iPhone Photography: How to Take Pro Photos On Your iPhone vs Fundamentals of Music Theory

Twenty-two lessons in 55 minutes cover composition, camera settings, depth of field, natural lighting and free Lightroom Mobile editing. Reviewers consistently praise the density of actionable tips and the clarity of on-screen graphics used throughout. The ceiling is the runtime — iOS camera features evolve with each iPhone generation and some interface demonstrations look dated on newer devices.

McManus is a professional photographer and award-winning YouTuber with a Film degree and nearly a decade of client experience. Reviewers across multiple blog sources converge on the same descriptors: polished presenter, straight-to-the-point delivery and a fun, approachable style that makes even technical concepts digestible. His over-the-shoulder teaching style is repeatedly cited as a major strength.

Included in the Skillshare subscription at roughly $13.99/month or $167.88/year, the class alone justifies a short free trial — and the subscription unlocks McManus's companion classes (Lightroom Mobile, selfie portrait photography) plus thousands of other creative courses. Multiple review aggregators note that over 60% of surveyed learners report the class exceeded their expectations relative to cost.

The class project asks students to capture and share 3–5 iPhone photos applying the techniques, producing tangible portfolio work. Hundreds of submissions are visible in the Skillshare project gallery. However, peer feedback is minimal — most projects receive no detailed critique — and the brief is open-ended rather than structured, which limits the learning value for students seeking mentored feedback on their output.

Composition rules, exposure control, depth-of-field through lens positioning, natural light direction and Lightroom Mobile post-processing all transfer directly to everyday social media, travel and personal photography. Multiple reviewers note immediate improvement in photo quality. The limit is scope: the class does not address advanced manual controls, RAW shooting or professional client work.

Six modules take you from pitches, scales and modes through intervals, clefs, rhythm and form into two full weeks of functional harmony and a harmonic-analysis final. Revised in 2022. Reviewers consistently praise the clarity and the bite-sized video chunks. Capped because the taught material is thin relative to the difficulty of the quizzes in the later weeks.

Five University of Edinburgh academics — Dr Thomas Butler, Dr John Kitchen MBE, Dr Zack Moir and colleagues — deliver genuinely academic, well-paced lectures. The teaching is the most consistently praised element across the corpus. The variety of voices keeps it fresh, though it makes the level of assumed knowledge uneven from week to week.

Free to audit in full; a certificate is ~$49 (or ~£35) and is included in a Coursera Plus subscription with financial aid available. For a six-module university-grade music-theory course with an open-access companion e-book, the free-audit route is hard to beat on price.

Assessment is quiz- and exam-based rather than creative-project-based — weekly graded quizzes plus a harmonic-analysis final. Good for testing recall and analysis, but there is no composition portfolio or peer-reviewed creative artefact. The exams are the most divisive element, with several learners flagging notation and clef demands that exceed the taught content.

The notation, harmony and analysis skills transfer directly to reading scores, arranging, songwriting and further academic study — Edinburgh positions it as a foundation for musicology, composition and performance. Limit is that it is Western-notation theory, not ear training, production or instrument technique, so it is one pillar of musicianship rather than all of it.