The 22 best photography classes in NYC

Penumbra Foundation is a non-profit photographic arts organization with a mission to bring the opportunity to learn skills and educate people in a diverse and evolving international photographic community. They have several courses like Introduction to Lighting and Creating Narrative Through Still Life Photography, plus many others, all helping people of various skill levels learn more techniques within the photography world. Classes are taught in small groups to help ensure everyone gets 1-on-1 help from the teacher. 

This school caters to budding photographers and photo hobbyists, giving them both coursework and a confidence boost. Newbies can start off with lessons on getting better acquainted with their equipment and then take on subsequent course levels on composition, exposure, editing and building a portfolio. There are also courses designed for kids and teens, and seasonal classes and workshops extend to travel, street photography and landscapes.

Open to all levels and experience, The Art of Intuitive Photography focuses on enhancing your instinct and intuition regarding photography, helping you to learn how to see things differently and improving your compositions. There are beginner classes available, as well as ones for more experienced photographers. Taught in small groups to ensure everyone has equal opportunity to grow their expertise and skill.

Explore the urban jungle camera in hand with this unique experience that combines city walking tours with lessons on how to capture the best photos while you're on the go. Tours take you to Central Park, Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, the NYC subway and many other destinations. Classes include a three-day intensive Photo Boot Camp under the direction of photographic pros who teach you the finer points of camera settings, composition skills and other improvements to your photography chops as you snap away at famous landmarks and icons of NYC.

The Digital Photo Academy offers a wide range of photography courses, both studio classes and on-site photography seminars that will see students visiting some of the iconic spaces of New York City. Start your journey off with an introduction to your digital camera, in a workshop that will see a professional photographer guiding you through the process of working with the camera you have brought into the studio (ensuring that you get practical advice on working with your own tools). Then, put this knowledge to use in one of Digital Photo Academy’s many guided photography tours, with destinations like Central Park, The New York Public Library, Eldridge Street or Battery Park.

Led by professional photographer JP Pullos and his team of instructors, this photo school enrolls students who want to promote their business visually or are merely avid lovers of photography. Group and online courses plus private lessons match up with those interests by addressing common scenarios that budding shutterbugs often encounter. Instead of applying memorization and technical jargon, courses take on an intuitive learning method involving a mix of class instruction and field practice.

Intuitive Photography offers an introductory digital photography course that is perfect for anyone looking to learn how to navigate their way around their digital camera. Participants will learn the basics of photography concepts like ISO, aperture and shutter speed and they will get real, practical experience taking photographs to put this knowledge to use. By the end of this course, you’ll be more comfortable taking photographs, and you’ll be ready to start learning more advanced digital photography techniques.

Photo Safari offers a fast-paced and exciting photography experience for anyone looking to capture the iconic majesty of New York City. In this course, students will learn essential photography skills (with a particular emphasis on landscape and architectural photography, since this is New York, after all) as they visit Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, Empire State Building, and Central Park to photograph all of the most beautiful vistas the city has to offer. If you are interested in photography and want to visit some of the most iconic sites in New York, this is the event for you.

With more than 400 courses offered a year, the curriculum at this school runs the gamut, ranging from digital media and darkroom practice to certificate and degree programs. Classes are offered throughout the year, with accelerated courses in January and the summertime, weekend workshops and one-day intensives. Plus its state-of-the-art facility with black-and-white and color labs, digital labs and a professional shooting studio and a distinguished faculty encompassing videographers, journalists and editors really bring creative expertise to the forefront.

While digital photography may be all the rage these days, there is something tactile and special about classic photography techniques that makes them a real joy to learn. For example, the art of wet plate photography, which involves pouring chemicals directly onto metal plates (and eroding them in a specific way to leave behind a photographic image) dates back to the 19th century and can allow artists to produce stunning images to display. In this wet plate course, offered by the Penumbra Foundation, students will learn how to prepare a sheet for corroding, how to safely handle the chemicals and how to pour the chemicals to ensure a beautiful finished product properly.

There are few places better to practice photography than a museum. Not only do you have a range of amazing art to photograph, but museums are full of interesting people, stunning architecture and beautiful scenery. And, if you live in NYC, there is no better museum to practice your photography skills in than The Met. In this guided walking tour of the museum, an experienced photographer will teach you about essential photography concepts, like lighting and composition, as you take advantage of the wide range of subjects offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When you travel, it's understandable that you’ll want to take pictures of the places you visit and the things you see. However, this can be a stressful and intimidating prospect, particularly if you don’t have any experience with digital photography (no one wants their picture of Angkor Wat to look blurry). In this travel photography seminar, a professional photographer will guide students through the best practices and equipment that they will want for taking on site photographs of the iconic destinations to which they travel. No matter where your journey takes you, this course will help ensure that you can take pictures to help you memorialize your trip.

So film photography is dead, right? Not so fast. Gowanus Darkroom is keeping the craft alive with classes that will teach you all the finer points of how to mix chemicals, develop negatives, and properly use an enlarger to make prints. Digital scanners are also available if that's your jam.

Lighting is, for a lot of reasons, one of the most important parts of getting a perfect photograph. Naturally, this makes taking photos in low ambient light (like at night) significantly more difficult. In this photo safari to New York’s Time Square, you’ll learn how to use ambient light and low light to create stunning photographs that leverage the darkness to your advantage. You’ll learn how to scout out locations, utilize flash and high exposure time techniques to create stunning images and how to capture ethereal motion. This course does require a tripod and a camera with the necessary features (a knowledge of photography techniques isn’t a must, but this also isn’t recommended to be your first photo safari).

The first step towards mastering any art form is becoming familiar with your tools and understanding how they work. Photography is no different, and it can be intimidating for new photographers when they upgrade from a point-and-shoot smartphone to a real digital camera. The Digital Photo Academy understands this and offers a seminar on digital camera controls to help new photographers feel comfortable with their cameras. These lessons are tailored to your specific camera, so you bring it in, and the instructor will walk you through how to make changes to settings (and why you would want to) on your personal camera. Plus, every session of this workshop is scheduled immediately before one of Digital Photo Academy’s other photography safari courses, meaning you can start using your new photography knowledge right away.

Central Park is one of the great wonders of the modern world, and it is a perfect place to visit if you are looking to learn the art of photography (particularly landscape and architectural photography, but also human photography, given how many people visit the park). In this guided photo safari, students will visit Central Park and receive a guided tour with a professional photographer who will teach them the essential photography skills they need to capture the beauty of the park’s scenery and landscapes. Students will learn how to scout locations for a shoot and how to ensure that the photographs they take are well-composed and well-lit, even during a live outdoor shoot.

Are you ready to take of that set of training wheels called automatic mode on your camera and take pictures like a real pro? Does the idea of taking to the skies and learning the art of drone photography get you stoked? Are you itching to take your camera into the streets, and nail that perfect shot on the fly? Well here's some good news: You can learn all of those and and more at the various photo classes being offered as part of NYU's continuing education program.

You’d be forgiven for not thinking of daguerreotype, a method of creating images using silvered copper plates and mercury-based chemicals, as a type of photography (or, at all, given that it was developed in the 1850s). However, if you are looking to create stunning works of art in a manner that isn’t commonly practiced, taking a daguerreotype class might be worth your while. You’ll learn how to prep the plates, prepare the chemicals (which are now, thankfully, mercury free) and process the images. By the end of the class, you’ll have your own daguerreotype image to take home and put on display.

If you are an artist yourself, you may be interested in learning how to photograph your own artwork. Professional artists need to build portfolios of their work and a bad photograph can make your masterwork look far less impressive to prospective buyers, clients or curators. In this 92nd Street Y class, artists will learn the practical and technical skills they need to start photographing their paintings, jewelry, sculptures, ceramics or other works of plastic art. Whether you are looking to apply to art shows or create a portfolio to help you get commissions on Etsy, learning how to photograph your artwork can go a long way to helping you build out your career.

If you are looking for a fun corporate team-building event, birthday activity or just something to do with a bunch of your friends, you may want to consider a photography course. Nowadays, virtually everyone is carrying a phone (attached to a super computer) in their pocket that is more powerful than even top end commercial digital cameras from a few decades ago. In this group workshop, you’ll learn how to maximize the quality of your shots with a phone camera and your attendees will get hands-on practice using photo editing tools to compose brilliant shots and tell compelling stories.

If you’ve been on Instagram recently (or, really, if you know one thing about Instagram), you know that food pictures are a surprisingly common part of the platform. However, if you really want to learn how to photograph food, you need to do more than just point a smartphone at a plate of fish and call it a day. Food photography is an actual art (and something that advertisers will pay top dollar for) and in this class, you’ll learn how to treat your food the same as you treat scenic vistas when you are looking to memorialize them. You’ll learn about lighting, composition and how to enhance a food’s appeal visually.

Since there is no physical film involved with digital cameras, most photographers don’t really think (or even know) about negatives these days. This course hopes to help students explore the creative possibilities of negative space by teaching them how to use digital processing techniques to create negative images without a darkroom. The course will cover Cyanotype and Kallitype prints and will help bridge analog and digital photography techniques so that students can create stunning works of art that harken back to earlier processes of photography.