On the advice of Scott Kelby, I purchased David Ziser's Digital Wakeup Call DVD. David Ziser is a well known and successful wedding photographer who teaches techniques at various seminars across the States. The DVD was fairly inexpensive $69 and I figured I'd easily spend that on a local photography course should one be available (which it isn't) and while the DVDs are wedding oriented, I figured that weddings mostly consist of portraits and group shots which is what I am interested in.

Anyway, the DVDs are very informative. You get around 4 1/2 hours of instruction (David talks with a powerpoint presentation but also demonstrates with his camera on screen) and I made 21 pages (these are small page, mind you) of notes.

David starts by talking about the wedding photography industry in general but quickly moves on to a discussion of different views of the face, basic lighting, composition, various techniques such as speeding/dragging the shutter and why you'd do this, on and off camera flash lighting as well as multi strobe, lens selection. He continues the DVDs with a discussion/demo of several software programs including his own photoshop dashboard, Fotofusion Pro. Finally he concludes with a discussion of how to market yourself in the wedding photography business.

The DVDs are well done, he is a good presenter that makes the subject matter interesting. There are plenty of diagrams and sample photos to illustrate his points. Also included in the package is a CD with several photoshop training videos (that I haven't watched yet).

I would give Digital Wakeup Call 10/10 for training and information about wedding photography (and portrait/group photography) and recommend these DVDs to an intermediate/advanced photographer (they are not beginner level). Great value for money!

David's blog can be found here
You can purchase the DVDs here