afford it) I can't
> recommend strongly enough sitting in a library looking through
> documentary photography books and then going out and planning and
> shooting a project of your own feeding off of the inspiration you have
> just built up. Doing that did more for my photography than anything
> else - it gave me more purpose which happened to be my problem.<<<

Hi David,

That's about as straight forward as it gets and how I basically learned to 
become a photojournalist. I looked at everything I could find in the old 
LIFE, LOOK, Paris Match, der Stern and any other photography books or 
magazines I could get my hands on. What did they shoot, why would they have 
shot that way? Learn how to cover a subject from start to finish with 
everything from your lead picture to the guts in the middle to the closing 
shot.

Photo magazines 54 years ago were wonderful, as they really were teaching 
manuals instead of the clap trap crap of today. People could actually learn 
and become better photographer's from them. Today that's almost an 
impossibility.

And  I still read and look for photography books of all kinds. And yes I 
learn something all the time simply because only a fool thinks they know 
everything there is to know about the subject of photography!  Besides these 
days it's evolving so fast if you do not stay with it in learning you'll be 
left so far behind you wont ever catch-up.

ted