1. Benefits: These are specific and personal to the client and represent something they are seeking to either improve their performance or remove a constraint to what they are trying to achieve. Such benefits are not usually expressed in purely technical terms.
2. Features: are characteristics that are built into a product or service and offered by a vendor to a market space - as such they cover a wide gamut of possibilities, some of which may, or may not, be applicable to the consumer.
3. Value: only exists when one can map a set of required benefits to a set of features without missing critical ones and without investing in a lot of features that are not required.
Those are all good points however over the years I have discovered a lot of people first getting into photography really don't know what they want to do, all too often and many times repeated in photo forums is, I want to do wildlife photography or street scenes or etc, etc, etc, but when it comes down to actually doing something they hit a dead end that too often seems to lead back into buying more gear.
My philosophy is and has always been carry a basic, might I say used camera with a simple fixed auto focus lens and shoot anything that interests one, don't make it a task, just do it for the fun of it and when one gets really good at doing that maybe consider another body and variable length lens.
Keep it simple learn how to walk before trying to run, it prevents discouragement and burning holes in ones wallet.
I fell into photography quite by accident, a relative who literally had cabinets filled with cameras noticed I paid a lot of attention to a TLR in one of the cabinets and would let me play with it, taking pictures kept me busy all day long, now that was imaginary as it didn't have any film in it but I was actually, without realizing, learning how to use that camera.
Then one day he handed me a nicer camera, it had a crank on the side and more things to learn about, he loaded it with a roll of 120, I was giving some basic advice on f-stops and was told to be careful as I only had 12 shots, the following week I was shown how to develop and contact print my roll of B&W photos and that was it I was hooked for life.
It wasn't until many years later I took a photography class and it was a mess, the class was more of a gear head event with many so called students carrying bags filled with lens's and a body or three, while a few of us only had a camera and a lens, mine was a T-50 with a 50mm lens shooting Tri-X, as I could develop and print that myself.
As such your advice of taking a on-line class is a much better choice, less gear head interruptions and distractions, one can go at their own pace, some of us learn quickly others not so much and then there are folks like myself who often misunderstand something and being able to go back and re-review something is a very important feature.
None the less it was at that class I discovered there are two types of photographers, those who spend all day flipping through catalogs and spending every dime they can muster up on gear and those who go out and capture excellent winning shots.
I am so glad I never got into the gear head thing, for the most part they spend a lot, produce little and have very little fun in the process.
By keeping it basic and as inexpensive as possible sooner or later it will be discovered what one has interests in photographing forming a solid baseline to properly make more expensive decisions.
