Largest Collection of Camera Courses In The World

I’m both pleased and excited to announce the availability of my classic CreativeLive classes now available at johngreengo.com. This has been a project I’ve been pursuing for a very long time. Over the last five years my photography courses have been split between new courses in my shop, and my older classes at CreativeLive. Now all classes can be found in one place.

There are 66 camera courses, known as “Fast Starts”, 3 lens courses and the hugely popular “Fundamentals of Photography” from my CreativeLive era that have now been added to my curriculum of courses. During my time creating courses in partnership with CreativeLive I was a part of more than 100 projects.

For those that are not familiar with the situation, for the better part of a decade I created classes in cooperation with the online learning platform “CreativeLive”. I created the courses and taught them, while CreativeLive handled the recording, marketing, and selling.

My start in teaching

My start in photography teaching began because of the economic recession of 2008. At the time I was working a dream job of being on a travel TV show and working with world-famous photographer, Art Wolfe. It all came to a sudden end when the funding for the TV show dried up. With free time on my hands and a desire to pay the bills, I put together a basic photography class.

This first class, “Crash Course in Digital Photography”, was presented to a group of 16 and it was the very first time I had taught anything in a classroom environment. I wasn’t nervous about teaching, but I was a bit anxious about how well I could teach and what the response would be from the students.

Public speaking wasn’t new to me, as earlier in life I was involved in presenting travel documentaries to small groups. I do remember being very nervous at my first presentation. My buddy, Tim, and I were presenting at REI and there was a legitimate crowd of more than 70 people. Tim put me at ease when he said that there was nothing to worry about because I was an expert in everything I would need to talk about.

I think that first photo class went well, at least the students seemed to enjoy it and they seemed to very involved in the class. And most importantly, nobody fell asleep; always and important indicator of how your material is being received.

CreativeLive: The early years

After a few successful in-person teaching experiences, an opportunity to teach an online webinar came about. I was a little unsure about teaching in front of a camera, but there would be a small group of people in the room for me to interact with.

I believe I was partially picked to teach this online class because I offered a good visual presentation to accompany my lecture. I had spent a lot of time developing my first photography course using Apple’s Keynote application, a program similar to Microsoft’s Power Point. I was quite aware of the phrase “death by powerpoint” but I thought photography was best taught with good visual aids.

I was working with a company called Creative Techs, an Apple consulting business that was experimenting with online classes. The owner Craig Swanson was curious about testing the burgeoning online video market. YouTube had recently hit the mainstream and Craig was looking to create higher quality content.

A number of instructors were tapped to try their hand at these webinar classes, as they were called at the time. I sat in on these courses and even helped with the behind the scenes production of them. There were classes on photoshop, history of photography, and tutorials on most everything offered by Adobe.

Interest in photography in 2009 was strong, and quality on-line education wasn’t common. The classes were a small hit. My early concerns about being paid in residuals somewhere down the road with a start-up enterprise were quickly put to bed.

Launching CreativeLive

After a few months of testing the water, Craig partnered with Chase Jarvis, a local photographer with both national and international notoriety. A new company was born — CreativeLive, and money and effort was amped up to create even higher quality courses.

CreativeLive was launched on April 7, 2010. Chase, the public face of the company, made the announcement and introduced me to teach CreativeLive’s very first on-line class, Fundamentals of Digital Photography.

This first course was an enhanced version of my in-person class. The 10-part course was taught one class at a time over a 10 week period. You could tune in any Wednesday afternoon (Pacific time) and watch the recording of the class for free. At any point of time you could purchase the course so that you could download the videos to watch on your own schedule.

This was the CreativeLive hook — live classes are free, pay to download and own. It allowed people a healthy sample size to more easily see what they were getting. Courses were also rebroadcast at different times of the day so that people around the world could watch at a convenient time.

Income from that first course wasn’t life changing, but it was eyebrow raising. If you only considered the 12 hours of my online teaching, my hourly rate was fantastic. When you factored in the 1000+ hours I had put into the material, it put things in a more realistic perspective.

Well-known photographers with a diverse set of expertise were brought in to teach about weddings, lighting, video, and more. A new, large studio was leased and studio equipment was purchased by the UPS truckload. All sorts of experts were brought in — line producers, audio mixers, video editors, hair & makeup, and catering. Over the course of a few years the staff grew from 4 to more than 70.

All sorts of well-known, if not famous, photographers were coming to CreativeLive to teach their speciality. They were often very successful professional photographers with thriving careers. Some instructors started teaching variations on their expertise and began creating collections of courses.

I’d put everything I had into my one class, but it was purely a course on the photography basics: exposure, focus, and composition.I started to feel like a smaller and smaller fish in an expanding pond. For quite a while I felt outgunned and that I had nothing left to offer. Of the first 20 or so instructors at CreativeLive, I was the least establish and the least well-known. However, that one basic class was one of the best selling courses, and would remain so for years to come.

Investment money was starting to flow into CreativeLive as they promoted themselves to the venture capitalists. Productions grew in size and location shooting became common. Live studio audiences were attracted and the quality of production went up. The home offices in downtown Seattle became a favorite destination for me – there was always something interesting going on. The employees of CreativeLive were always one of my favorite parts of this whole enterprise. The crew was hard working, fun to be around, and really watched out for me and each other. Although I wasn’t an official employee I felt like a close cousin the way I was always welcomed on the home-front.

My one photography class was yielding some residuals, not enough to pay the rent, but enough to give me some ideas. If I could create more classes, I could live off the residuals. I’d have a free schedule and could produce at my own pace and my income wouldn’t be linked to just one source. The problem was that I was sure everything I knew about photography was in my one class.

The camera class

I love pitching ideas. Craig (head of daily operations) and I had developed a good relationship in that first year of operation and he was very receptive to my ideas. While all my knowledge of photography was in my one class, I did know a lot about cameras and maybe I could do a shorter class on how to operate a particular camera.

We all knew that a single class on one model of a camera wasn’t going to be a super seller, but a collection of them might be very valuable. At the time, the priority at CreativeLive was building a catalog with new content. With the rapid introduction of new digital cameras there was a lot of potential content out there.

I went off to work attempting to put together a complete course on the operation of a camera, the likes of which I had never seen done before. Camera’s are messy things: physical buttons, electronic menus and loads of accessories; how do you organize all this information into a cohesive learning experience.

I started with four cameras: Canon’s T2i(550D) and 60D, along with Nikon’s D3100 and D7000; all popular mainstream cameras. I thought that I could create one class, then copy everything over to the next camera changing only the minor pertinent parts of the course. Boy was I wrong.

I put everything into those first four camera classes, I was embarrassed at how much time it took me to address all the little, but important, differences between each of the cameras. Being part nerd and part perfectionist, the classes were a never ending opportunity for additional tweaks and improvement.

As expected the classes weren’t a big hit, but they did well enough that I was allowed to create and record more of them. Over the next year I created seven more Fast Start courses.

In 2012 I taught a new version of my Fundamentals class, in the big studio with a big monitor and lots of promotion and advertising. I also taught two of my most important Fast Start courses — on the Canon 5D Mark III and Nikon D800. These were two of the most important new professional grade cameras on the market. These were just the type of camera to be used by the core CreativeLive audience; so there was great interest in them.

Over the course of that year I had honed the camera classes with more detail, more examples, and better organization. The 5D Mark III and D800 camera classes were among my most popular. Digital was still fairly new, and cameras were getting more and more complicated and everyone wanted to know more about them.

It was in that year, 2012, that I knew I was on to something. Sales took a sharp turn upwards and with my new camera classes, I had an endless supply for potential content.

Over the course of the next seven years I produced more than 70 courses with CreativeLive. Most every year I created a new version of my fundamentals course, between five and 12 Fast Start camera courses and occasionally something else, like a Nature & Landscape course or an in-depth lens course. Over a decade my courses had been purchased by tens of thousands of people and with the free broadcasts my courses had been seen by millions upon millions.

Nothing lasts forever

CreativeLive changed around 2019, and focus shifted from creating content to selling what was in the catalog. The request for new content from me wained; the writing was on the wall. If I wanted to continue doing what I was doing, I would need to take care of business myself.

It took almost two years to reorganize so that I could offer classes directly from my own website. Since my renewed start I’ve recorded and offered 41 courses with many more on the way. I always kept in mind those first 70 courses that were back at CreativeLive. When someone sent us a message requesting a course on an older camera I could send them a link, but I didn’t have the rights to sell them the course myself.

Recently, CreativeLive stopped selling to new customers, making my older classes unavailable to purchase through them. Working with CreativeLive and negotiating an agreement, it’s exciting to announce that all those classic courses are now available in my shop.

I’m not drawing any direct comparisons, but I do feel a bit like Taylor Swift who recently acquired the rights to all of her early musical recordings. I will forever feel grateful and thankful to CreativeLive who gave me a shot even though I was a nobody. They trusted me and listened to me over the years and most definitely helped me get to where I am today. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some great people along the way and even found my wife in an around-about way through the whole experience.

It feels good to have all my babies (courses) back home; it’s a lot more organized and it’s a lot simpler — just how I like it. We’ll continue creating more courses as best as we can, but we also have a number of other improvements we’re working to bring forth.

Thanks to all of you for being along for this ride. If you were first introduced to me via CreativeLive I’d love to hear your story in the comments below.