Archive for January, 2007

Competitions on Photocritic

The hawk-eyed among you will have noticed that we've got a couple of new features here on Photocritic. The most noticeable is a competitions calendar in the sidebar on the Photocritic home page. You might have spotted that I've every now and again included some competitions into the site. This is because I love the idea of using competitions to turn you into a better photographer. Sadly, keeping a complete list of photography competitions up to date is damn near impossible, especially because that would detract from some of the other things I would like to talk about here on Photocritic. Instead, I've teamed up with the gang over at Photo Competitions. You should probably subscribe to their news feed anyway, but just in case you forget about entering a competition, you will have a reminder in the sidebar! The other news item is that I've started promoting Earth Shots a bit more, by including their 'photo of the day' in the sidebar of the article pages. I really enjoy their photos, and quite frequently they serve as a reminder of why I became a photographer in the first place -- to capture some of the beauty we surround us with. Photo Competitions and Earth Shots -- Welcome to Photocritic!

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More on red eyes

I frequently get e-mails about people who don't quite grasp the concept of red eye -- why it happens, and what you can do about it. I had to explain it to a friend in the pub last week, and drew a little diagram that made them go 'ahaaa! I finally get it' (yeah, i've got some really dim friends. Sorry about that.) Anyway, I decided to implement the drawings into my existing red-eye article with the imaginative title "Red eyes and how to avoid them", so if you feel like you could do with a bit of a brush-up on that aspect of photography, go re-read that article!

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Your pet peeves…

I spend a lot of time looking at people's photos, both for work, and for this website. It helps me identify where I go wrong myself. I've grown to realise that my biggest downfall is that I tend to use odd crops on photos, and I'm obsessive about certain aspects about my photography. I'm curious though... Are my hang-ups and failures the same as other photographers'?

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Turn your camera upside down

Have you ever thought about why digital compacts with built-in flashes have such an obvious shadow on them? Well, obviously it's because the camera is too damn small to get some distance between the lens and the flash. Quite apart from the problem with red eyes (which, luckily, is easy to avoid), it means that the shadow thrown on your subjects is annoying.

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Time lapse photography

There's a lot to be said for the persistency of time lapse photography - it makes life rather interesting. Reducing a period of a few hours (like a flower opening to the sun), a few months (like a flower growing or a baby growing inside a mother's belly) or a year (seasonal timelapses, construction work) is amazing stuff.

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Who uses macro photography?

As some of you know, I'm currently writing a book about macro photography. As part of this, I'm writing an appendix on the commercial uses of macro, only to realise that I don't know that many professions that use macro- and micro photography as part of their everyday life. So... I'm turning to you, my faithful and lovely readers, to appeal to your wisdom. Can you think of any fields where macro photography is used regularly? I've come up with the following: Forensics Research science Food photography Jewelry catalogues ... What else can you think of? Pretty please leave a comment -- you can be anonymous if you want to!

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Portraiture: Loosen up!

I've spent a lot of time looking at portraits over the last couple of days for various reasons I shan't get into in details, but there's one pet peeve I'm afraid I'm going to have to share with you... Why are people always so damn serious when they are being taken photos of? Does nobody understand the art of portraiture anymore?

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Quick Poll: Your favourite subject?

Sweet and simple: What's your favourite thing to take photos of? (If you want to add something that isn't on the list, just click 'add', and you can type in your own {democracy:23} (also remember that you can look at -- and vote on -- our past polls!

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Wanna write for us?

If you've been following Photocritic for a while, you can't have missed the fact that we've had some world-class Guest writers involved recently. RJ Davis' article on paper negatives was very well read indeed, Anna's introduction to portraiture went down a storm, and Alecu's rally racing photography article was rather well received, too.

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Cross polarization

Geekery and science meets photography: Cross-polarization is a fantastic little technique that exploits a quirk in the way polarizers work. Think of light as wooden ice-cream sticks that are flying towards a set of bars. The bars will only let the sticks that happen to be aligned with the bars through, and absorbs all the other sticks. Before the filter, the light is moving in lots of different polarizations. After it has passed through the filter, all the light is moving in the same linear polarization.

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