PhotoJoJo takes the reins!

They’ve only been going for about a month, but PhotoJoJo is definitely one of the cool kids on the block. So far, they only have just over a thousand subscribers to the newsletter, and another thousand who read the RSS feed, which is bloody ridiculous, considering the amount of very good newsletters the guys have produced so far. They should be more popular than the Pope and strawberry jam by now! 

My good friend Amit explains how it all hangs together:

If you’re like most people, you got a digital camera sometime in the last few years. And you probably went from having stacks of prints haphazardly stuffed in a few dozen 1-hour photo envelopes, to hundreds or thousands of shots on your hard drive. You’re drowning in photographs.

Photojojo finds the coolest things you can do with the photos you’ve already taken. (Fun things to print on, DIY projects, and more.) We also unearth tips and do reviews of gear that will help you get the most out of your camera.

They deserve a gold medal for the project, and I wish them the very best of luck. Check out their story archive, and when you subsequently have become suitably impressed, get yer subscription sorted!

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Take 3D photos!

Remember when you were young, wearing blue-and-red 3D glasses to make the world go all funny-coloured but vaguely 3D? As it turns out, it is actually possible to this yourself as well! All you need is a photo camera, some DIY skills, and a small stack of materials costing around £20.  

The full instructions are available on Instructables – have a go!

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Make your own Camera Straps!

When a professional pap photographer buys a new camera, the first thing they do is to replace the strap. Why? Because they carry their cameras around so much that the regular strap is a pain. More padding and wider strap means that it becomes at least a little more comfortable to lug around.

Although, of course, you don’t have to be a professional to want to replace your camera strap. In fact, it’s quite easy to make your own! 

There are no rules for what a camera strap should look like. A length of your favourite leather belt that has become too small can be recycled into a camera strap. You can use a length of rope, if you want. In fact, there’s nothing to stop you from using a bungie-cord either, apart from the fact that it wouldn’t be very useful.

So get creative, and make your camera stand out from the masses, by making your own! To attach it to the camera, get creative: Many cameras have eyelets, so a simple keyring could hold the strap on to the camera. The cameras that need actual straps attached to the camera can be conquered by using… a short length of the strap that actually came with your camera!

Whatever you decide to make, make it creative, and make it stand out. Also, if your camera is expensive, you may want to make sure that your strap is strong enough – you don’t want to break it!

If you can’t be bothered to make your own straps, luckily there are a few people out there who will do it for you. Heyday Fashion do their Snazzy Camera Strap, the Epic store sell Hippie Camera Straps, and even high street shops have an array of replacement straps available.

What are you waiting for? You can be the coolest photographer on the block!

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Keeping the kids happy

Taking pictures of kids is difficult, no doubt about it. But as the old Dutch saying goes, “A child’s hand is easily filled” – i.e children are easily pleased. So it shouldn’t take much to keep them happy when taking photos.

One chap came up with a solution that is as ingenious as it is simple: Why not mount a Pez dispenser to your camera?

A few quick mods with a Stanley knife is all that is needed – and the result is staggering. Not only do the kids love it, but the Pez dispenser remains operable, and you can treat them for their being-good efforts during the photoshoot!

Fabulous.

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Digital Camera Magazine PotY 2006

Digital Camera Magazine* is a fantastic magazine for all avid photographers, and the DCmag POTY (Photographer of the Year) competition is always a lot of fun. This year’s competition is well on its way, and it’ll be very exciting to see which of the highly talented photographers will run off with the top prize this year! 

Entry to Photographer of the Year 2006 is free, but you must be a member of the Digital Camera Magazine website before you are allowed to submit you entries. Once you have you DCMag account, you will be able to log in to the Photographer of the Year 2006 site and start uploading your entries straight away.

… So get an account, and submit a photo or two at DCmag POTY2006… it can’t harm to try, and who knows, perhaps this spurs you on to create great, new works of art!

Finally, you may have noticed that this entry is tagged “competitions”. I’m a big believer in participating in photography competitions to get good photo critique and to improve as a photographer, so expect more photo competition writeups soon!

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*) Quick disclaimer: DCmag are published by Future Publishing, and I work for another publication at the same publishing house. Jake (the web editor over at DC Mag) is a great guy, but other than that, I have no connections to the magazine at all. I am not participating in POTY this year. You should, though!

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Darkroom on a shoestring budget

Oh, the smells of fixative, how I have missed you. I went wholly digital in 2002, and have nary set foot in a darkroom since. But if it hadn’t been for dark-rooms and the manual art of processing film, I think I wouldn’t have been nearly as good a photographer today*.

Developing your own film

Did you know that you can develop your own film on a shoestring budget? You can – you need a room that’s completely dark (bathrooms are good, add a bit of black duct tape, and you have a dark room!), a developing tank, reels, and chemicals. Oh, and you need to know how long stuff needs to be processed, of course.  

You should be able to buy a dev tank for next to no money – your local photography club will probably have them on loan, or you can buy a kit (including measuring jugs, a temperature meter and chemicals) for very little money. (think £25 / €40 / US$50 or so).

If you feel brave, and are getting the knack of black and white film developing, why not take the next leap and get into the C41 process as well? Yup, it’s colour developing in all its glory. it has advantages, and isn’t that difficult, especially with the good guides that are available out there

After you have developed your film, you can either feed it through a film scanner (or make your own film scanner…), or you can start thinking about doing your own printing as well.

Printing in a darkroom

It’s the most rewarding part of darkroom work (read why in popular photography magazine), but you should also be aware that it’s extremely addictive…

As with so many other things, Photo.net has a fantastic introduction into how to set up and plan for a black and white darkroom, but photogs.com also have a thorough rundown of all the equipment you need – and it also offers tips with budgets in mind! We like these guys. Chris over at Apogee Photo also has a set of 10 tips to setting up a darkroom, again with a tight money-saving angle.

Even in the age of digital this and digital that, the classic darkroom has a place in the hearts of many an aspiring photographer. Understanding the basics of a Real Darkroom™ will help you understand how Adobe Photoshop does its magic, and will also teach you a whole new mindset as to how you can work with photographs.

And of course, there is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing your images appear, as by magic, in the developer.

*) Note that this implies that I’m a good photographer, which obviously ain’t the case

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The softer side of photography

There is a lot to be said for making stuff yourself, but what when there are things you can’t make? I’m a half-decent programmer, but couldn’t write a piece of image software if my life depended on it. Luckily, there is a lot of fantastic freeware out there. My good buddy Ed Perchick has rummaged through the darkest corners of the interweb… 

First, you need to copy the images from the memory card, to your computer.

Rename4u- when uploading images from your memory card to the computer, this free windows tool makes it easy to give sets of images better file names.

Next, if you shoot in RAW, you need to convert to JPEG / TIFF.

Raw Shooter Essentials – completely free Windows RAW converter. Has a subset of the functionality of its paid for big brother, but still fantastic quality, and output quality is as good.

Next, you will probably want to make some image corrections.

The Gimp – very powerful image editor – open source, available on all platforms, and loads of community support.

Then, you may want to apply other corrections, e.g. reduce noise, convert to black and white, or other creative treatments.

Virtual Photographer – this is a great Photoshop compatible plugin which has loads of good quality effects, e.g. Sepia, black and white grain, and is very worthwhile.

GrowCut – this is a fabulous free Windows Photoshop compatible plugin that assists making complex selections.

Noiseware Community Edition – free advanced noise reduction software – sure it doesn’t have the flexibility, or advanced features of its paid for siblings, but it still gives great results, and it’s free.

* Neat Image Demo – the demo of
Neat Image is another freeware noise reduction software with lots of features

And finally, if you’ve shot landscape shots, you may want to stitch them together.

Autostitch – – this is unbelievable, and free. It automatically stitches sets of images together into panoramas – it adjusts brightness, colour, skews, stretches, and has seamless results.

Finally Photo Freeware as its name suggests, has bags of photographic freeware to download.

article by Ed Perchick

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Make your own Lens Hood!

Lens hoods are great devices – basically, they allow you to shoot more directly into the sun (i.e at a more acute angle compared to the sunrays) without getting the dreaded solar flares.

Unfortunately, lens hoods can be silly expensive. But, as you all know when I make a statement like that, there is a cheaper way of doing things – in fact, a much cheaper way!  

Lenshoods.co.uk is the solution – the site contains PDF templates that can be printed and cut out to make lens hoods for a variety of 35mm and digital SLR camera lenses, with a large series of templates available for all the major camera manufacturers and lenses.

If you print them out on thick black paper, and cut them out carefully, the lens hoods work as well as the official ones – at next to no cost! Fantastic.

Why bother? Well… The site explains it best itself:

Even modest lens hoods are pretty expensive. For example, a replacement lens hood for the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L will set you back £45.99. Even the most basic lens such as the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II will cost you £17.99 if you want to add a lens hood.

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Rescuing data from defective flash cards

If you’ve ever lost all your images of a memory card, due to failure, or by accidentally formatting it, you know how horrible it is. Back in the day, when you lose a roll of film to an accident, at least you can console yourself that you only lost up to 36 photos. Now, if you lose a large memorycard, you can lose hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos. Not very nice.

Luckily, your memory card is likely to not lose all of the images, even if some were to become erased or corrupted… 

If you have an accident where you believe you may have lost some images, do the following:

1. Don’t use the memory card any more. Don’t take any photos. Don’t try to format it. Don’t do anything that might write to the card.
2. Take it out of the camera.
3. Insert your memory card into a card reader
4. Rescue your images!

Of course, the rescuing bit is the most tricky. Luckily, there are lots of services and software out there that can help.

If you use Linux, you could go the hardcore, manual way of recovering your photos, using Sleuthkit. If you don’t feel that confident or hardcore, Lexar bundles an application with its memory cards called ImageRescue. If you don’t have this piece of software (it’s for both Windows and OS X), it’s worth buying a Lexar memory card just for the software. Alternatively, you could buy it online for $30. A cheap price to pay, if you ask me, for a piece of software that could save your irreplacable photos.

Of course, there are loads of other software out there. I haven’t tried anything but Lexar’s software (why would I? It works :), but I’ve heard good things about CardRecovery ( (£22.80, US$39.95), Media Recover (US$30), and Photos Recover (US$30) PhotoOne Recover ($25) as well.

When you have recovered your photos, I would suggest testing the memory card thoroughly. If it never fails again, it may have been a freak one-off accident. If it ever does it again, take it back to the store you purchased it, and demand a replacement. Don’t jeopardise your cherished memories.

If your pictures are a matter of life and death

If your photos are so important to you that they cannot possibly be replaced, it may be worth getting professionals involved. Professional data recovery services cost an arm and both legs, but these guys really know what they are doing – using clean-rooms, and disassembling the memory card for you, if necessary, to ensure they can recover as much of the data as possible. There is a lot of variation between the success rates of professional services, so ring around and don’t commit until you are sure you have a service you trust. There are dozens of big data recovery firms around, and I’ve never used any, so I’d be hesitant to recommend anybody, but a quick search for Data Recovery in Google should bring up the companies relevant to your area.

Good luck!

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Print images on green leaves!

Completely out of left field, this story, but it turns out that you can use leaves as photographic paper, by using light and iodine to dye the starch in leaves dark.

Random? Well, yes, but it is a fun project, and the results are nothing short of stunning. How does it work?

The chlorophyll in healthy green leaves captures light and uses its energy to join together carbon dioxide and water. The result is the organic compound we call starch. It is the basis of much of the food we eat. Starch is white, but if you drop a small amount of a solution of iodine on it, the starch turns black. So that’s it really.

Why didn’t I think of that? Err, never mind. Go read the article and prepare to be amazed!

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Is Your Darkroom Safe?

I stumbled across an article by Michael Fulks, which serves as a reminder that photography can be dangerous:  

The realization that I was slowly being poisoned finally came to me after I set up a darkroom in the laundry room of my house. While it was much larger than the closets and bathrooms I had used before this time, I noticed that I was only able to work for about 15 minutes at a time and then I would always begin to feel anxious and have trouble concentrating.

It was only after I had an assistant helping me that I fully realized the severity of the situation. After about 10 minutes working over the sink she complained of trouble breathing. After about 15 minutes she said, “We’ve got to get out of here. We’re being poisoned!”

It turns out that they were being poisoned by gases caused by a chemical reaction of the copper in the work surfaces and the chemicals used for film developing. It’s a good little story, and a decent heads-up, too!

Oh, and also, if you do your own film developing, have you seen our film developing database??

Keep your compact zoomed out!

Daniel posted a blog entry with a lot of valuable tips about shooting with the limitations of using a digital compact camera – most of it is common sense, but if you’ve never thought about any of it, it’s definitely worth a quick read. Some of the points he brings up is using a low ISO to reduce noise, using custom white balance, using program mode, getting in close, and take a lot of pictures, to increase the chances of getting the shot.  

The man’s got a lot of great points, although for one of them, I don’t quite agree:

When your camera is fully zoomed out, it is at wide angle and will cause some distortion in your subject. If you are taking portraits, you definitely will want to step back and zoom in so that your kid, or spouse, does not look like a chipmunk.

While I am happy to admit that most compacts aren’t great for barrel and pincushion distortion, it’s a minor problem, compared to light loss. Cheap lenses, and especially those in digital compacts, lose an incredible amount of light once you start zooming in.

In fact, my Canon Digital Ixus S500 (also known as the Digital Elph in the US) has a f/2.8-4.9 lens over a 3x zoom. That means that while you get f/2.8 at full wide-angle, you lose nearly two stops of light just by zooming in. Most of the time, it ain’t worth it – leave your camera fully zoomed out, and rather crop the image to size!

Compact camera flash deflector

It’s an old trick, but it’s a goodie: If you find yourself in a pinch and need to bounce the flash off a compact camera, grab a piece of white card (my credit card has come in more times than I care to admit – good job they wouldn’t give me a Mastercard Gold, because that would have eskewed the white balance :), and hold it at a 45° angle in front of the flash. That way, the flash will bounce via the ceiling, and you get far softer lighting than with a direct flash.   It is a bit hit-and-miss, and it means that the light sensor on your compact camera has to determine that the flash has to fire with higher intensity, but it’s better than nothing.

A better solution would be to build a flash-bouncer yourself…

Which is where Reflectors & Shades comes in handy. It shows a way you can build a flash bouncer out of aluminium. The instructions apply for a Nikon 990, but the general idea is the same for all cameras.

It costs next to nothing, and the results can be significant. Bonus!

Umbrella helmet lighting

People get extremely creative when it gets to getting the lighting right. My old mate Ed just tipped me off about one which is particularly weird. But as far as making people laugh, it works. The bonus? it means you can get some excellent lighting for impromptu portrait photography! Basically, you take a helmet, you mount a flashgun on top, and you add a reflective brolly. It’s laughably simple, but it may just work… if you can live with the shame, that is :)

Check out the page by Juergen Specht which also shows pictures taken with the rig, and further explanations, if you should wish to build one for yourself.

(Cheers, Ed!)

GPS-tagging your photos with EXIF

You know how your JPEG files have information stored about shutter times, focal lengths, your camera etc? Well, all of that info is stored in something called Exif tags (Exchangeable image file format). If you are geeky enough to ever have looked at the EXIF data specifications (more easily digestible on Wikipedia), you will have noticed that there are fields for co-ordinates inside the JPG file, much like GPS systems store world-positioning details.  

The fact that you can store EXIF data in JPEGs means that your photos can be tagged with very precise geo-positioning information. The first time I came across this commercially was Navman, with their NavPix system, allowing you to take a photo of your destination, and then navigate there (if it’s useful or not is a different question, but some publications have thought of some interesting uses for it…). Of course, in Japan, it has been possible to link JPG with GPS data for ages.

Either way, there are ways to make this whole setup more photo- and less navigation-specific. Tim, for example, has created a system which links his Nikon D200 directly to a G0PS system, tagging the photos as you take them, and then create a visual gallery through the power of Google Maps! Nifty.

Other tools:

RoboPhoto allows you to link photos to maps Kenneth Hunt has a good roundup on GPS Exif and implemetations.

Make Your Own Camera Remote Control

So, you are into your long exposure photography, such as night-time or macro photography? To get top quality photos, you’re going to need a remote control. And most of the time, this is going to set you back quite a lot of money, especially as the cheap as chips screw in type cable releases don’t work on new cameras anymore.

Not all is lost, though, if you don’t feel like forking out too much, you can make your own jack-type remote control for Remote control For Canon cameras.

If your camera uses the newer, N3-type remote control ports (that’s the round plug with three prongs), things become a little more tricky, as the actual connector is difficult to get by. However, if you do find one, this is how to wire it.

Nikon users also have a wealth of information available to them, if you for example run a F100 camera. Or you could build a more advanced, Infrared version, as seen for the D70.

In fact, there are probably schematics or technical drawings available for most remote controls – try a google search for your camera brand along with “remote” and either “schematic” or “build”.

Good luck!

Lomo photography

A Lomo camera is essentially a really, really low quality camera built in Russia. That doesn’t stop it from having a nearly religious following, however, and with the right attitude when wielding one of these cameras, it can be a very liberating photography experience.

Fuelled more by the fantastic PR campaign than by the quality of the actual cameras, the Lomo cameras do something really clever: They trade on their weaknesses. Light leaks? It’s a feature! Bad vignetting on the lens? It adds to the charm!. Impossible to get a correct exposure? It opens up for creativity.

Call us crazy, but it’s actually pretty damn cool.

I used to own a Lomo a while ago, and you can, indeed, get some pretty cool-looking photos with them. Now that low-fi is in, and retro is the way forward, Lomography may be your cheap ticket into photography cool.

The rest of the world is also cottoning on. BBC four, for example, shares this:

In 1991 a group of Viennese students discovered the Lomo Kompakt Automat when on holiday in Prague. This mass-produced Soviet camera was so cheap and easy to use that they shot rolls of film, ignoring the established rules of “good” photography. The resulting snaps were often odd to look at, out of focus and, due to the character of the Lomo lens, garishly coloured. But they were wonderfully fresh. The craze for Lomo spread so fast that when, in 1996, the St Petersburg manufacturers threatened to stop making the camera, Lomographers stepped in to guarantee all future sales.

Some examples

I won’t be pimping my own Lomo photos – they were good, but I didn’t quite like the unpredictability of the Lomo cameras myself, so I sold my camera again. For the examples, why not check out the photos on Flickr tagged with Lomo, or try the rampant fan-base over at the Flickr Lomo Group. There are also dozens of local groups worth checking out.

Enjoy!