About Emma Davies and A Year With My Camera

My photographs have been published by the BBC, the Telegraph, Gardens Illustrated, Outdoor Photographer and Digital Photographer magazines.

Those are the credentials, and they are not the reason you are here. I include them because they say something useful: I take photography seriously, I have been trained in how creativity is taught, and I know what good teaching looks like.

The reason I think you might be here is the next bit.

How A Year With My Camera began

A Year With My Camera started in 2015. The problem I wanted to solve was specific. Photography is full of people who already know a great deal (who can be wonderful) but who are not always patient with people at the beginning. Most beginner photography books and courses assume a kind of prior knowledge their readers do not yet have. They use words like aperture and depth of field before explaining them. They include far too much in every lesson. They move on before the reader has had time to practise.

I had taught photography in person for some years before this, and I noticed the same pattern over and over. People came to my workshops not because they were not bright enough (they were perfectly bright) but because someone, somewhere, had not given them the time to actually understand what they were doing. Often that someone was a well-meaning partner who had got irritated when their explanations did not land. Sometimes it was a manual. Sometimes it was a YouTube video pitched two levels above where they were.

So I wrote a course. The aim was to teach photography in the way I thought it ought to be taught: one concept at a time, in plain English, with no rush. The course is free by email because the people I wrote it for should not have to pay to find out whether they can do this.

How the course is taught

There are three working principles underneath everything in A Year With My Camera.

The first is that you only need to compare yourself to the photographer you were last year. Other people's photographs are not your measure. Your own progress over time is. This principle does more work than any technical lesson I could write.

The second is that progress matters more than perfection. I would rather you finished a lesson with a flawed photograph than waited for the right time to start. There is no right time to start. There is only now, or later than now.

The third is simply that photography should stay fun.

Beyond those principles, the design choices in the course are deliberate. One concept per lesson. Plain English before technical terms. A small piece of practical homework. Permission to move on without fully understanding; because understanding compounds, and you do not need to hold it all in your head on the first pass.

Join the course here (free)

How the course is delivered

A Year With My Camera is available in four formats: the free email course, an optional community app, printed workbooks available on Amazon, and a set of video courses. The curriculum is the same in all four. Choose whichever fits how you prefer to learn.

Over 100,000 students have taken the course since it began in 2015.

Where to find me

A Year With My Camera lives at ayearwithmycamera.com, with the app at ayearwithmycamera.app and the course's Instagram at @ayearwithmycamera. My personal photography work lives in a few other places.

My portfolio is at emmadavies.com. My photography school is at emmadaviesphotoschool.com. My personal Instagram, for the work I make outside the course, is @emmadaviesphoto. My books are on Amazon. The full list is on my author page: amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B073DH7VZ9.