Hi, I'm Phil Steele, and I founded SteeleTraining.com to share my love of photography and image editing with fellow photographers.

In my own attempt to learn photography, I became frustrated by what I perceived as an "information gap." On the one hand, I found plenty of free information online, but it was random and unpredictable in quality and completely disorganized. Seeking it out and separating the gems from the junk simply became a waste of time.

On the other hand, there were some great classes and courses created by professional photographers—but the prices were too often beyond my budget. And frankly, sometimes a great photographer is not necessarily a great teacher.

A recent magazine cover photo

A recent photo in Sunset, the travel magazine of the American west.

What I wanted was well-organized instruction, understandable to an amateur, presented in a logical sequence, by a good teacher, at a reasonable price.

And it just didn't seem to exist. I ended up learning the hard way, often the slow way and the expensive way, buying books, online courses, seminars, DVD courses, everything I could get my hands on. And of course I spent a lot of years with the camera in my hands learning by making mistakes.

Then one day, after absorbing all the knowledge I could find and shooting for nearly a decade—I suddenly realized that I was now in a position to create the training that I had always wished existed!

The result is this site. I want to give you the training that I always wished I could find.

My goal is to help pull you forward a few notches as a photographer, very fast. I want you to learn from my mistakes instead of having to make them yourself, and to enjoy a shortcut through some processes that I had to traverse the long way.

— Phil Steele

P.S. If you fear that you're arriving too late to the photography party, don't worry. Up until my 37th year I believed that "real" photography was something done only by art-school trained professionals, something beyond the reach of us mere mortals.

But then I snapped a lucky shot (warning: nudity) with my little 2-megapixel pocket camera, and it ended up in an art gallery. This inspired me so much that I got a slightly better pocket camera and actually tried to take some decent photos for the first time in my life. And after that, each year, I tried just a little bit harder.

Now my photos have appeared in books and magazines internationally; one of my gallery websites gets over one million photo views in a good month; and I'm making a living teaching photography (and you'd hardly know that for most of my life I was a software geek with a college degree in geophysics—about as far from art school as you can get). The message: It's never too late to get started.