Skip: I read your post twice but am still unclear what you are trying to do as a photographer and what you still need to learn. Do you feel you still don't fully understand some of the technical issues of photography like DOF? Or how to operate your camera? Are you steering toward art photography, including landscape, or non-art (documentary?) photography? If so are you looking for help with composition, etc., on the art side?
On-line courses on technical aspects of photography and camera operation may be competent, but I'm having a hard time seeing how a pre-packaged course would be materially different from just reading a book. (Perhaps some of the courses have exercises at the end of each lesson that are graded by the teacher?) This free and extensive
tutorial is certainly dated, extremely thorough ... and occasionally opaquely written. But optics are optics, and learning about film photography remains very good background for a digital photographer, since you'll find endless references to things like density curves and the relative latitude of slide vs neg film vs. digital in any discussion of digital photography. Similarly, the two books
The Camera and
The Negative by Ansel Adams (2nd edition) remain definitive and excellently written instruction material for beginners. In both cases just skim the material that only relates to film while mastering the material on optics, exposure metering, etc. that apply equally to both.
Once you get past the technical basics, it's more a matter of needing answers to specific questions/problems, which is something that can be done on-line.
If you are doing art photography and feel stonewalled about your development in that area, I'd say photosig.com is as good a place as any to get feedback. Someone here astutely commented that sites like this serve to turn all participants into carbon copies of some middle-of-the-road standard. But that's not necessarily a bad thing for a beginner, since that standard is at least a competent one - IOW, a reasonable starting point.
And short of posting every photo I take and pestering all of you till you ignore me
What you have here is a clutch of strongly opinionated photographers who are at the least very competent in technical matters. IOW: the signal-to-noise ratio is unusually high on this forum. It probably wouldn't cause you too much permanent damage to post one picture per week for critique. I suspect you'll find that the compositional comments you get will effectively cancel each other out, but people here can certainly point out technical issues, such as over-exposure or a sub-optimal point of focus.
Above all, persist. Don't let misunderstandings or differences of opinion get to you and don't hesitate to ask any number of what you may suspect are beginner's questions. For example, if you try to work your way through the Navy photography course I linked to above and hit one of those opaque spots, just quote the passage with a link to the page and ask for clarification.
