My name is Curtis and Learn Light and & Sound is a fancy name for my little side-hustle business where I make free videos on my YouTube channel and premium online courses.
I started with a passion for still photography back in the late 1980s when at University. I spent a lot of time at the main library, with good intentions of studying for classes. But I often found myself sitting in the photography section of the library, poring over all the books available on the topic. Remember, this was pre-internet and pre-digital photography.
My first semester, I also took the introductory Film Studies 117 class to fill one of my general ed requirements. But somehow, I didn't occur to me that I could actually make a career of film production. I can't explain why that never occurred to me. Could be that I grew up in a wonderful family of professional accountants (My father was a controller, my Grandfather a CPA, one of my aunts and one of my uncles were also CPAs).
So in my freshman year at university, I bought enough ramen noodles to survive for a month after I blew all the rest of my money on a 35mm film SLR camera. No regrets, though I intend to never eat cheap ramen in those quantities again.
My first interest was landscape photography. And that summer, after I returned home, I signed up for a photography class at the local community college where we shot 400 ISO black and white film and developed and printed it in the college's dark room. Amazing experience, not only from a technical perspective, but the instructor was also a great mentor from a creative and artistic standpoint.
Fast forward to the early 2000s. My brother is a musician and after he started his music career, built up enough of a fan base and enough income to buy a rig to start recording at home. Mind you, this was a much more expensive proposition then versus now. He showed up at my house after traveling down to Salt Lake to pick up his new kit: A Neumann TLM103 microphone, a Universal Audio 6176 channel strip, and a Digi 003 firewire audio interface with a Pro Tools license. I also served as his roadie on a few legs of his concert tours. He was really generous and trusting to let me help him out and play with his kit.
And then when DSLRs introduced video recording capabilities, I learned everything I could during the evenings and weekends, to make quality video.
Back then, I worked professionally as a product manager at a software company. Fast forward to now, I work as a director of education video for Webflow, a tech company in San Francisco.
And between then and now, I've learned quite a bit from experience and a number of mentors.
I hope you find some of my videos and courses helpful.
