Here’s a great piece on Jonathan Worth, an English photographer who has embraced Creative Commons and who offers free, CC-licensed photography instruction.
The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class’s RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions. Worth’s Fall course attracted over 10,000 visitors to its website from 1,632 cities in 107 countries… Thanks to some savvy networking, the class also gives access to some big names. The crowd-sourced list of photo books, with submissions from bandstand photographers Alec Soth, Gilles Peress, Joel Meyerowitz, Todd Hido and others had over 100,000 page views.
“I think Jonathan’s course experiments are fantastic,” says Professor David Campbell, member of the Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. “He is probably the most creative teacher I know.”
After nearly 15 years as a successful commercial photographer specializing in portraiture (he’s photographed celebrities like Alan Moore, Colin Firth and Brett Easton-Ellis), Jonathan Worth gave up the advertising and editorial jobs, left New York, and returned to his native England to take up a part-time teaching gig at Coventry University.
Jonathan shot some portraits of me as part of a National Portrait Gallery project, and they’re among my favorite photos of all time (check out his portrait of Alan Moore!).
Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education
(Thanks, Jonathan!)