Comparing comparison websites

If you have been taking pictures for a long time, you’re probably fairly set in your camera-buying ways. You probably have brands you prefer over others; you know what you want out of your equipment, and you have an idea of the latest developments in camera technology.

When you need to buy a new camera, you’re normally most of the way there before you have even set foot in a shop or headed to your favourite camera-purchasing website. However, it is all a bit different if you are a first-time camera buyer, an occasional picture-taker, or buying a camera as a gift. The market is extensive, and a fairly daunting place. What to do?

There are quite a few camera comparison websites out there so I thought that I’d take a poke around and see which offered the best — or at least most useful — guidance. Seeing as I am a dyed-in-the-wool Canon user, I also employed the assistance of some slightly less camera- (and to be honest, web-) savvy potential consumers: my parents.

The mission: I told my father that I’d dropped his beloved Canon Ixus in the sea and had £150 to replace it, whilst my mother was entrusted with the task of finding an entry-level dSLR for my brother. So what did we discover?

Cameras.co.uk

Reviews, direct comparisons, and selection according to criteria are set out clearly, but the site is heavily focused on compact cameras. The reviews are arranged by camera type, for example ‘simple and easy’ or ‘pocket-sized’, and offers a numeric comparison across that group before you click through to a detailed review of a specific camera.

There is a range of pre-selected head-to-head camera comparisons, but they are pre-selected so you might feel a little limited there, and none of them looks at dSLRs, so it wasn’t very helpful for my mother. When it comes to the camera selection tool, it includes a price criterion and to my father’s relief, there was a link explaining the different terms.

Verdict of cameras.co.uk: good start for compact cameras, but not so useful for dSLR shopping.

DPReview

This site met exactly the same response from both Ma and Pa: ‘It doesn’t have a price comparison feature!’ That is a fairly significant defect, especially for my father, who was working on a strict budget. He was also quite intimidated by the other comparison criteria. It was all too technical for a some-time picture-taker.

Verdict of dpreview.com: good if you already know about cameras (and if money is no object), but not for a novice.

Digital Camera Reviews

This was the least helpful site we visited. There wasn’t any mechanism to select criteria for your camera, which meant that you had to sift through 601 different entries, covering everything from camera cases to memory cards before finding actual cameras.

Both my parents gave up and didn’t even make it as far as reviews. I took a look and was rather unimpressed: three lines doesn’t tell me what I need to know.

Verdict of digitalcamerareviews.org.uk: don’t bother.

Let’s Go Digital

This site hit an instant snag with my parents: there was no select by price function. When prices were mentioned, they were in US$, which is great for all you American readers, but not for my parents. However, I did like the reviews ascribed to individual cameras.

Verdict of letsgodigital.org: a good site to hit after you’ve done some initial research to establish what you’re looking for in a camera and have a few potential contenders.

Snapsort

Snapsort was my Dad’s favourite. Using its ‘Just tell me!’ function, he was able to tell it how much he had to spend on what sort of camera, and it made a series of recommendations for him. My mother was impressed by the colour-coding on the ratings and that it offered clear explanations of different camera terms and features.

I like that it offers head-to-head comparisons between any cameras of your choosing across two different interfaces, but also features its most popular comparisons. I wasn’t quite so impressed by the usability of the selection criteria interface, it was just a bit on the clunky side for me, and that it only offered statistical evaluations didn’t satisfy my ‘I need an opinion!’ craving. However, the killer feature of this site is that it shows prices in seven different currencies.

Verdict of snapsort.com: a clean design for what is probably the most comprehensive site out there.

What Digital Camera

Immediately this site won points with my mother because she was able to select ‘dSLR’ from a drop-down list and could sort the reviews according to price or ranking, and then make direct comparisons between cameras.

Each camera has an extensive review that gives marks out of 20 for design, image quality, performance, value, and features, states it pros and cons, and tells you what the reviewer thought of it. My dad loved that there was clear advice that set out what to look for when purchasing a camera.

Verdict of whatdigitalcamera.com: ugly site design (but hey, I love Small Aperture’s look and there are probably people who don’t) but it helped my parents to make a stress-free and informed selection.

The overall verdict?

There isn't a one-size-fits-all camera comparison site out there, but by combining several of them, you can reduce your research time, at least!

Relying on one site probably won’t give you sufficient breadth of information to make a decision, but by combining their strengths — for example Snapsort’s high-level overview and head-to-head comparisons with What Digital Camera?’s more detailed reviews — you will have a good idea of what is available on the market and can draw up a shortlist of contenders.

Once you’re armed with an overview, you can walk into a shop without feeling quite so overwhelmed and make a selection: After all, there’s nothing quite like holding a camera in your hands to help you come to the right decision!

10 inspiring pinhole photos

The fact that a friend of mine is doing a pinholes photography exhibition inspired me to start looking for some more fantastic examples of pinhole photography in the deepest depths of the FlickrWebs.

I discovered two things: I need to get back to low-fi photography, and there’s a lot of talented people out there.

But what am I doing waffling – I’m sure you just want to look at photos, don’t you? Can’t blame ya. Here you go!

1 – Pont d’Aquitaine

Pont d'Aquitaine by Steven Monteau

2 – Peter Iredale

Peter Iredale by Zeb Andrews

3 – Virginia Park

Virginia Park by Matt Callow

4 – The ghosts in my grandmother’s house

The ghosts in my grandmother's house by Donovan Rees

5 – Dream Colors

Dream Colors by Noriko Ohba

6 – Foot Fetish on Neptune

Foot Fetish on Neptune by Refractionless

7 – Je est un autre

Je est un autre by Nhung Dang

8 – River Typewriter

River Typewriter by Sean Duggan

9 – The First Man to Witness the Beginning of the End of the World

The First Man to Witness the Beginning of the End of the World by Scott Speck

10 – Self portrait with Big Damn Atlas

Self Portrait with Big Damn Atlas by Katie Cooke

Wanna have a go yourself?

If you want to try a spot of pinhole photography yourself, you could do a lot worse than reading Katie’s Teaching a Cardboard Box to be a Camera; it’s a great little introduction to creating your own pinholes.

Of course, you can also skip the film phase altogether and create a pinhole lens-cap for your dSLR camera!

All photos used in this article are used as ‘fair dealing‘. If you have strong reservations against your photos appearing on Small Aperture, please contact us, and we’ll get them taken down. Please support the artists creating these photos by clicking on the photos to take a closer look at their work!

Lens Cloth of Rights

One day, the British police might get the hang of what it is that photographers can and cannot do in public places, and stop telling us that we can’t take pictures because it contravenes the Terrorism Act 2000. Until then, how about a handy-dandy lens cloth which sets out your rights as a photographer on it?

If you pick up a copy of Amateur Photographer on Tuesday 6 July, you’ll also get a free lens cloth that states, very clearly, what you are allowed to do — or even what the police aren’t allowed to do — if you are taking pictures when out and about. There are five points, and they were issued by no less than the Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations at the Metropolitan Police Service as the guidance for dealing with professional and amateur photographers in public places. Doesn’t get clearer than that, really, does it?

And just for completeness, or if you’d like to print off the guidance, laminate it, and keep it with your camera, here’s a recap of what it says:

• there is no restriction on people taking photographs in public places or of any building other than in very exceptional circumstances
• there is no prohibition on photographing front-line uniform staff
• the act of taking a photograph in itself is not usually sufficient to carry out a stop
• unless there is a very good reason, people taking photographs should not be stopped
• officers do not have the power to delete digital images, destroy film or to prevent photography in a public place under either power (Sections 43 and 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000).

Of course, this doesn’t apply if you’re outside Britain, but these links might be useful if you’re in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States.

Happy snapping!

Katie Cooke: Balancing Act

For those of you who are fans of Katie Cooke‘s pinhole photography you’ll be pleased to know that she has a new exhibition opening in Edinburgh on 3 July 2010. If you’re not familiar with Katie’s work, you should probably check her out.

Balancing Act is a series of seventeen silver prints of long exposure pinhole self portraits. Taken in 2006 and 2007, the pictures document Katie’s gain, loss, and regain of her ability to stand in between two major surgical procedures.

The exhibition runs from 3 to 31 July at the Axolotl Gallery, 35 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6QQ.

Saving money on your photography

Photography is not a cheap hobby. It probably starts out as an inexpensive past-time for most of us, maybe with a low-end compact camera or using Dad’s SLR and a couple of prints here and there – I know it did for me – but as our experience and our enthusiasm grows, so do our kit bags.

Add together the cost of an entry-level dSLR, a couple of lenses, a tripod, and a few other bits and pieces to make your life more interesting and you’ve already spent the best part of £1,000. Before long we realise that we’re having to take out insurance policies specifically covering our photographic equipment.

So if finances are a bit strained, or if you’re trying to save to go on the photographic trip of your dreams, what can you do? Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Small Aperture’s guide to skinflint’s photography.

Buy secondhand

From eBay to the local paper to car-boot sales to word-of-mouth there are thousands of pieces of perfectly useable photographic equipment for sale at a fraction of the price they would be brand new. Granted, they come without warranties and guarantees, but shop carefully and there are bargains to be had.

Don’t feel compelled to buy the latest model

At the moment you can pick up a Canon 450D for about £550 / $600 (Amazon UK / Amazon USA) whilst a 550D is roughly £750 / $1,000. If you’re just stepping up from a compact to an SLR the difference in specification is probably not worth £200. The same goes for lots of kit; so weigh up if the extra expense gives you suitable value-added.

Coffee shot through a home-made pinhole camera

Borrow equipment

Without even thinking too hard I can name two of my friends who also use Canon cameras. Did one of them lend me his wide-angle lens when I went away last weekend? Of course he did. Would I loan someone my 50mm prime lens if asked? Almost certainly.

It costs nothing to ask, just make sure you care for someone else’s kit better than you’d care for your own granny. (That is assuming that you like your granny. Otherwise pick your favourite person in the world.)

Rent equipment

Okay, so you use a Nikon and your best friend uses Pentax. You can’t borrow her macro lens for your weekend at the Eden Project, but you can always rent one.

Renting the same piece of kit over and over again will be expensive and you might as well just buy it in the long-term, but every now and again, or if you want to try before you buy, it could be worth it.

Make your own

Need a soft focus lens? Improvise with clingfilm. Don’t have a diffuser? A piece of muslin over your flash will do the job. Left your tripod on a train? Try using a piece of string. Want an interesting portrait background? Look around you: there’s sure to be something intriguing.

There is a bundle to be saved with a little ingenuity and creativity.

Try using old kit

Plenty of camera manufacturers haven’t altered their lens mounts in years. That means that many lenses from manual cameras will still fit on their digital grandchildren. Even if they don’t fit, picking up an adaptor is relatively cheap. Think of all that beautiful glass you could be using!

Use rechargeable batteries

I keep a compact camera in my handbag: it has rechargeable AA batteries in it. Got a flashgun? That’ll take AAs, too. Might as well make those rechargeable.

The photoshoot couldn't get to New York; so New York came to the photoshoot

Use free software

If you haven’t got £230 to spend on Adobe Lightroom, there are free photo editing packages available, for example GIMP, Photoscape, and Picnik. They might not be quite as responsive as something you pay for, but they will do the job.

Shop around for printing

I’m as guilty as the next person of always using the same company to run off prints of my photos. If I were to shop around, looking online and on the high street, I might be able to save myself some pennies on printing.

I do try to save up and print in bulk, though, which is far more economical than ten photos here and there.

In summary…

The day that I realised I was frustrated with my compact camera and wanted the versatility of an SLR, I knew that I was in for the long haul, but at least I know that it doesn’t always have to cost me a king’s ransom!

Tips for winning photography competitions

Have you ever entered a photography competition and not won a bean?

Don’t worry, it happens to all of us. To help you along, we’ve collected together some of the best tips from some top judges to see if we can’t help you lay your hands on that so-far elusive first prize!

• Edit ruthlessly and only submit your best shot — don’t be sentimental and don’t submit an almost-shot, submit your best one.
• Be original — you want something that will make the judges go ‘Oooh!’, with your approach, your technique, and your interpretation. And don’t try to imitate another photographer.
• Know your craft — ensure that you are seen as in control of the image: you shot it in black and white for a reason; the lighting is just right; its focus is exactly how you wanted it; you get the best out of shooting on film or digital.
• Seek the opinions of others — don’t be too hard on yourself and don’t be too sentimental about your images.
• Evoke emotion — be personal and be powerful.
• Know the rules — you don’t want to be disqualified because you didn’t do it properly. And don’t forget to put your name and the name of the image on your files!
• Finally: persevere — you might not win this time around, but there is always next time and you’ll have learned from the process.

If you want some more insight, including tips from some competition judges, why not have a look at what Photocritic and PhotoRadar have to say, too?

Now, go forth and conquer!

Shotblox: photoblogging made simple

There are millions, maybe even billions, of photographs published on the web and quite a few different content management systems to handle them.

How many picture-specific content management systems are there – you know, ones that really focus on your photographs and aren’t laden down with extraneous features that detract from the real image? If you’re thinking: ‘Not that many,’ then maybe Issac and Kasey Kelly, over at Kelly Creative Tech have developed something to fill this niche.

Shotblox.com is a simple-to-use piece of photoblogging software where the photograph is the centre of attention. Once photos have been uploaded directly from your harddrive or from Adobe Lightroom they are saved in galleries and then each gallery is displayed as a clean block of images. Click on an image and it enlarges. Yes, it really is that simple. I was curious so I tried it out.

A funky user interface should help you along as you're building your new site

It took me a few minutes to sign up, a few more minutes to select a typeface colour and a background colour, and a few minutes to upload some images. Almost before I knew it my distinctly amateur-looking photographs were being presented in a professional-looking format, and I didn’t even have to use the video tutorial. There’s an option to notify your friends or followers of your new posts via FaceBook or Twitter, and if you get horribly stuck the Kelly brothers are an email away. My photos are accessed via the Shotblox subdomain, (http://deb.shotblox.com, if you’re that interested) but if you’ve your own domain, you can point that at Shotblox.com.

As Issac told me, Shotblox is really about what the photographer wants. It is primarily user-led with the emphasis being on simple: simple to use and simple in looks. They want the photography to stand out.

So if you do decide that Shotblox is for you, what will it cost you? Well, there are a range of packages on offer from a free sample of ten photos through to unlimited numbers of photos and unlimited bandwidth for US$500 a year, which means that if you’re serious about showing off your photos, there’s probably a package perfect for you.

Take a look for yourself at www.shotblox.com

What went wrong?

A good friend of me recently posted on a social media site that a recent photo shoot he had done had gone horribly wrong; sure, some of the photos came out all right, but none of them fulfilled the ‘vision’ he was hoping for from his shoot.

It’s heartbreaking when a lot of effort doesn’t pay off – but all you can do is to chalk it up as a writing experience. Analyse what went wrong, and then don’t do that again. It’s a slow way of learning things, of course, but things learned the hard way are generally learned properly – so there is a bit of a silver lining after all.

What can you do when you feel as if you’re properly starting to get the hang of photography, but you still want to learn more? There’s a simple trick you can use… And it really works, trust me.  

Even photos that come out very well deserve a second thought. If I was in this situation again, what would I do differently? (click for full size)

Some of you might know that I’ve spent a lot of time working towards my advanced motorcycle licence with the Institute for Advanced Motoring. It’s bloody hard work, but it’s awesome as well: It serves to illustrate that even though I’ve got my full motorcycle licence, I didn’t really have much of an idea about how to keep myself in one piece on two wheels.

The IAM course (which, incidentally, is built on the Police system for Motorcycle Control. Check out Motorcycle Roadcraft or Roadcraft, the car version. It’s a bit of a revelation) teaches you to become psychic on the roads; I find myself slowing down for hazards that don’t even exist yet, I change lanes instinctively before something dangerous happens in my line, and I do overtakes on split-second decisions. And I can control my motorcycle better than I thought ever possible. It feels bloody awesome.

Haje, I didn’t come here to read about your two-wheeled prowess…

Because studio work is generally repeatable, it's a great candidate for constant improvement.

Okay, okay, my apologies. But trust me, there is a link here: All the things that are relevant to learning how to control a motorcycle at speed are relevant to photography as well; the ‘psychic’ element comes in when you’re working with studio work, for example – once you understand your equipment well enough, you can visualise what happens if you just add a smidge of power to your fill light, or add a slight warming filter to your main.

And, like riding a motorcycle, it feels flippin’ brilliant when you know something is going to happen. Then you do it. And then you check what happened. And it worked. It makes you feel great about yourself. Only recently, I was standing next to a photographer who was struggling to get the shot they wanted. Without even looking at their settings, I surmised they were shooting in Program mode, when what they wanted was a particular shutter speed to get a panning shot right. So I told them that a 1/45 second shutter time might be easier. They looked at me, changed their setting, and rammed home the shot. And bought me a pint, which I thought was a nice touch.

Once bitten, twice shy: If you can't learn from other people's mistakes, you've got to learn from your own. No, I agree, this caption doesn't really make sense, but I don't really have anything to say about this photo.

Anyway – I’m not the greatest of photographers, but the trick about getting much better at what you do, is to do everything consciously – even things that are instinctive. What I mean by that is that if you feel you need to change a setting or a lens, go ahead and do it. But the important bit is to go back to it later. Find out why you felt that way. ‘Because it was the right thing to do’ is not a valid reason – there was something that made you ‘feel’ that you could improve your photo in one way or another.

That feeling is extremely valuable. That’s your experience talking, and you have to talk back: It’s a skill, but more importantly, it is a skill you can develop with practice. So, if it’s practicable, stop right there and then, and have a think. Why are you making a choice to make a change? What is wrong with the photos you are getting, and what will the effect be of making the change? The answer to those questions will help you develop and become a better photographer. But you have to be conscious about it. Write it down, add it to your Flickr notes, tell other photographers about your choices. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but make sure you vocalise it. The next time you’re in the same situation, the perfect photo will roll out effortlessly.

Oh who are we fooling, I’ve never taken a perfect photo. And nor will you in your lifetime. But that’s the point: You become a better photographer by polishing one aspect of a photograph every time – and hopefully, the photos you take will be closer and closer to perfect for every day of shooting.

Didn’t you mention a simple tip?

God, I don’t half ramble on, don’t I? Do forgive me, I get very excited about photography. And motorcycling, for that matter.

It's worth re-visiting your photos after some time. This one, for example, sat in my archives for five years before I realised it was actually sort of a wicked shot - all it took was some Lightroom magic to make it sparkle.

Anyway: The real reason I started burbling along about motorcycling is that this is a tip I learned as part of my IAM training. Replace ‘ride’ or ‘drive’ with ‘photo shoot’ below, and you get the gist of the tip.

After every photo shoot, spend one minute to think about one thing you would improve about your most recent shoot. Don’t worry if you made lots of mistakes. Don’t worry if everything went wrong. Pick one thing you would improve. And think about how you could improve it.

The great thing about picking just one thing is that it’s bite-sized. You can process one thing, and you can come up with a plan with avoiding it next time. Missed the sunrise? Get up earlier. Didn’t get the photo of the soccer goal? Stand somewhere different. Scene too bright? Bring neutral density filter. Got your camera equipment stolen? Buy a big Rottweiler. Couldn’t get the toddler to smile? Bring that hyper-colourful hawaii shirt your wife hates so much. It’ll make the kids smile, trust me.

Eventually, you become good enough a photographer that most of your development will come from your own experience and the fact that you are challenging yourself. Always remember, though: There is always something you can improve. But only if you’re consciously working on it.

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Low-light action photography

Low-light photography is something that often confuses the metric bejesus out of photographers: It’s very tricky to get right, and even if you do everything 100% correctly, often-time you’ll find that your photos still don’t come out as you dreamed of. Now, multiply that with the trickyness of photographing action, and you’ve got yourself a true cluster-copulation of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Everybody will sooner or later end up in a situation where you’re photographing moving things in the dark. To concert, event and dance photographers, it’s part and parcel of their chosen photography work.

I’ll be honest: I don’t consider myself a very good low-light photographer (with the exception, perhaps, of my concert photography portfolio, but in those circumstances you’ve got an entirely different set of challenges.

Today, though, I’ve got a wicked treat for yourselves: One of my colleagues and friends in Australia, David Wyatt, agreed to share some of his observations of low-light action photography with us. He’s a scholar, a gentleman, a legend, and a bloody great photographer… Take it away, David!  

Dance and stage photography are two areas of photography that often intertwine with each other. They can be wonderful to watch: They’re full of dramatic moments that can include moving silhouetted outlines of dancers or actors performing while being back-lit by a single strobe light – which is a great effect from the viewpoint of the audience, but which can make life for you, the photographer, incredibly frustrating!

The following notes are simply intended as a guide only to ways of coping with low light photography, particularly for photographers just starting out in or thinking about trying dance or stage photography – practice is the only effective way to develop experience and increase your photography skills, and there are thousands of great sources out there providing methods of increasing your photography knowledge, depending on the area of photography that you enjoy.

Equipment

My camera bag looks a bit like this: I use a Nikon D700 with a 70-200mm and a 17-55mm f2.8 Nikon lenses, and have recently upgraded from a Nikon D300. I also sometimes use an SB-800 flash unit for posed shots, and never use flash during dance or stage performances, unless I’ve previously received permission from the event or performance directors to do so.

I started taking photographs of dance and stage performances eighteen months ago, and love it. There’s nothing like capturing a shot of a dramatic moment on stage, or of a passionate glance between a couple dancing together, and knowing that the same moment captured within your camera will never occur ever again in precisely that same way.

The lighting challenge

Up, up, and and away: The more dynamic the photos, the better they tend to be! © David Wyatt

Dance and stage performances can often have scenes or components which are entirely under-lit or which have fluctuating lighting levels, and sometimes fast movement at the same time, which together can make it very difficult to balance between a shutter speed that will be slow enough to let sufficient light into the camera to illuminate the image, while using a shutter speed that will be fast enough to freeze the movement. On the other hand, slower shutter speeds can also be used to amazing artistic effect with tripods or monopods through blurring the movement of dancers to give an impression of high speed in the photograph. (If you’re confused about exposure, check out How Exposure Works).

One of the main aspects of low-light dance photography in particular is that having faster glass will always makes a large difference in the kinds of shots that can be achieved. With an f3.5-5.6 lens, you can try to compromise in low-lit venues by lowering the shutter speed and opening the aperture as widely as possible using manual control settings on the camera, but chances are that those setting may still not be enough to freeze motion without using flash if the action is fast-moving, particularly if you may be wishing to capture the background as well as nearby action through using a smaller aperture for greater depth of focus (i.e., f5.6 – f11).

It's difficult to get too much energy into a dance shot - but you can try, if you want! © David Wyatt

Increasing the ISO levels can help with taking shots at a fast enough shutter speed to try to freeze the motion, though depending on the kind of camera you use, grain in the images at higher ISO levels can tend to become a problem, especially between ISO 1600 to 3200. While the f2.8 lenses more suited to low-light work are quite expensive, some of the f1.8 prime lenses are much more affordable and fantastic quality lenses for low-light performances, especially for photographers on a budget. The downside with prime lenses is that they require footwork to move around to frame the image properly, and without footwork or mobility, can require extensive post-shoot cropping for composition requirements, which is the compromise that offsets the price of the f2.8 lenses with zoom capabilities.

There will always be a dance or stage performance in low-light where you may not be able to capture the action effectively purely because of the low lighting that may be involved, or because of the distance placed between yourself and the dancers/performers. If that happens, it may simply be a matter of needing to upgrade your equipment if that’s an option, trying to use a slower shutter speed with a tripod or monopod (shooting at 1/40 and 1/60 shutter speeds with a monopod can still capture stationary non-moving images very well, when there may be a pause in the action), or checking if you can use flash at those events, which may sometimes also be an option.

Colour, motion, passion; what more could you want from a photo? © David Wyatt

There is also some excellent free software out there for image editing (including brightness and light levels adjustment) and for noise reduction in images, including GIMP, Picasa, and Neat Image. Neat Image is a nifty piece of software great for reducing noise/grain in images that may have been taken using a high ISO, though using noise reduction can substantially decrease the quality of images it has been applied to. Images with a large amount of noise reduction applied may still be fine for website display at small-medium size, though trying to print those same images may be a different story entirely due to the loss of detail through the noise reduction process. The new Lightroom 3 has some pretty awesome noise reduction algorithms built in, as well – so if you’re using LR, don’t forget to give that a shot, too!

What I’ve written here is a snippet of my own experience of low-light photography through dance and stage work, and I’m still continually learning as I go along. I base my abilities to a higher degree on the quality of the photographs that I’m yet to take at future performances, and to a lesser degree on my previous work. A bit like the acting adage that actors are only ever as good as their next performance.

Dance and stage photography in low-light environments are both some of the most difficult kinds of photography to capture effectively, although both forms also have some of the most beautiful and dramatic human moments that can be captured on film, which make the hard work infinitely worth it!

David's website is worth a peek!

About the author

David Wyatt is a dance and stage photographer based in Melbourne, Australia, with a wicked eye for a good photo. Check out his website over on Capturing Images.

He loves a bit of feedback, and is available for assignments – contact details are on his site, so knock yourself out!

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Book review: Photo Trekking by Nick Onken

As a semi-prominent photography blogger and photo writer, I occasionally am sent books to review. It’s pretty exciting, actually, because it gives me a great insight into what’s happening in the photography publishing world, and hey – it’s always a great idea to keep an eye on the competition. The problem is that I’m frequently not the target audience of these books: I’m an advanced photographer; I love to write for all photography audiences, but if my ongoing photography course for newbies project has taught me anything, it’s that photography looks very different through other people’s eyes.

So, this time, I decided to ask a friend of mine – the always lovely Ella Bowker takes a closer look at Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World, by Nick Onken.

Take it away, Ella…  

I recently came back from a long weekend in Italy with my family (check out the pictures on Flickr!). I schlepped along a collection of books to entertain me on the plane, and I’d like to tell you about one of them: Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World, by Nick Onken (Amazon.co.uk or http://amzn.to/dsjv9O ">Amazon.com. Travelling with a travel photographer’s book seemed highly appropriate. It’s not as if one needs much inspiration to take beautiful photos in the Tuscan hills, but perhaps this book would be able to help me take even better photos. Flicking through the glossy pages of exotic photographs, I noticed that he’d taken some shots not all that far from where I was staying, too. How exciting!

Uhm, so who is it for?

Unfortunately, I found the subtitle of this book to be a tiny bit misleading. It turns out this book isn’t aimed at the general travel photographer – those of us who take fairly good photos above the standard of the usual holiday snaps and want to do it a bit better. Instead, it is aimed at amateur photographers who wish to spread their wings and give professional travel photography a go.

Fantastic photos - but Ella Bowker finds that she'd prefer it was a proper cofee-table book, rather than a half-way house between how-to guide and photographer's portfolio

Call it a bugbear of mine, but it really bothers me when writers haven’t fully identified their audience. Or rather: Onken has identified a very specific audience here, but delivers a book which goes too far in some areas, and not far enough in others. Now, I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m not nearly good enough a photographer to aspire to do it in a professional capacity. To be entirely honest, I don’t think that I’d want to even if I were. Having said that, the premise of the book piqued my interest, and I threw myself at it in an attempt to learn about the life of a professional travel photographer and where exactly I’d need to start in the unlikely event that I did decide to pursue this as a career.

Perhaps I wasn’t the designated audience for his book, or may be I was slightly disappointed to discover that the content wasn’t actually what I thought it would be. Either way, I finished it and was left feeling that Onken hadn’t quite delivered what the book’s covers seemed to promise. Don’t get me wrong, the book shared some very useful information, such as what the different markets for travel photographs are,how to make initial contact with them, and how best to promote yourself and your work. However, all the while I had this feeling that the book didn’t go far enough. It was scratching at the surface of life as a travel photographer and not telling you enough of what you needed to know.

What’s it got?

The book is divided into five chapters: the world of travel photography, preparation, shooting on location, tips for taking great travel photographs, and after the shoot. Onken takes you through planning your shoot to ensure that it evokes the right feel for the client and includes anything that is a ‘must see’ for that location. The ‘How to budget for a travel shoot’ section was interesting, and discusses everything from airport transfers to local guides. But when it came to issues such as local etiquette and cultural nuances, coverage was rather thin. There was one more thing which struck me as odd: I’d have thought that if someone is seriously considering a career in travel photography, the chapter looking at photography tips is likely to be well below their level of expertise.

Each chapter, with the exception of thetips for taking great travel photographs chapter, contains at least one ‘Traveler’s Journal’ which gives the back-story to a series of photos taken in locations ranging from The City of God in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Kyoto in Japan. These sections worked well to communicate the human element of Onken’s photographs and his experiences in order to take them. If each chapter had been built around these journal entries, they might have achieved the degree of depth that this book needs.

I do feel that more could have been said about the grueling travel schedule and exhausting days of a travel photographer; the shots that made the cut and those that didn’t could have been examined; and the outcomes of that particular trip could have been looked at, too. Yes, it would have been a very different approach to the book, but one that I think could have worked.

Onken’s book feels more as if it were an exercise to get his photos on to people’s coffee tables. In order to do so, he settled on the niche audience of wannabe travel photographers. But there’s nothing wrong with a photo book for a photo book’s sake; Onken is clearly a talented photographer – but it just seems a bit curious to have them presented in a setting like this book.

It’s a cursed shame, really – there aren’t any books out there that covers this section of the market all that well, and after reading this book, I can’t but conclude that, well, there still aren’t any. But if there was one, I’d buy it.

Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World by Nick Onken. Published by Amphoto Books, New York, available from all sorts of lovely book shops everywhere.

About the guest writer of this post

Ella is an avid amateur photographer based in London. Her Flickr stream is a documentation of her process of becoming a better photographer. She wrote Teaching Photography to a 5-year-old and Taking photos for the future for Photocritic.org

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BeetleCam: Safari via remote control

I’ve done a fair bit of work with Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas in the past – they’re both ludicrously talented photographers and great guys. They also have a knack for DIY – and I have to say that their newest project is one of the ones that has interested me most recently – What do you get when you strap a camera to the top of a remote controlled car? You get their incredible BeetleCam.

The modern world of wildlife photography is saturated with thousands of talented photographers producing a huge number of fantastic photographs. As a result it is difficult to produce original shots without really pushing the boundaries and striving for new perspectives. Often, this means putting yourself (or the camera) into places that many would consider impossible.  

Matt and Will with the fantastic BeetleCam

Tired of the dangers of wildlife photography, Will and Matt set out to invent something. “We were driven to embark upon an ambitious project to photograph African wildlife from a new perspective”, Will tells me over coffee: “Traditionally, you get close to animals by using camera traps – stationary cameras triggered by a trip beam or remote. The problem with this method is that it requires a great deal of time, patience and luck. Therefore we decided to invent something a little more proactive!”. Easier said than done, but they did come up with a brilliant solution: The BeetleCam. Put simply, it’s a DSLR camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy.

When was the last time you captured a shot like this? Incredible, eh?

They booked a trip to Tanzania and set about designing, building and testing BeetleCam. The first step was to get up to speed on the necessary robotics and electronics that would be required to build such a device from scratch. Having conducted our research, they sourced components from around the world. Construction then began in earnest with sawing, soldering, sewing and super gluing taking place around the clock in Will’s garage.

This was the last thing the poor Canon 400D saw before it was mauled by lions. Literally.

BeetleCam’s primary challenge would be getting over the uneven African terrain with a heavy payload of camera, lens and flashes. “We therefore ordered the most powerful motors we could find”, Will recalls, “and large off road tires, too”. After all, BeetleCam had to be able to operate for long periods without being charged, so they also ordered massive batteries.

Next, they constructed a split ETTL off-camera flash cord that allowed the camera to control the output of two flashes depending on the light conditions (this would be important for filling in the shadows cast by the bright African sun). The finishing touches were to camouflage BeetleCam and seal the camera and internal mechanisms from the environment.

The beetle cam in full camouflage

The prototype was finished with a month to spare but it proved to be catastrophically unstable. Whoops – you don’t want to go retrieve a camera from the midst of a pack of angry lions! An emergency redesign was undertaken to lower the centre of gravity and, a few days before their departure, BeetleCam was ready for to be let loose in the wild!

“We decided to make our first subjects elephants.”, Will says, and his face says it all: This was not going to end well. “Photographing them proved difficult”, he laughs. It turns out that their hearing and high intelligence made it very hard to outsmart them. “Eventually we developed a technique that involved manoeuvring BeetleCam into their path and waiting for them to approach”. Needless to say, this took a great deal of guesswork but perseverance paid off and they were able to take some amazing photographs of huge elephants towering over the camera.

You'll be much happier standing a few hundred meters away with a remote control than to actually be pressing the button here yourself. Trust me on this one. Or just ask Will.

Spurred by their success, Will and Matt got brave. “Our second subjects were lions and these proved easier to get close to”. sadly, though, it turned out to be just a little bit too easy. “Within 20 seconds of deploying BeetleCam, the lions had rushed over to investigate, bitten our Canon EOS 400d and run off into the bush carrying the actual BeetleCam itself”. A dramatic recovery mission ensued and they eventually retrieved their battered camera and BeetleCam. The camera would never take another photo, but imagine their excitement: “The 400d had captured some incredible shots in its final few seconds of life!”, Will laughs. Fortunately, they were able to patch BeetleCam up with some string and a few bits of wood. “We replaced the 400d with our only other camera, a Canon EOS 1d Mk III. Obviously we weren’t going to deploy near lions again!”

With our expensive 1D mounted on top of BeetleCam, they were were quite nervous when they decided to try photographing a group of old bachelor buffalos. If you’ve never had the honour of trying to capture ‘em; Buffalos have a reputation for being grumpy and unpredictable! “To our surprise and great relief, these old brutes turned out to excellent models”, Will explains. “they were very cooperative and posed beautifully as we drove BeetleCam around them!

Stunning. Absolutely stunning.

“Upon returning to the UK, we were thrilled with the photographs that we had managed to take during our two-weeks in Tanzania. We have already started work on BeetleCam Mark II and plan to return to Africa later this year to take more photographs.”, Will concludes.

Follow the Burrard-Lucas brethren’s crazy adventures by subscribing to their newsletter or checking out their RSS feed. Videos of the BeetleCam in action and more pics taken with it can be seen on the BeetleCam section of their website.

A huge thanks to Will and Matt for being interviewed for Photocritic. All photos are © burrard-lucas.com. Images used with explicit permission – please contact Matt and Will for further copyright info.

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The Canons of Navarone

Something interesting has happened in the world of photography: Canon currently have two cameras on the market, at basically exactly the same price point. The Canon 550D (EOS Rebel T2i) costs £705 in the UK and $799 in the US, whilst the Canon EOS 50D costs £726 / $850.

Shop around further afield than Amazon, and the prices are so similar that they are practically identically priced. Which is a curious and interesting situation. The question, then, is as follows: You will buy one of them, but which one would you choose?  

Comparing the specs

When you compare the specifications side by side (made a lot easier by using dpreview’s fantastic side-by-side comparison tool of the two cameras), there ain’t much between them. The 50D is slightly faster, the 550D has a slightly better screen and higher resolution.

Some would argue that the 550D makes more sense because I have the memory cards already (HD/SD), but the 550D generates massive files, and I probably have to buy new, bigger memory cards anyway, so that point is moot.

In favour of the 550D

A very tasty camera indeed.

The 550D has a full-HD movie mode, which isn’t something I generally look for in a stills camera, but I have seen some beautiful results, and I’m tempted to give it a go.

The 50D doesn’t have particularly good high-ISO results in some tests, which is a downer, while the 550D appears to have inherited the absolutely epic low-light skills from the 7D camera.

Resolution means nothing, and the difference between 15 or 18 megapixels is practically non-existent. Having said that, having a little bit higher resolution can’t harm, but the key thing is that imaging chips in general are slowly getting better – seeing what the 7D has been able to do with a ‘very similar’ imaging chip, I’m leaning towards the 550D based on its innards

In favour of the 50D

A very tasty camera indeed.

I’ve owned many cameras in the xxD series in the past – the 60D, 10D, 20D, 30D, and 40D have all been in my possession at some point, and I trust Canon to do a good job on it. They’re a lot more solidly built than the xxxD series, so that’s a huge advantage if you mistreat your camera (which I generally don’t).

The 50D is also faster in general: It starts faster, it takes photos in continuous mode faster, etc.

What would you do?

n

So, the 550D and the 50D cost practically the same, and have different advantages. Which one would you buy?

• Canon EOS 50D
• Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i)
• I don't know, honestly!

View Results

It’s an interesting (and fiercely difficult) choice to have to make; choosing between these two, very similar-yet-different cameras. I know which one I am leaning towards, but I’m very curious to hear what you would choose – and why. Vote above, comment below, make it good!

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No longer looking for n00bs (thanks!)

Edit: I’ll keep this post here for posterity, but I have all the help I need. Thank you all so much for your feedback and interest!

So, I’m a writer. I write books about photography. And I get a lot of e-mail from people, asking if I can recommend a good book for someone who knows absolutely nothing about photography. Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve found such a book quite yet.

The problem with photography books out there is that they are either too technical too early (I happen to find shutter times deeply fascinating, but it’s too hands-off for many people who want to get out there and take photos), or they are too tutorial-driven. Several of the most popular photography books for beginners are written in the form of ‘hey, see this photo? Isn’t it awesome? to take it, set your camera to X, Y and Z, and press the shutter’, without actually explaining why you need those settings, and what would happen if you changed them slightly.

Only today, a good friend of mine, Sally, asked me if I could recommend a book. that re-awakened the idea I had: Maybe the time has come that I write my own book for complete beginners. 

Why do you need newbies?

There’s a problem with wanting to write a book for newbies: Sure, I am a photographer at heart, but I’m entirely self-taught. I’ve red hundreds of books about photography, I’ve experimented for a few decades, and I’ve been blogging my way through my first fledgling steps to my current state, as a halfway competent photographer.

Through my work career, I’ve learned some interesting tricks. Specifically, I used to work as a producer for a big TV station, and one of the things we did was focus on user-centred design, test-driven development, and the mantra of ‘test early, test often’, with the idea that it is much easier to adjust a process early on, then to try and fix something six months down the line.

So, my idea is to write a photography book “the wrong way around”: I want to know what my readers want to learn (this would be equal to the ‘tests’ in test-driven development), and then I want to find ways of teaching them. Then, after I’ve taught them about a topic of photography, I want feedback. What was easy to understand? What was tricky? Did the examples and analogies work? And – perhaps as important as anything else – is it still fun? Did you enjoy learning this piece of photography knowledge, and do you feel you know it well enough to build upon it to learn the next lesson?

I want to participate, what do you need from me?

Bunny knows sweet fuck-all about photography, but his feed-back style is too aggressive for my liking, so I sat him down and explained that no, I wouldn't need his help with this particular project. I think he will grow to accept this. Maybe. Eventually.

Well, you need a SLR camera. I would strongly prefer if you had a prime lens, but a simple kit-lens should be sufficient.

You need to be a keen beginner. Perhaps you’ve had your camera for a few months, but you don’t really know what to do with it. Maybe you have a vision for what you want to accomplish, but you haven’t really got the skills to pull it off.

The important thing is that a) you have no formal photographpy training and b) that you know as little as possible about photography. I’ll probably admit a few slightly more advanced learners to the group, but the difficult part – from my perspective – will be to get through to the rank beginners: the ones who want to learn, but who don’t have anything to build on.

I’ve got plenty of other book projects at the moment, so I think this is going to be a very gradual project.

I expect you to be able to commit a bit of photography time, and to comment on each of the lessons (roughly every second week or so, I imagine). I also expect you to keep any discussions that happen in the virtual lessons to yourself – after all, if this end up being a book, I don’t want the world to know everything until I’m ready to unleash it! :)

Finally, I’ll do a lot of the feedback in ‘public’ to the group. If you’re worried about that: don’t be; I imagine that many people will be making the same mistakes, and it merely saves me from having to type up the same feedback again and again. If you’re particularly sensitive to criticism, however, this probably won’t be the project for you.

How do I apply?

Sorry, you’re too late! – Within 24 hours, I received a lot more applications than I had dared hope for. I was expecting about twenty people interested or so, but instead I received well over a hundred e-mails! I’m going to kick the project off and see where it goes, but I think I’m okay for people for now.

Stay tuned to see where this is going, and how we’re going with the book. I’m sure there’ll be a post once I’m sure what’s actually going to happen. Here’s to having my fingers crossed to find a publisher who might be interested!

So, what’s the plan?

I’ve created a private group on Flickr, and I plan to post the lessons as articles / discussion topics. To get access to the group, I need to invite you, so when you send me the e-mail, I’ll take a look at your Flickr profile, and then invite you if I think you’re good for this project.

I’m hoping to kick off with the first lesson in the beginning of March, and then try and gauge for how frequently we need additional lessons to keep you busy. I’ll also do individual photo critiques of your photos after each lesson, and use these critiques as part of my feedback to the whole group.

Oh and you know what? We’re going to have a hell of a lot of fun. It may even be the first time ever that a book has been written using XP methodologies. I know that makes me a geek, but damn if that ain’t pretty exciting!

In photography, rules aren't laws.

The internet is absolutely full of guides about things you should and shouldn’t do to take ‘good photos’. Don’t over-expose. Remember the rule of thirds. Don’t cut people’s heads off. Watch your background. Use a shallow DOF in portraits to throw the backgrounds out of focus. 3-point lighting for portraiture, etc.

A lot of us just take all these rules for given, as if they are hard-and-fast rules that you have to stick to, because if you don’t, you’ll fail as a photographer. Break these rules, and you won’t take a good photo in your life. Your cat will die, your children will hate you, and your significant other will divorce you.  

Truth, as you might expect, is slightly different. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time the ‘rules’ (which in any case should be seen as mere guidelines) make a lot of sense. Of course it looks silly if you cut people’s heads off. Of course your photos won’t look conventional if they are harshly over- or under-exposed.

Rules aren’t laws. You can break them unpunished

Grossly over-exposing a photo doesn't have to mean it won't look good. (click for bigger on Flickr)

Read the sentence above. That’s all I really wanted to say with this article. So if you’re in a rush, or you think I use too many words to say something simple, then read that sentence a few times, and go check out XKCD for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that while the guidelines are there to help you, there’s no point in following any rules or guidelines unless you fully understand (or grok, if you’re geeky and/or well-read enough to be familiar with that concept) why.

The best reason to understand why a rule is there, is to break it. Some times, you might find that your photos actually come out more interesting – better, even, perhaps – when you break the rules. Other times, you’ll try to take the same photo twice; once whilst following the rule, and once whilst breaking it, and you’ll realise why it’s a good idea.

Just remember: Never follow a rule just because you’ve read somewhere that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Follow it because you understand it, and because you know what happens when you don’t.

Break these rules

Contrary to popular belief, your foreground doesn't have to be in focus (clicky for bigger)

• DPS’s 11 tips for beginner photographers.
• DP Tutorial’s Photography tips for beginners.
• The tips in my own How to win a photography competition
• Buzzle’s basic digital photography tips.
• Photography Tips and Tricks’ Tips for Beginners
• Digital Photography Tips’ guides on The rule of thirds, Making a good crop, Change shooting angles for better photos and Focus on the details for better photos.
• Every single one of Rick Sammon’s (@RickSammon) Top Ten Digital Photography Tips (YouTube Video)
• These 100 tips from Cameras.co.uk (ignore the first 30 or so, they’re about 600 years old, and are related to taking photos by carving them into mountains)

A couple of examples

DO cut their heads off at the top if it makes for more interesting and intimate photos (click for bigger on Flickr)

The Carlsberg Express: Of course your horizon doesn't have to be straight, if a non-straight horizon gives you better results! (click for bigger on Flickr)

Sometimes, getting in closer makes a photo more intimate. Don't be afraid to crop into people's faces.

The horizontals aren't horizontal. The verticals aren't vertical. The background is a mess. How could this photo ever be any good? But it is... (click for bigger on Flickr)

White balance? Hah? I spit on your white balance. (click for bigger)

Some times, the background adds to a photo - don't throw it out of focus on principle just because you have a nice, fast lens.

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Building a laser trigger for your camera

There are loads of reasons for why you could want to trigger your camera remotely – to avoid camera shake, for example, or to be able to take a photograph of yourself without having to rely on a timer. If you want to build more ambitious projects, however, you may have to consider getting more exotic.

I recently built a little device which triggers my camera whenever a laser beam is broken. It is about as simple an electronics project as you can pull off, but it’s going to form the base of a couple of other cool projects I’ll be working on going forward (stay tuned…), so I figured I’d do a quick post explaining how I did this.  

Talking to the camera

This looks a lot like a headphone jack, but it is not - headphone jacks are 3.5mm, this is 2.5mm.

Even though it isn’t strictly necessary, I decided to use my Arduino (check out Arduino.cc) as the base for this project.

I say ‘not necessary’ because you can build this project using just electronic components, which makes it all a lot simpler – however, what I really wanted to do is to build a base on which I can build further in the future. If you want to get more advanced, it becomes a lot easier to use a programmable micro-controller like the Arduino, so I figured I may as well start where I mean to continue.

I stripped the wires from the remote lead. Connecting green and red triggers the camera.

To interface with the camera, I decided to keep things as simple as possible, and I used the 2.5mm jack port on the side of my Canon EOS 450D. If your camera has a different remote control port, you should still be able to use the tips described in this post, but you’ll have to source the actual plug yourself.

Using the remote control port has several advantages, the biggest of which is that it’s really easy to trigger the camera this way. All you need to do is to make a connection between two wires! I bought a couple of cheap remote controls from China and used one of ‘em to interface with my camera, but you can go into your local electronics store to pick up a 2.5mm jack for next to no money…

Triggering the camera with the Arduino

This is the most important part of this mini-project: As soon as you can trigger the camera with the Arduino, only your imagination will stop you from coming up with ways of using this. Because the Arduino will accept input from any number of sources, you can program it to take photos in just about any circumstance imaginable. Just a few ideas:

• Motion sensor (trigger the camera when it senses movement)
• Heat sensor (take a picture when the)
• Sound sensor (take a picture when the dog barks or the phone rings)
• Telephone trigger (Hook up the arduino to a mobile phone. Call or SMS the mobile phone to take a picture)
• Timelapse photography (Program the Arduino to take a photo every minute)

There are a few different ways you can use the Arduino to trigger the camera – I considered using a relay, but the problem is that even very fast relays are quite slow, so I decided to use a transistor instead:

You! At the back! no sniggering at my atroceous schematic drawing skills!

The Arduino sends a signal to the transistor, which connects the two leads leading to the camera, which triggers the camera.

Forgive the rubbish picture - I was prototyping, so it's less than clear what's going on here. The important bits are in the schematic above. Honest, it's piss easy.

Getting the laser trigger to work

I hooked up a LDR (Light-dependent resistor) with a pull-down resistor to ensure that it wouldn’t trigger randomly to the analog sensor pin 0 on the Arduino. The programme uploaded to the Arduino is as follows:

 int sensorPin = 0;  int sensorValue = 0;  int cameraTrigger =  13;    void setup() {    pinMode (cameraTrigger, OUTPUT); }   void loop() {    sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);    if (sensorValue > 700) { // trigger is quite low, might need to be higher in daylight      digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, LOW);    }    else    {      digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, HIGH);      delay(10);      digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, LOW); 	 delay(1000); // Take max 1 pic per second    }  } 

Pull-down resistor to ensure true readings, and a LDR to do the actual light measuring.

With the arduino all programmed, I just had to add the LDR.

Now, I rigged up a laser module aimed at the LDR, and I checked what the common sensor values were – turns out that it drops to about 200 when the laser beam wasn’t hitting the sensor, and goes up to about 900 or so when it is hitting the sensor. I set the sensor trigger to about 700 to give me some leeway.

In the above snippet of code, the interesting stuff happens in the loop: Basically, it checks if the sensor has gone ‘dark’. If it hasn’t, it simply checks again.

The bright pink bit in the photo here is the laser beam hitting the LDR.

If the Arduino detects that the sensor has gone ‘dark’, it triggers the camera for 10 milliseconds, then untriggers it. This is to ensure that the camera doesn’t continue taking photos for the duration of the beam being broken – I have my camera set to ‘one shot’ anyway, but by adding this line of code, it should still work if the camera is set to continuous shooting when the shutter button is held down.

When the Arduino detects a broken beam, it takes a photo, then waits for a second, before checking for a broken beam again. If it’s still broken, it’ll take another photo and then waits another second.

Does it even work?

Yup. But a video says more than a thousand words so check ‘er out:

(forgive the crummy video quality, but you get the idea)

So, er, what the hell can you use this for?

It’s all a little bit theoretical at this point, because I haven’t actually used the trigger for anything useful yet. For one thing, it’s not very portable yet, but I’m planning to take a version of this and solder it all together so it’s a bit more sturdy. At least I know it works, which was the purpose of the exercise.

I have a couple of fantastic ideas for how I can create some pretty cool projects where the camera can just stand there and take photos automatically. Think birds on a bird-feeder, people walking through a doorway, balls in flight, etc.

If you plan to use the kit to take people by surprise, you may have to hide the lasers away a bit better. In a cleanish room, the red laser is pretty much invisible anyway (although it shows up in specs of dust etc), but if you want the sensor to be completely invisible, you can just use an IR laser instead – it’ll make it invisible to the naked eye.

Disclaimer

I haven’t broken my own camera equipment doing any of this, but if you balls things up, there’s a good chance you might. Be careful, know what you’re doing, and don’t come running to me if you blow up your camera, please!

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Protecting your copyright in a digital world

Part 2 of 2. You may be interested in reading part 1, "What is copyright, and how do infringements harm you?", first.

I've spoken at great length about why I have such a problem with people stealing my content in part 1 of this article... But what can you do about it?

Finding infringing content

Unique strings of text – It turns out that most people who nick my content with malicious intent are doing so via the RSS feed. Probably because, in addition to being immoral, they are lazy. I decided to turn this to my advantage: I inserted a unique string and a date-stamp into my RSS feeds.

In theory, because this unique string only exists in my RSS feed, it should never show up in Bing, Yahoo, Google or, well, anywhere on the internet, really. If/when it does, I know someone is doing something they aren’t supposed to. Searching for this unique string should ideally result in zero search results. Invariably, however, it never does.

Copyright web services

Apart from inserting a unique string, you can use a service like Copyscape to scan for infringing content. Their Copyscape Premium service is fantastic: Point it at your site map, and for only $0.05 per page, it will take all your pages and compare them to the internet. They score your content against other content. High-scoring content obviously is likely to be plagiarised or infringing in one way or another, so you can take action.

Of course, Copyscape only works for textual content. For photographers wanting to track whether their images have been ‘borrowed’, there is Tineye, and their more hard-core PixID service.

Dealing with infringing sites: Start easy!

If you think that someone has used your content by accident, or out of ignorance, there’s no point in chucking the book of the law at them. A friendly e-mail (cc’d to yourself so you remember to follow it up in a week or so) is usually more than enough to get them to take the content down.

I have found that the number 1 reason for the ‘friendly e-mail’ approach failing is that there isn’t an easy way of contacting the owner of the site… I’m not being difficult, but if it takes me more than about 10 seconds to find the contact e-mail address (check the header, sidebar and footer for anything that reads ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, or similar) or a feedback form, they’ve already wasted enough of my time. On to step 2:

Finding contact details

One of the big problems with many websites is that it is difficult to find out how to contact people. If their ‘About Me’ page or ‘contact us’ pages are absent, broken, or just hopelessly convoluted to use, you have to get clever. I tend to use a site called Domain Whitepages, which will give you 3 pieces of information: Who registered the domain, Who is the domain registrar, and who hosts the domain.

The person who registered the domain is usually the person you want – but many people have made this information private, or it might be out of date.

Your next point of call is the web host. These are the people who own and run the physical server on which the website is running. Look up the host’s website, and do a search for ‘copyright’ and ‘dmca’. If you can’t find either, look for ‘abuse’ or ‘report an issue’. Most web hosts have a mechanism for contacting them with abuse-related e-mails. If you sent a DMCA notice (more about that below) to the host, they will generally respond extremely quickly – I often had responses within an hour – anything longer than 12 hours is quite rare.

If you really can’t figure out who is hosting the server, your last option is to go for the domain registrar: This is the people who have registered the internet domain (like ‘photocritic.org’ or ‘google.com’). If you have to serve a DMCA notice to them, things will take a little bit longer, but if they can’t contact the owner, they’ll pull the plug on the whole domain, which tends to get the owner’s attention really quickly.

Fighting back with the DMCA

After your e-mail, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – or DMCA – is going to be your second response to any issue of copyright. The DMCA is an US piece of legislation which doesn’t apply in any country except the USA, but I’ve sent DMCA notices to all sorts of countries (including, interestingly the UK, although the appropriate document in this country would be a ‘Notice and Take Down, or a NTD document), and while the legalese on the DMCA notice might be incorrect for, say, Germany, copyright law tends to be similar in most countries, and they’re not going to split hairs over receiving the wrong form: The important thing is that someone is breaking a law, somewhere.

To use a DMCA notice, you need the following: Your details, the details of the original and infringing content, and two particular snippets of legalese which swears on pain of death (ok, not quite – but nearly) that you’re convinced that you are in the right and they are in the wrong. Below is an example of the form letter I have been using.

Example DMCA notice

I have been using the following format for my DMCA notices to great effect:

[your address]
[today's date]

DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

Dear Sir or Madam: Upon a routine copyright check, I discovered that the example.com site infringes on my copyright.

The copyrighted work at issue is the text and images appearing on my site here:
- http://photocritic.org/nude-girlfriend-photography/

The URLs infringing on our copyrighted material include:
- http://example.com/nude-girlfriend

Please ensure that the infringing content is taken down within 48 hours.

You can reach me at [e-mail address] if you require further information or clarification.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

[my signature]

Mr [my name]

If the person you are sending the notice to demands the notice to be sent in by fax (surprisingly many do, actually), check out Interfax – they let you e-mail them a PDF document, and they fax it on for you. Fantastic, because, well, who even has a fax these days?

In the above, it is important to add your full mailing address near the top of the document. Create a list of all the article originals, and then the corresponding list of the articles on the infringing site.

First off, send this to the contact e-mail for the site. If that fails to get the content removed, send the same thing to the web host’s copyright or abuse team a week later. If that fails again, send the same thing to the domain registrar after another week. Do add a note to the letter stating whom and when you sent the notices to before, because the host might want to know before they decide to shut down a server.

But… Does it work?

Here, have a random photo I took this week-end. I'm quite proud of it. And this post is nearly 4,500 words long or so, so I figured you needed a break for a few seconds. Enjoy.

The DMCA form is incredibly effective. In the past year, I have sent out around 50 formal notices to people infringing on my copyrighted content, and all but two of these infringements have been taken down. One of them is in Vietnam (which doesn’t have any meaningful copyright legislation, so I’m out of luck, basically) and India (which does have legislation, but is notoriously lack at enforcing it, and the site owner is simply ignoring me. Particularly annoying because it looks like it might be a pretty high-profile site). I am still looking into how I might convince them to take the articles down, but I fear it might take more time than it is worth to me.

Out of the fifty or so, the hosts deleted the articles most of the time. Some times they placed a block on the pages (so the pages would result in a 403 forbidden page), some times they deleted it from the database (causing a 500 internal server error when trying to access the page), some times they shut down the whole site (showing a ‘if you own this site, please contact the host immediately’ message), and other times they found more elegant solutions.

In at least three cases, the site owner never contacted the host, and the whole site was taken down. In one case, the domain registrar decided to take the domain name offline, which means that while the domain itself is still available via its IP address, most of its users were unable to get to it.

What if the DMCA notification doesn’t work?

Excellent question. You could seek further legal help, but be warned: things often get complicated really quickly: The person infringing might be based in Romania, using a server in Russia on a Chinese domain name. If that happens, you’ve drawn the short straw: Where do you begin?

The best approach: If there is any aspect of the business which is operated out of the US (Say, they use Google Adsense, in which case, fill the AdSense DMCA complaint – the content will continue to exist, but at least you can send a message). Especially check the domain registrar – you’ll often find that even ‘foreign’ domains can be registered via an US registrar, and they should be susceptible to a sternly written DMCA notice.

From personal experience, I’d say that the DMCA approach is effective in well over 90% of cases, and I decided I didn’t have enough energy (or hours in the day!) to try to go beyond that.

What if there is a particularly rampant infringement?

In theory, you could start a lawsuit whenever someone steals a single piece of content from you. In practice, you’d me mad to do so, and honestly, it is a lot of hassle to go to court. Sometimes, however, you come across a case where you can’t see any other option.

I’ve had a couple of cases where the site in question wasn’t just copying my content, but went very, very far beyond that as well. One of them had ‘borrowed’ around 50 of my articles, the other one had systematically ‘borrowed’ every single one of my articles, all the way back to the start of Photocritic – yes, nearly 400 articles.

Let’s just say that I thought they were taking the proverbial piss. So, in addition to my standard DMCA letters, I included invoices for unauthorised use (number of articles multiplied by how much I would have charged to write those articles as a freelancer) with the letter and started talking to a solicitor. I can’t go into details about either of the cases, but suffice to say that both companies ended up paying significant amounts of money for their infringements.

Dragging people to court is not necessarily an approach I would recommend: litigation can be very expensive, but when things get just a little bit too silly, getting the legal system involved early on can ensure that people sit up and pay attention.

Disclaimer

I have rudimentary legal training in UK media law, but my training is several years old, and you’d be insane to take legal advice from some random bloke off the internet anyway. Nothing in this post is meant as actual legal advice – talk to your solicitor, that’s what they are there for!

Further Reading

This is part of a 4-story series:

1. What is copyright, and how do infringements harm you?
2. Protecting your copyright in a Digital World (this article)
3. Just because it's in my RSS feed, doesn't mean you get to steal it
4. Ignorance is no excuse

In addition, you might enjoy Police Fail: Copyright, what is that? and Even Schools Don't Care About Copyright...

Photocritic by Email!

I know a lot of you are deeply gutted whenever you miss an article on Photocritic. Well, I’d love to think that anyway. But guess what, now there’s a new way of staying up to date – by the power of Email! Such technology! Such splendour! Such a lot of words to basically just make an announcement which could have been done on Twitter! Oh well.

What would MacGyver do? Subscribe to Photocritic via e-mail, of course!

So, yes. In the sidebar of all my article pages, you will now find a small form with the header ‘Get Notified’. (so, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, this probably doesn’t apply to you, because clearly you’ve already found a way to stay up to date, but if you want to see the sidebar, you could try clicking on the permalink to the article you’re now reading. Ooh! Articles linking to themselves! How incredibly ouroborosesque)

In summary, there are three ways of reading Photocritic:

• Check back often (three times a day would be nice, and will do wonders for my statistics
• Get the RSS feed
• Subscribe via e-mail (see the sidebar)

That’s all, folks!

- Haje

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

When RAW is not enough

One of the first pieces advice I give to people who wonder where to start getting their photos to become better, is to shoot in RAW. There’s many obvious reasons for why this is a good idea.

With RAW, the final result can be sharper, you have better control over white balance, you get wider dynamic range, you can do HDR photography, and, well, it’s what all the cool kids done. Recently, however, I have moved away from shooting in RAW for several reasons. Or, to be precise, I have started shooting in RAW+JPG.

Here are some compelling arguments for why you should do the same… 

Becoming a better photographer

Holding a bunny to your face while wearing full Motorcycle protective gear is a great way to become a better photographer. Aw, c'mon, give me a break, what would YOU use to illustrate this article? (clicky for bigger)

RAW is great because it is lenient – you can over-expose a photo quite significantly, and still rescue the highlights, because you have significantly higher bit-depth (and more information) than you would do with JPGs.

This is a life-saver for press, event, and action photographers: The fact that you aren’t completely buggered even if you’ve screwed up the exposure a fraction is a godsent!

The problem is that I’ve recently talked to a lot of photographer of the ‘new garde’. People who have rarely – or never – shot on film, and are unaware of how often RAW is helping them out of a hole. There’s two ways of looking at this: Either, use the extra flexibility RAW gives you on a regular basis, and accept that we’re now in the digital age. Or shoot as if you’re still shooting on film, and use the extra flexibility as a safety buffer.

Bunny is sad because his compact camera doesn't take photos in RAW. (clicky for bigger)

I’m a strong believer in the latter: Ultimately, when you present your photos, you have to save them as 8-bit colour anyway, so you’re in fact re-compressing the image back into a lower bit depth. This isn’t a bad thing: the human eye can’t really cope with more than 8 bits anyway.

The problem is that it’s difficult to estimate how much of the photo is over-exposed when you’re relying on RAW to save you – and there will come a day where you are relying on it, and you’re off. There’s only so much recovery you can do of a photograph, and if you miscalculate, you don’t have a safety buffer anymore.

Personally, I’ve become a huge fan of trying to take perfect exposures out of the camera: Shoot as if the JPEG is your film. Get the white balance right. Get the exposure right. Sharpen the JPG in-camera. Set the saturation and contrast you like. In short; Make your JPEGs be as perfect straight out of the camera as possible. In addition to making you a much better and more conscious photographer, this has several benefits. To wit:

Better previews

Getting the white balance right on shots like this is challenging, but hellasatisfying. It's good to know you can fall back on RAW if you did make a hash of it after all (clicky for bigger)

RAW photos are unsharpened out of the camera. This is a blessing, because as we discussed in the article on how you can sharpen your photos, you should never sharpen your photos twice. Your JPGs are sharpened in-camera, which means that if you sharpen them on your computer, you’re not getting as high quality as you could. Not a good thing.

In situations where you're taking lots of photos (like when snapping gigs), it's a relief to have JPG preview - it saves you from opening hundreds (or even thousands) of RAW files to find out which ones turned out well.

The flopside of this, however, is that RAW photos can look flat and lack energy. The photos that really zing are the ones that are tack-sharp – and if you’re only looking at RAW photos, you may actually miss the photo that is sharpest, because it hasn’t been sharpened to its full potential.

When you shoot RAW+JPG and your JPEGs are perfectly exposed and whitebalanced, they are the ultimate previewing tool: Full resolution previews, beautifully sharp, which your computer can deal with very quickly. Even better, if you need to e-mail or upload previews of a shoot anywhere, it’s an order of magnitude faster to resize and compress JPGs than RAW files.

So, Shoot with JPG, keep them, and use them for previewing purposes. If you decide to edit any of ‘em, use the RAW files, but at least you’ll have a much better picture (har har) of the potential of your photos

Submitting photos to magazines

Enough with the useful captions already. Here's a picture of a guy in Vietnam with 10 (yes! Ten!) cases of beer on his motorbike. (clicky for bigger)

So you occasionally shoot paperazzi stuff? You do events? You shoot news? Honestly, you don’t want to piss off the picture editors: if you send them a photo they’ll have to do a lot of work on, you’ll need to have a damn fine explanation… And find yourself some other customers, because they won’t use you again.

They’re on extremely tight deadlines, and they prefer photos they can just drop into their page layouts without fiddling with them too much. Shoot perfect JPGs, and that’s usually good enough for magazine use.

Let them know that you have a RAW file if they need it, of course, but 99 times out of a hundred and twenty two, they won’t want it – they don’t need the hassle.

Workflow speed

My university professor stole a wise saying from someone else once: Work smarter, not harder. This saying really is eminently applicable here.

I don’t care how fast your computer is – RAW will slow you down in one way or another. If you organise your photos so you can preview the JPGs, you’re making your life a lot easier.

If the JPG looks out of focus, the RAW will be too – that’ll save you a few seconds opening the RAW file to check. Multiply that by 300 photos, and you’ve saved yourself 10 minutes. Presto!

There’s no reason not to

This model wants you to shoot RAW+JPG. Just look at how stern she looks. Would you dare not to? Thought so. Grab your camera right now and change your settings. (clicky for bigger)

Set your camera to RAW+JPG, and bring plenty of memory cards. They cost next to nothing these days, and if you do a shoot where you know you don’t need to keep the JPGs, you can always trash them after you’ve downloaded them – sort ‘em by size (the RAW files tend to be 3-4 times bigger than the JPGs) and delete half the smallest files. Or sort ‘em by type and delete all the JPGs. Whatever you prefer.

If you have enough memory cards (and you should. Really. If you don’t, head over to Amazon and be Amazed (groan) at how cheap they are), there really is no reason not to shoot in RAW+JPG.

Go on. Give it a shot. And let me know how much time you’re saving :-)

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

365 project

For the longest time, I’ve thought that I wouldn’t have it in me to do a 356 project – i.e. a photo per day for a whole year. If I think about the past five years, for example, there has never been a whole year where I would have been consistently able to post a photo per day. I mean, hell, my whole Flickr stream dates back to August 2006 and only 728 photos in it. That’s an average of 0.6 photos per day or so.

I’m not even sure if I want to subject the world to a project like that. I don’t really like posting photos to Flickr that I’m not reasonably happy with (even though I, too, have a load of junk in my Flickr stream, of course)… Could I really get 365 photos together over the course of a year?  

Then I started to think. I mean, I have a lot of respect for people who pull off ambitious projects, and I’ve seen shots from 365 projects that are creative, fun, moving, intense, moody, acrobatic, inspirational, retro-tastic, and ethereal.

How many days in 2010?

So, for 2010, I have decided to join the fray. And Randy made the silly suggestion of being my running mate, which gave me an idea… Perhaps more people fancy joining in.

Since there is no way in heaven or hell that I’ll be able to post a photo a day for a whole year, I can’t make that commitment. What I can do, however, is that I will post 365 photos to my Flickr stream in 2010. I’ll even make an attempt to post an average of 30 photos per month. I might even manage to do an average of 7 photos per week. And hey, even if I fail miserably, I could turn my attempt into a custom calendar – a perfect gift idea with the holiday season coming up!

That sounds like a lot of mathematics…

One of my less hopeless self-portraits of 2009, taken in Vietnam (clicky for bigger)

… And how do I know whether I’m running behind or not? Well, of course, there had to be a geeky solution: I made a simple counter to keep me (and you, if you like) on track… So if my 365/2010 project has fewer photos in it than the counter would indicate, feel free to give me a firm kick up the jacksie to keep me going!

I need more running mates!

As mentioned, Randy offered to join the fray, but I’d like to keep track of more of you guys who are about to start a project for 365… Post a comment, send me an e-mail, poke me Twitter, send me some smoke signals, or organise a carrier pigeon to let me know!

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Learning by example

Some people learn best when they start at the basics: This is a camera. Press this button to make it go ‘click’, and it takes a picture. Change the aperture to… etc. Me, I like to work the other way around – I learned a long time ago that photography – like computers, cars, etc – is interesting mostly for its results, rather than for its technology. Who cares if your camera can do 1/4,000 second or 1/12,000 second shutter times… Unless, of course, you need the faster shutter time to achieve something.  

Learning by example, then, is the act of starting at the other end of the learning process: Find a photograph you like, or come up with a crazy idea, and then start stepping backwards: What do I need to do to create the photograph I have seen / imagined / come up with.

What’s the point?

Boats on Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. Taken with a Canon Digital IXUS at ISO 200, f/8 and 1/30 second exposure, at widest possible zoom

The interesting thing of learning by example is that there’s a pretty good chance you miss whole fields of photography. If ISO or lens length isn’t relevant to the shots you’re taking, you’ll never have to learn them… It’s kind of like mathematics: I could never wrap my head around calculus. Not because I don’t have the brain capacity (or, at least, I would like to think), but because I never saw the point. Just like I never saw the point of geometry, until someone managed to bring it to life by explaining how I could apply it to my life – suddenly, I had a need for a bit of knowledge, so I went out to acquire the necessary information and understanding, and was able to do the calculations I needed.

I’m a strong believer in doing the same thing with photography: If you don’t think you need something, well, you probably don’t. You’ll eventually find out that the techniques you’re using at the moment are limiting you – or making the things you’re trying to achieve more difficult – but that’ll be new motivation to learn something new again.

So, how do you do it?

My sister in Vietnam. Taken at ISO 100 with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens stopped wide open, aperture mode. Shutter time was whatever the camera suggested. Slightly desaturated the RAW file to get a more timeless 'feel'

Well, it’s easy: Find a source of inspiration. Personally, I use all sorts of sources: Magazines are a great starting point (especially amateur photography magazines like Digital Camera Magazine or similar – also check out PhotoRadar). Flickr, of course, is a marvellous source as well. The problem with on-line, however, is the nature of computer screens. Call me old-fashioned, but I really prefer the high-resolution way of looking at photography: Prints, books, magazines, etc.

The other problem is that, even on Flickr, not that many photographers take you through their way of thinking, or their technique for getting the shot (I love the idea of the How I Took It group, but so far, only 22 photos have been posted, which seems like a huge shame). Luckily, you can often ask questions, and many are good enough to help you along, but that’s still not an ideal way of getting tucked in. (Of course, I’m also guilty of this, but if you find any photos in my photo stream which you’d like explained and deconstructed, I’d be more than happy to – leave a comment and I’ll dig out the info!)

Using books for inspiration

Photos that Inspire is one of the few books I'm aware of that goes into detail about the individual photos, with how, why, where and when they were taken - perfect to start learning

There are a lot of fantastic photography books out there, but many of them are by a single photographer – the problem with that is that they have only a limited number of styles, and most of them say nothing about how the photos were taken – you’re expected to enjoy them as art, rather than as part of a learning experience. As you get better, this is a sensible approach, but when you’re starting out, it can be mighty frustrating.

The best one I’ve found that does things a little differently is Photos that Inspire (Amazon US / Amazon UK) is in the same series as my macro book – the Photo Workshop series published by Wiley – and it’s a peach.

For one thing, it has a couple of my photos in there (which obviously makes it a much better book already) but the important bit is that it contains tons of photographs taken by professional photographers – who explain why and how the shots were taken. It’s like a small art gallery with a personal guide by each of the individual photographers – and a fantastic place to start learning, of course.

How do you learn?

So, that’s my take on it – How do you prefer to learn about photography? Where do you get your inspiration? There’s a comment box down there somewhere…

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.