We’ve spent about eight hours going through The Complete Photography Bundle II ($89), a limited time collection (only 3 days left!) of 42 photography educational resources and tools. There’s a significant amount of material and we have only scratched the surface. It’s 35 gigabytes in total, so make sure you have a nice fast Internet connection to download all this material!
The information included ranges from introductory eBooks to informative videos, with a healthy dose of Lightroom tools and presets. Not everything is for everyone, but there’s enough breadth included in this bundle that can surely justify the very reasonable $89 price. Here’s a look at some of our favorites from what we’ve seen, in a rare lengthy review from us:
In his OneLight v2.0 educational video, Zack Arias, a professional commercial and editorial photographer, talks you through the nuances of lighting. The first few hours has Zack talking through and testing different lighting options, with the help of Carl, a trusty stuffed squirrel. Later episodes has Zack talking through photoshoots. He’s very direct and informative, but at the same time funny and friendly, which makes this video series really approachable and effective.
The other tutorial that we enjoyed from the bundle was a Landscape Photography video tutorial from Nicole S. Young — this one focused on Lightroom, Photoshop, and other post-processing techniques to make landscape photography pop. It’s always fascinating to watch other photographers use image processing tools — you’re bound to pick up a few new techniques and ideas — and Nicole uses a variety of different tools to great effect. It’s also good reminder that many great photos are made, not just taken, and is encouragement to improve a great capture in post-process.
Many of the tutorials use masking as a technique for better post-processing; Topaz ReMask is another great tool included in the bundle to make masking easier. Historically, masking in Photoshop was a fiddly and time consuming process. Having not used Topaz ReMask before this, we’re impressed that a few quick gestures in Topaz is sufficient for extracting even a subtle mask from a noisy background.
We didn’t find everything in the bundle useful: one of the videos (Splash photography) was a rambly recording of studio sessions and not well edited. The bird photography video, while very informative, was really only a teaser to the next videos in the series (a tiny bit disappointing, but we’re not bird photographers). The eBooks were generally introductory and often too simplistic in nature. They were still good for someone newer to photography or looking to brush up on fundamental concepts and techniques, but didn’t have too much new info for an experienced photographer. There were a few more specific and detailed guides (such as creating better bokeh, long exposure photography) but there were few of these and we were definitely looking for them all to be of that depth. There was one particularly well-produced fashion posing guide from Lindsay Adler (pictured). Some of the poses are over the top but many are generally useful for portraiture. Posing subjects was always difficult…
In summary, we think The Complete Photography Bundle II is a good purchase, with all the different facets, it delivers value beyond the $89 price tag. It’s also nice to see that 10% of every purchase is donated to charity. Please note that this bundle only lasts until noon on October 20th. Reviewing this material this has reminded us that it’s important to remember that photography is more than just upgrading cameras and lenses (as this site is often focused) and learning is always important; we’re looking forward to slowly going over all this material in the months to come, to upgrade the people behind the cameras.
