Full Disclosure
If you’re looking for an honest Artificial Academy review: you’ve come to the right place! Just like every other course review on this site: I haven’t been paid, sponsored or gifted in anyway by the course creator. I’m not an affiliate and I don’t get any kickbacks or anything of value from writing these reviews!
What is Rate My Food Course?
I started this page because I couldn’t find real reviews from real students of the food photography courses I wanted to take! Sure, I could find reviews from affiliates but to me – that’s not an impartial review. As always, if you’d like to review this course or any other food photography course, you can read about the criteria here and submit a review form! Our reviews aim to be constructive and helpful. The reviews are here for students who want to learn about food photography, find classes that are a good fit for their skill level and cover the subject areas they want to know more about!
Let’s get to the Artificial Academy Review, shall we?
Who created this course? Joanie Simon. On Instagram, you can find her at @thebiteshot and if you want to learn all you could ever want to know about photography – seriously, she is an incredible wealth of knowledge and her camera presence is warm and engaging – head over to her YouTube page. If you want to see all of the courses she has to offer, you can head to her website.
Course Outline – What’s Delivered
4 Main Categories
- Core Competencies
- Putting It Into Practice
- Advanced Topics
- Set Up Demos
Each of these units contain 5-14 videos – Advanced Topics contains the most and Putting It Into Practice contains the fewest. In Advanced Topics, Joanie covers: capturing action, shooting in restaurants, continuous lighting, strobes and high speed sync, to name a few. I watched the first two sections as well as the set up demo for my particular gear and was able to start taking pictures I was proud of almost immediately. Within a couple hours of practicing and tweaking I produced one of my favorite images to this day. I took this photo 2 days and a cumulative 2 hours of practice after taking her course at 8pm:
Who is Artificial Academy for?
The food photographer who is ready to learn to shoot with artificial light, as fast and painlessly as possible!
Who is Artificial Academy NOT for?
- The food photographer who already knows how to shoot in artificial light, is confident with setting up their Speedlight and knows what settings to use.
- Photographers who shoot anything other than food may not find the course as applicable but Joanie does cover shooting portraits, lighting for video, and lighting larger scenes. I think it would still be a worth-while investment if your only interest is learning how to set up your artificial light!
Results:
Shooting photos you LOVE almost immediately (2 hours of practice + a few hours to watch the videos) – it doesn’t get any better than that, in my opinion!
Value for the money? Oh yeah. And then some. Her course makes something that is intimidating and makes it very approachable and easy.
Best features
Short videos that are easy to follow. They are broken down well so you can go into the material, find exactly what you’re looking for and implement it quickly. I love that you can easily refer back to one piece of information instead of having to wade through a long video trying to find the exact spot where the course creator teaches something you’d like to review. Joanie is highly engaging and explains the information in an easy to follow manner.
Constructive Criticism
I don’t really have anything critical to say! I think her course is comprehensive, helpful and took me from clueless to confidently shooting in artificial light in a matter of hours, which I think speaks for itself. Joanie is a phenomenal teacher!
The Details
Cost: $255 or 3 payments of $95
Course length: This is a go-at-your-own-pace course. You can binge all of the videos in one day or in a weekend – I did! I was ready to start shooting with artificial light and within hours Joanie had me up and running!
Lifetime access? Updates? Yes, you get lifetime access. Joanie adds to the course periodically. I think I remember her adding in a video a few months ago.
Did you like the Artificial Academy Review? Are you going to sign up? Tell me in the comments below!
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