Archive for December, 2006

Becoming a photographer

The other day, I got an email - somewhat out of the blue from Miranda, who wanted to interview me for her High School paper on careers. She chose 'photographers', and found me somehow - presumably via this web-site. Anyway, she sent over a list of quite interesting interview questions, and as I'm a right rambling mofo, I went on and on and ... etc. But anyway: I figured that there might be quite a few other people out there who are young, aspiring to be photographers, and have questions about how to go about it, so I decided to just publish my answers.

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Expose for the highlights…

Today's topic came about after I was sent some fabulous images from Ben Darfler, as part of our photo critique series. He sent me four excellent photos, and I picked two that illustrate a common theme: How to expose a photo correctly. You would think that exposing a photograph correctly would be easy - you just point the camera at what you want to take a picture of, and let the machinery take over from there, right? Well, most of the time, that will give pretty good results, but if you have ambitions of developing as a photographer, manual exposure is where it's at. The way you choose your exposure is one of the biggest differences between film and digital photography. When photographing with film, you want your shadows to be drawn as well as possible; because of this, my high-school photography teacher would drone on about "Expose for the shadows; develop for the highlights." Well, digital changed all that...

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Adobe to hand out Photoshop CS3 Beta?

According to a press release on the Adobe site, the company is about to release a Beta of Adobe Photoshop CS3...

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Olan Mills goes bankrupt

Just heard a disturbing piece of news, which was confirmed by the Olan Mills website yesterday: Olan Mills has gone into administration, effective immediately. According to my source, the UK chain has tried to sell its business for a while, unsuccessfully. The staff have been told they will not be paid for this month, and the area managers have been told to lock up the stores and go home. There have been reports of some store employees taking equipment home (cameras, computers, studio lights, etc), holding it as 'hostage' against unpaid wages. Can anyone shed any light on if this affects the US company as well? It'd be rather surprising to see one of the most famous portrait studio chains go tits-up... {democracy:17}

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Replacing a removed IR filter

A couple of months ago, we did a feature on how you can remove the IR filter from a digital SLR, to enable it for Infra Red photography. All good and well, but surely, that filter was there for a reason? One of our readers was wondering about just this, and sent me a question: "I was wondering If it was possible to have a external IR filter that threads onto my lenses that will block the IR light to the sensor but still transmit all visible light through it, mimicking the original internal IR filter that was previously attached to the cameras image sensor?"

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Photo Critique - Mike Fuhl

Right, I figured that the best way to illustrate the proposed new feature on Photocritic - proper photo critiques - would be to show off what I was planning to do with the feature. First up is a long-term reader of Photocritic, who submitted two photos.

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Professional critique of photos

I got a suggestion through from my dear friend Hilary, who suggested that I start doing photography critiques on a serious level. I.e, people submit a few photos to us, and we go through them with a fine-tooth comb, making suggestions for improvement: explaining which bits of the photos are good and why, and how they could be improved. I don't think it's such a bad idea, actually. It'll be quite a lot of work on my part, but I could get other photographers involved. What do you reckon? Vote below, and add a comment if you have more to say. n{democracy:15} Also, if you're interested in getting some photos critiqued, why not consider sending me 3-4 of your photos, and I'll pilot it with a few critiques, so people can find out what they can expect, and how well this works. Please only send RGB JPEG files (any resolution is OK), and only use the hajejan+critique@gmail.com e-mail address, so I can keep it all in one place. I'm unlikely to ridicule anyone submitting photos, but can't guarantee it :) Feedback? Tell me about it!

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Fire writing

It's so simple, yet so effective - grab a burning torch, use a tripod, set to a long shutter time, and write in the air. What more could you possibly want? It's FIRE! Now go outside and play!

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Respectless photographers?

I seem to be months behind on this item of "news". I actually spotted it a couple of weeks ago, but didn't think it was that interesting. It seems as if people didn't agree, as the topic is getting some serious discussion. Basically - a picture of a photographer in the middle of a marathon race is pissing off a lot of people. On one hand, I can kind of see what is going on here. As Robert Capa said: "If the picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough", and getting in the middle of a race is one way to get closer, I suppose...

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Pet photography

People really do come up with the oddest things, but it actually makes a lot of sense: People love their kids, and are willing to pay insane amounts of money for formulaic photographs taken by a photographer that really couldn't care less. I'm not mentioning any names, of course, but I'm sure you can think of photography businesses who operate like that in your area... So why not the same for pets? On my journeys around the Internet, I came across one person who claims he is making 500 US dollars a day taking pictures of people and their pets.

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