Home | Photography Lessons | About/Contact | Blog | Links | 日本語 [Japanese] | RSS Feed of Recent Photos RSS Feed of Alfie's Most Recent Photos

Photography lessons in Tokyo, Japan: technique, subject and project based learning for camera and post-processing.

Do you live in or near Tokyo and want to learn photography in English? There is no photography school in central Tokyo that teaches in English but I have started private and group lessons, for people of all skill levels.

About The Classes

You may be someone who already knows something about photography, or who has a new digital SLR camera and wants to learn more. Or perhaps you are an absolute beginner and need some advice and a few lessons on how to get the most from the hobby? Whatever your needs, I hope I will be able to help. My students are currently a mixture of beginners and more seasoned hobbyist photographers, each with their own list of things they want to learn more about. With a lesson or two all of them have felt not only more comfortable with their camera and more able to get the best from it, but also slightly more switched on to the world around them. Enough for it to begin to better feed their new-found skills with some extra creativity.

I teach all levels of photographer. For beginners it would be, first, just going over what you grasp about the basics of aperture, speed and ISO [i.e. exposure] and then going through establishing a way of you being able to measure and play with exposure in your photography. Understanding light, shadow, tone, contrast, dynamic range; these things are key to be able to get yourself to a point where you can feel in total control of the camera, rather then feeling like the camera is controlling you. This is the first objective.

Then we try to work on subjects that you like shooting and how you can get better at them. I generally do this through little projects and by us shooting together during the lessons. After that we  introduce various other areas of photographic technique: macro, nature, people, still-life, architecture, for example.

We'll also work a little on how you 'see' things. This is not exactly the same for everyone as we all see the world around us differently. The aim here is to, at least, get you seeing some new things about the world around you which you can then feel confident about capturing with your camera.

There are some technical and creative aspects to every lesson and we try to work on projects that combine the creative and technical. You can find some of our projects on my Japanorama website:

Here's a rough idea of costs:

Classes take place at a location convenient to you and me. I live in Shinagawa-ku and am happy to travel 30 minutes from there on the train to reach my students. The first lesson is 90-minutes long. The extra half-hour gives me a chance to figure out a little about your level of skill and experience. The lessons can be subject or technique based. For example we can shoot people or we could explore the topic of creative use of depth of field. Sometimes we do both subject and technique based things at the same time.

It's better if you have a DSLR [Digital SLR] camera but it isnt the end of the world if you don't. I have several cameras you can use.

I can teach weekdays or weekends; mornings, afternoons or evenings. Whatever suits you.

So please get in touch. You can drop me an email using the contact page. Or call me on 090 9971 7805.

Find out about our series of flash and studio classes for the advanced photographer! Click here for details.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Alfie Goodrich