The Compelling Frame Information

“IF YOU WANT SHARPER PHOTOGRAPHS, BUY A NEW LENS. IF YOU WANT MORE COMPELLING PHOTOGRAPHS, START HERE.”

No camera in the world will make captivating photographs on its own. Even the most amazing thing in front of our lens requires decisions from us to make that thing into an amazing photograph.

Those decisions are the way we make a great moment feel great, gorgeous light feel gorgeous, and the lines and shapes take us to the emotional and storytelling heart of the image.

Composition is the visual language of the photograph, and you can learn to use it more intentionally, creatively, and powerfully.

What You’ll Learn In The Compelling Frame

19 Great Video Lessons

Powerful video-based lessons to teach you the strongest visual language skills, each lesson is accompanied by summaries, key takeaways, creative exercises, and Study the Masters sections.

Lessons include:The Intentional Perspective: POV; The Illusion of Depth; The Impact of Contrast; Isolation: The Art of Exclusion; Moments: Gesture and Geometry; Story: Relationships of Elements; Visual Mass: Pulling The Eye; Balance and Tension; Visual Echoes: Repetition and Pattern; and much more.

+ 31 Creative Exercises

We can learn a lot by reading or watching videos, but if words alone could make us better photographers, we’d all be Henri-Friggin’-Cartier-Bresson by now.

Every lesson is accompanied by challenging creative exercises—each of them a chance for you to flex your muscles and apply what you’re learning. If you were learning a language, you wouldn’t get fluent by just learning the grammar and the vocabulary, would you? We all need to make this stuff our own, and these 31 assignments do exactly that.

+ Study the Masters

One of the best ways to learn to make more captivating and compelling photographs is to study more photographs with those qualities; not just look at them and nod our heads, but to really experience them, and then to learn from them.

Study the Masters is part of all 19 lessons of The Compelling Frame, a chance for you to be introduced to photographers who have made some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

+ About The Image 

Three of the 19 lessons in The Compelling Frame are image studies called About The Image—a chance to discuss all the elements and decisions that have been taught in the course, but in context of other elements and decisions. It’s easy to talk about one abstract idea like Contrast or Tension, but how we apply those in the photographs themselves—and how those elements interact with others—is often much more difficult to pin down. About The Image is a chance to look at three images in that light.

+ Exclusive Bonus Material

In addition to 19 self-paced lessons designed to get you fluent in the visual language of photography, there are 4 additional About The Image videos, and 2 Craft & Creativity videos, unavailable anywhere else.

More courses from the same author: David DuChemin