Our friends at 5DayDeal have put together their “The Complete Photography Bundle” for the 4th straight year. This is their “classic” bundle of eBooks and videos focused on making you a better photographer. It’s available for only $97 for five days only — the deal expires on October 19th at 3 PM ET, and this bundle will never be offered again!
This year 5DayDeal tried to make several more focused bundles, ranging from business-focused bundles to web-focused bundles. This current “The Complete Photography Bundle” is their traditional bundle, focused on how to take great shots, and how to post-process them into astounding photographs. We spent some time reading and reviewing the bundle and our thoughts are below.
We found the following parts of “The Complete Photography Bundle” the most interesting:
- By far, our favorite was Zack Arias’ eBook “Get To Work – DEDPXL Business Primer”. It’s an enthralling 127 page read about Zack’s journey from day job to successful commercial photographer, with many stops in between. It’s a deep narrative filled with many personal anecdotes and we really think it’s a must read for anyone looking to one day start a photography business (or start any business, for that matter.)
- We thoroughly enjoyed several video series on editing landscape images. Post II Landscapes and Art of Cityscapes are step-by-step tutorials for editing landscape and cityscape images — with some gorgeous RAW files provided so you can edit right along with the instructor.
- The Incredibly Important Composition Skills eBook covered some basic but important composition concepts, with the use of some very nice examples. A great read for those starting out in basic photography composition.
- Posing subjects is always difficult, and Lindsay Adler has a Posing Pitfalls guide — a one hour video tutorial on some common mistakes with posing and how to correct them, along with a handy cheatsheet.
- Also handy was the Client Communications Success Guide which gives handy tips for communicating and dealing with photography clients in many different scenarios.
- Finally, two HDR Master Classes were quite interesting — it’s amazing how much the HDR state-of-the-art has progressed, and some tutorials on how to shoot and edit panorama HDRs was fascinating to see.
There was a lot more material that varied in quality: Trey Ratcliff’s tutorial series “Becoming an Artist” looked interesting but we just couldn’t get into it (and it was very long — fifteen half-hour episodes); a Photigy course on wine photography was interesting but most people aren’t going to find themselves photographing wine bottles. A couple of eBooks and videos were misses, but that’s to be expected in a large bundle of 30+ products. As before, if you see just a few items of interest in the “The Complete Photography Bundle”, it’s worth a purchase at $97. You never know — perhaps something unexpected in the bundle will inspire you. As an added plus, 10% goes to charity.
Has anybody bought these before and are they worth it? Yeah, it’s a “great value” but these products look overpriced to begin with. I feel like there’s already so many great, free resources on the internet
Yes, I have, twice. It’s a great value so long as what is included is what you want to learn about. The trick is finding the time to watch all the videos, read all the books, and install all the presets while still working full-time.