Photocritic photography blog

The ambrotype process is a photographic process that creates a positive photographic image on a sheet of glass using the wet plate collodion process. It was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in the early 1850s, then patented in 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting of Boston, in the United States.

This time, it’s your turn…

My good Katie Cooke (who I’ve featured on Photocritic before, and who might be familiar to you as the author of Slowlight - a fantastic resource on pinhole photography) wrote up a 20-step guide on the mysterious world of ambrotype photography.

Arguably, it’s not a very useful skill to learn (as opposed to, say, learning black and white, and subsequently colour developing in a darkroom), but we’re all photography geeks for a reason, dammit, so let’s start the new year by geeking out like it’s 1859!

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Well, I’ll be damned…

I just received an e-mail from the editor over at JPG magazine, bearing a rather quite sad message: They’re shutting the doors for good. I was a subscriber (and hell, when I was working in publishing I tried to talk the publishing firm I was working for into buying the magazine, but nothing ever came of it). I’m not even bothered about whether or not I lose money as a result - the amazingly original concept of JPG was a breath of fresh air, and a lot of my friends got their first (and - for some - only) images in print on the venerable pages of JPG.

JPG - you’ll be missed. I hope that the economic tides will turn so it turns out not to be the final nail in the coffin for one of the most inspirational and creative magazines out there! Read the rest of the article »

Oh my, it’s nearly That Time Of Year again, so perhaps it’s a good idea to brush up on the ‘ole fireworks skills, yes? Indeed…

So have a lovely celebration folks, if you’re of the drinking kind, then try to stay vaguely upright until midnight, at least, and give 2009 a becoming welcome!

Rock on… Read the rest of the article »

As all photographers know, travel photography can be about more than safeguarding memories. Holidays are the perfect time to discover new cultures and customs, be outside of one’s comfort zone, eat new food, and, of course, really get stuck into the different lenses and ISO numbers. Coming home with that perfect picture of something or someone that fascinated you makes the enjoyment of the getaway last that much longer.

The way the local population expects you as a photographer to behave with your camera may be very different in countries other than your own. This Photo Etiquette may, however, not be easy to understand or adhere to, especially when it comes to photographing people as a subject, so we decided to have a closer look at what you might encounter… Read the rest of the article »

Right, this is mostly a service announcement, so if you don’t use RSS or Twitter, feel free to ignore this post. Or you could, y’know, start using RSS and Twitter (Check out ‘RSS in Plain English and How to use Twitter on VJ).

SO… 2 things:

Twitter - Photocritic now has a Twitter account; you can see the updates in the side-bar (look for the Twitter-coloured box, you can’t miss it really) or follow me @photocritic. Go on, you know it makes sense. If you’re really curious, I’ve got a personal Twitter account too…

RSS / Syndication feeds - Turns out that the 30,000-odd RSS subscribers (Yes, really! Amazing stuff - thank you everybody!) are taking their toll on the server, so I’ve moved the RSS feeds across to Feedburner. I’ve done some clever redirection malarkey, so if you were already subscribing, you should just simply be redirected to the new feed, and you don’t have to do anything. If you’d rather get the feed from feedburner directly, check out feeds.feedburner.com/photocritic

Are you looking for the perfect Christmas gift for that special photographer in your life? If so, you’ve come to the right place. I know from personal experience that present shopping for photography-obsessed people can be tough.

The world of photography turns quickly, so it can be a challenge for many of us to keep up. That’s why I thought I’d bring out this handy Christmas gift guide just in time for the holidays. (Well, that, and last year’s guide was one of my better visited pages, so I figured it’d be rude to not do a re-run with a bit of an update, too)

No matter what your budget, you should find something on this list that will bring a picture perfect smile to your photo-junky friend’s face.

Behold… Photocritic’s From sub-$40 to credit crisis-incurring gift guide (of DOOM)
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I had an e-mail from a gentleman called Danny the other day, who was wondering where my film development database had gone - and to be honest, I was sort of wondering it that myself.

My black and white film development database is designed to look up times for combinations of black-and-white film and a specific developer. If it can’t find it, it does it best to calculate a likely development time for any given combination of film of developer. Read the rest of the article »

There are tons of reasons for using RAW instead of JPG when you’re taking photographs. Your photos will be sharper, you will be able to unlock your camera’s full dynamic range, and you have a better flexibility over things like white balance.

It seems as if people are cottoning on in a big way, too - I ran a poll about 2 years ago about whether people were shooting in JPEG or RAW… And I re-ran the same poll earlier this month.

The changes are staggering… Read the rest of the article »

Following from my post about dynamic range in cameras a few days ago, I did some further research… I give you: The 25 cameras with the best dynamic range!

Interestingly, it seems as if Nikon is generally doing quite a bit better than Canon, and that a camera launched almost 5 years ago is actually one of the ones with the very best dynamic ranges out there - And it’s not the brand you’d think, either!

Oh, and interestingly, there’s been a serious shift in the number of photographers shooting in raw - more about that in the end of this article.
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So far, we’ve covered the pre-film and the film era, so no prizes for guessing what today’s history lesson is going to be about - yup, that’s right, the digital era is upon us, and we’re taking a look at history as it’s happening all around us…

Let’s launch into the third and final installment in our 3-part series: The history of photography: The Era of Digital. Read the rest of the article »