So, you have a new SLR camera… Now what?

If you’ve been extra super special good over the past year, you might have woken up to Christmas Day with a brand spanking new SLR camera under the Christmas tree.

I don’t want to ruin your sparkly-new-camera buzz, but may I please just take this opportunity to remind you that your shiny new dSLR is still just a tool: Sure, it’s a bloody good tool with lots of new buttons and levers and settings… It doesn’t matter whether you’ve just graduated from a compact camera or perhaps from an older, film-based SLR camera: It’s still all down to you: Your camera might be more powerful than the computers they used to put a man on the moon, but it will still only do what you tell it to. Think of it this way: switching from a 28 year old Datsun to a brand new Maserati won’t make you a better driver, and trading in your battered old Olympus Trip with a shiny new megapixel monster isn’t going to make you a better photographer.

What you have gained, however, is a tremendous amount of new potential. Your new tool will have a ton of new features. Buried somewhere deep behind all those new wheels and buttons is the doorway to life as a better photographer.

Here are the 10 next things you should do to become a better snapper:

1) Read your camera’s manual. I know, you’d be hard-pushed for thinking of anything more boring to do than read a camera manual, but I’ve made a habit of reading every manual of every camera I’ve ever had: It’s the only way to fully understand all the features of your camera and where to find them. Except the A-DEP feature (Automatic Depth of Field), of course. Nobody understands the point of that.

2) Start paying attention to what your camera is doing. Even if you decide to start gently and turn your camera to ‘P’ for Program Mode, it’s a good idea to start keeping an eye on the aperture / shutter combinations your camera is choosing for you. It may take you a while, but slowly and with some practice, you’ll be able to start guessing what your camera’s exposure choices are

3) Try Manual Mode. As soon as you dare, try turning your camera to Manual Exposure mode for a week. You don’t have to keep it there - most photographers use a range of different photography modes - but getting used to your camera controls goes a lot quicker when you have to change all the settings yourself. One top tip: Even in manual mode, you’re not on your own; your camera will still tell you whether it thinks you are about to over- or under-expose your photographs. Feel free to ignore it and expose however you like; it won’t mind. You’re the boss

4) Learn how to use the histogram on your camera. The LCD display on the back of your camera is great for checking colours and composition, but don’t trust it to show you what your exposures are like: Use your histogram for the scientific approach to getting your exposures right!

5) Don’t worry about wasting film. Yeah; I said it: New SLR users are often shy about taking photos, but there’s absolutely no reason to be. Look at it this way: if 1% of your photos come out as masterpieces, it’s better to take 5,000 photos than 50; if you take five thousand shots, you’ll have 50 great shots. If you only take 50, you may not have any. Best of all, the more photos you take, the more comfortable you get with your camera, and the better that percentage gets. Take tons of pictures, you can always delete the rubbish ones later.

6) Don’t be tempted to buy more kit. A SLR with a kit lens is an incredibly powerful combination. Sure, there are tripods, flashes, more lenses, and other gadgets you can buy, but until you are comfortable with… We had you going for a while there, didn’t we?  Ignore us: Buy all the awesome accessories you can lay your hands on, photography is a hell of a lot more fun with gadgets, and it’s a good way to learn as well!

7) Shoot in raw. No, seriously. Shoot in RAW. Stop reading this article right now, switch your camera to RAW mode, and don’t look back.

8) Get some good software. Personally, I’m addicted to Adobe Lightroom, but Aperture is pretty decent, too. You’ll want a solid piece of software to help you deal with those raw files, to make adjustments to your shots, and to help keep track of all your photos.

9) Sign up for Flickr. Flickr is a great way to show off your photos, and it’s great fun to track your own progress as you get better. The first 200 photos are free, and after that, you can get a Pro account for less than a week’s supply of lattes. Then, spam all your photography mates with your Flickr profile, and bribe, beg, or threaten them into giving you feed-back on your photos. Some sobering comments and constructive criticism is the fastest short-cut to better photographs.

10) Imitate your favourites. The quickest way to become a great photographer is to plagiarise the hell out of photographers you admire. Pick 10 photos you really admire, and go about recreating them: Learn the techniques you need, jump through all the hoops they did, and try to get your photo to be as close to identical as possible. Done? Great, you’ve committed copyright infringement. Ssh, don’t tell anyone. On the bright side, you’ve learned a load in the process, haven’t you? So now take the photo you just took, and add your own twist to it; replace, improve, or change something. Let it become the first step of an evolution of your photographic style - pick the bits you love from photographers you admire, and mash them together to create your own style.

Enjoy your new piece of equipment, but never forget that the bottleneck in this creative process is you: your shiny new toy is going to help you, but without you, it’s nothing. Show it who’s boss, and get out there and snap some fantastic shots.

Good luck!

This article was originally posted on the Usual Shutter Specs, an awesome photography gadgets site based in the UK.

Red versus Arri. In court, not the cinema.

Ooh, there's nothing like a bit of corporate espionage and cat-fighting amongst camera manufacturers to kick off the new year. Not content with seeing former Arri VP of Market Development for Digital Camera Products, Michael Bravin, done for computer fraud and email hacking, Red is alleging that he was engaged in unfair trade practices and the misappropriation of trade secrets - amongst other charges - too.

In September last year, Michael Bravin pleaded guilty to unlawfully accessing the email server of a third camera manufacturer, Band Pro Film & Digital, when he was in Arri's employ. After a bit of negotiation, he was sentenced to two years' probabtion for his misdemeanours.

Red, though, thinks that because at that time it was engaged in secret discussions with Band Pro about a potential joint venture, Bravin was also illicitly privy to sensitive information regarding Red's technology. Not only that, but he then passed on this information to Arri's Chief Technology Officer and its VP of Camera Products. Naturally it follows that Arri used this information to give its Alexa an edge over Red's Epic. If you ask Red, this puts Arri in the wrong.

There's more, too. Red is also claiming that Arri indulged in a bit of false advertising just before it launched the Alexa. It doesn't specify just what was false about Arri's claims, it all reads like standard PR to me, except that it said that the film I Hate You, Dad was filmed on an Alexa when it was really shot on Red.

My favourite claim, though, has to be that Bravin participated in discussion over on RedUser.net using a pseudonym (something's that's against blog policy) to slate the Epic and direct people towards the Alexa.

Red wants a jury trial to seek damages, disgorgement, restitution, and injunctive relief to cover all of these shenanigans.

In keeping with my proclivity to imagine corporate scandals and sagas as films, I was originally inclined to cast this one as a silent melodrama. The more that I think about it, though, it's a highschool drama, complete with cliques and foot-stomping.

(Headsup to Engadget and The Wrap)

Some of my best photos from 2011

2011 has been a pretty crazy year all around. This year, I have:

• been to four different continents and a dozen different countries
• taken tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of photos (and 6,000 of them were good enough that I decided to keep them in my Lightroom library).
• gotten engaged.
• I've (nearly) brought my photography gadget Triggertrap to market 
• Seen one of my books go on sale, and finished another one that'll go on sale in 2012. 

It's been an incredible ride. But really, in this post, I just wanted to share some of my fave photos from 2011 with you - they're in the gallery above!

Happy new year, and have a well-exposed 2012!

Rock on,

~ Haje

2011: my favourite photos

Out of the shadows

2011 has been a bit of rollercoaster. I completed a project I'd been working on for two years; I quit my day job; I wrote my first book; and I planned a six-month trip overseas. It has been stressful, fulfilling, and thrilling by turns.

Amongst all of the excitement and uncertainty, I even managed to take a few photos. I've shared a few of my favourites in the gallery above.

Which leaves me to toast 2012 - when I'll be skipping the UK in favour of the US, New Zealand, Australia, Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, and maybe even a late stop in Thailand - and thank you for joining for the ride so far. Next year should be even better!

Picking a picture project for 2012

New Year is just around the corner and there is perhaps a chance you're looking for a photo project to keep you inspired and develop your skills throughout 2012. My dislike for 365 self-portrait projects isn't exactly a well-guarded secret, but that doesn't mean to say that I don't see the value in embarking on some kind of project. Quite the contrary, in fact. So, after much trawling of the Intergoogles for interesting ideas, and even a little dreaming of my own, here are ten of my favourite potential photographic projects. And there's not a 365 (or 366, given it's a leap year) self-portrait project in sight.

Architectural features - The town where my parents live has an unusual number of buildings with clocktowers. (My brother and I noticed this, I kid you not, when we were devising a zombie survival plan.) These clocktowers are beautiful and would make for an interesting series of images. So would weather vanes, or doors, or windows. Any architectural feature that piques your fancy could prove a challenging project over the course of a year. Or even a lifetime.

Do a Monet - Haystacks, the waterlillies at Giverny, Westminster: he painted them at different times of the year in different lighting conditions. (And indeed at different stages of his life. If you're wondering why the late pictures of the Japanese bridge are so red in tone, it was as the result of cataracts affecting his vision.) Anyway. Pick a landmark or a landscape and set about photographing it at different times of the day, in different weather conditions, and throughout the year.

Fairytales - I've seen this one mentioned on countless different websites, so I can't give credit where it's due for the person who thought of it originally, but I love it. Gather your capes, dust off your wands, construct your gingerbread houses, and set up your tripods!

Numbers - There are lots of ideas for alphabet and number photo projects out there. For this one, though, I was inspired by the BBC website magazine's '10 Things We Didn't Know Last Week'. Each week, the article is accompanied by a reader's image of a cluster of ten things. It's included a pile of skulls (ick); the contents of someone's packed lunch (yum); ten chairs at a cafe (yeah); and a pile of ten puppies (cute). So start with one, and go as high as you can photographing randomly spotted numbers of items in groups.

Portraits without a person (or at least most of one) - Capturing the essence of a person doesn't have to mean photographing her or him. When you get to know people, you realise that there are things about them that somehow define them. My brother's recognisable by his curly hair and if I'm seen without a particular pair of earrings it's likely to be a cold day in hell. Go out in search of those things that help define a person and you have a whole new series of portraits.

Recreation - No, I'm not suggesting that you might want to recreate some of your favourite photographers' best shots. I'm going for something a little different here. Why not try recreating a favourite painting? I don't know, John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, any of Degas' ballerinas, maybe even one of Fantin Latour's flower paintings; whatever takes your fancy. Getting this one right might take a year of planning for one photo, but it's definitely a project!

Seven Deadly Sins - Anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. You might want to create representations of them in the studio, but you could take this as more of a social documentary project and head out to photograph evidence of them in your community.

The spectrum - One of my favourite competition themes that I've set was 'monochrome'. The idea wasn't to produce black and white images, but one in a predominant colour. Why not take this idea one step further? Produce a series of monochrome images that run through the spectrum.

Tell a story - Pick a favourite story and retell it using a series of photographs. You can make this as involved or as simple as you want, and if you choose a loved-one's favourite book, it could make a wonderful gift.

Your weakest technique - Which element of the photographic canon do you find most difficult? A few years ago, I decided that portraits were something that I needed to improve. So I set myself a challenge to take more pictures of people, to evaluate them, and to chart my progress over the course of a year. Last year, it was all about diversifying my use of studio lights and trying new techniques and ideas. And 2012? I might aim for landscapes. It's where, right now, I feel least confident. Ask me again in a year's time, and hopefully it'll be a different story.

If you're looking for even more inspiration, you could check out Rania Matar's wonderful A girl and her room, Gabriel Orozco's quirky yellow scooter photos, Irina Werning's brilliant Chini Project, or Pixiq's own Miss Aniela's extraordinary multiplicitous self-portraits. Not forgetting series of shoes, pin-hole photography, opposites and dichotomies, 100 strangers, shooting from the hip, or documenting a day in someone's life.

Just remember, when you pick a project, you're in it for the long haul. You want something that's going to stretch and challenge you, but isn't going to overwhelm or bore you, either. Learn, and have fun!

Evaluating your photos

As the end of the year rolls around, it becomes natural to take a look at what you've done over the past year... And as a photographer, taking a closer look at the past year of photography can be extremely exciting indeed!

Apart from just taking a closer look at your own photos, if you're in a self-improving mood (and you may very well be; the new year's resolutions are just around the corner, after all!), perhaps it's a good idea to take a closer look at your year in photos, with a critical hat on.

If you've never actively sat down and consciously evaluated your own photographs, it may be quite hard to get started. In fact, even if you've made a habit of doing just that, it may still be difficult to actually vocalise what makes a photo 'good', and how you can make it 'better'.

I was having this very discussion with a friend of mine online, who asked me 'but I don't even know where to begin to evaluate a photo. Have you got any tips?' I sure do;

Self-Evaluation Aide-Memoire

• What is the story? All photography is ultimately about storytelling in one way or another: If your audience is to connect with your photograph on an emotional level, there has to be a 'story'. As such, the first challenge is to identify what the story is that I'm trying to tell.
• Technical Quality Is the image in focus? Is the exposure perfect? What about noise and sharpness?
• Composition: Does the composition of the photo improve / help tell the story I am trying to convey?
• What was good? Even if it isn't perfect, there's probably something I like about this photo. What and why?
• The right tools for the job Could this photo have been better if I had used different equipment? If so, what is the difference between the equipment I did use, and the equipment I wish I had used? Why didn't I use that equipment? Can the effects be recreated with the equipment I do have?
• Hindsight Now that I am looking at my photograph over a cup of tea, is there anything I wish I had done differently, creatively?
• Did I tell the story? Now that I've answered all the other questions, the line of questioning comes in a full circle. It's time to go back to the first question, and determine whether the story was successfully told. If the answer is 'no', chances are that one of the questions between the first question and this one holds the answer to why the image 'failed'.

Especially when you are just starting out, using a form asking the above questions can be extremely useful in increasing the percentage of photos that come out great.

Don't worry if the process feels like it takes quite a long time at first; like anything you are learning, it will feel a little unusual and clunky at first, but once you grow accustomed to running through this little checklist, it'll become second nature to evaluate your own photos.

The secret to why this is so successful is that you're not just training yourself in evaluating your photos back in the comfort of your office chair – you'll also gain the ability to evaluate your photos as you are taking them! Bonus.

Faster than greased lightning: spending money on remote camera triggers

Stepping Stone's Lightning Trigger at $380. Just lightning, nothing else.

Right, hands up who's looking to spend their Chrisnukah pennies on a neat and groovy photography toy? Yep, just about everyone. There's a surprise. You know what is a surprise, though, it would seem that the adage that you get what you pay for doesn't necessarily hold true for camera lightning triggers. If you're in the market for a lightning trigger, there's a goodly selection of them out there (and what with 2012 supposedly being apocalyptic or something, you'll get plenty of use out of one, I'm sure), but as this rather convenient comparison table shows, spending more won't necessarily get you more.

The cheapest and the most expensive - the Stepping Stone Lightning Trigger at $380 and the Ubertronix Strike Finder at $110 - both respond to flashes of light and that's pretty much it. There's no sound trigger, no motion trigger, and nothing so exciting as a time-lapse feature.

Ubertronix offers two higher-specced versions of the Strike Finder, the Pro and the Elite, at $170 and $350 respectively. You'd think that the Elite version might be all-singing and all-dancing, but you'd be mistaken. It might respond to lightning, lasers, sound, and motion, but it can't do time-lapse. Funny, really, when the Pro can manage time-lapse and react to lasers, but sound and motion are out of its comfort zone.

Oddly enough, the most comprehensive trigger out there is at the cheaper end of the spectrum, costing $150. It's the Triggertrap, and not only will it respond to lightning flashes, laser beams, and sound, but you can deploy its time-lapse feature and it comes with an auxiliary port, too.

Dreaming Robots' Camera Axe starts off as a basic box to which you add your own components allowing you to build exactly the trigger that you want. It starts at $185, but by the time that you've added a cable and at least one sensor - one that responds to lightning, for example - you've spent close to $225. Add a motion sensor to that and you're looking at $245.

Of course, for the ultimate in geekularity, you could always build your own, completely, utterly, and totally from scratch. As in, printing the printed circuit board yourself, programming a microprocessor yourself, and buying all of the components that you'll need and getting out your soldering iron to assemble it yourself. Heaven only knows how much it'll cost you in components and time but it'd be yours. If you fancy doing that, head over to diy-doc.net and look for the SmaTrig 2.1.

Sure, if you only want to photograph lightning, why spend more than $110 on the Strike Finder? But are you certain that you're never going to want to try some laser-triggered photography, or something sound-reliant? No, I didn't think so. And I definitely can't justify $380 on just a lightning trigger.

The lovely lightning picture is courtesy of Andy Dopieralski, on Flickr.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

It's been a pretty intense month in my world the past month, and I think I've been working harder than I ever have before in my life. A large proportion of my time was gobbled up by Triggertrap (a full update about what's been happening on that front over the past month can be found on the Kickstarter site), and whatever I had left has been nibbled at by several exciting book projects I've been working on. There's three more books about photography in the pipeline, and it looks as if I may have some fiction in me as well, so that's all very exciting.

The fantastic Noah and Michael at NoMi design (the guys who have been absolutely insturmental in building and developing the Triggertrap) created me an awesome Christmas present: A motion sensor for the Triggertrap. You see that tab at the top? That's for hanging it from a Christmas tree, as a Christmas ornament!! How bloody geek-tastic is that...

Anyway; it all means that I haven't had as much time to post to Pixiq as I would have liked, but things look like they may be slowing down a little, so I'm going to take the rest of the year off, and I'll be back in full force in January.

In the meantime, if you're of the Christmas-celebrating type, I wish you a very happy one - and if not, have a fabulous rest of the year anyway.

Catch you on the flipside...

~ Haje

No more standing still to self-record with Swivl!

Ever wished that your camera could follow you around when you're making a video of yourself, without having to resort to bribing your loved ones or paying off your friends in their own weight in beer? Then you should check out Swivl.

It's an IndieGoGo-funded automated camera mount that will move to record you whilst you prance around your kitchen or boogie in the living room.

There's a base and there's a marker. You attach your camera to the base and the marker to you. Whilst you perform your all-singing, all-dancing recording activity, the base will swivel horizontally and vertically to follow the marker - and therefore you - ensuring that you're always in the picture.

Swivl will work with iPhone 4S and 4s and fourth generation iPod Touches. However, it can't cope with older iPhones or iPod Touches or iPads. Although it isn't Android-enabled at launch, the basic following capability will still work without any software, so provided that your Android phone isn't any thicker than 11mm, it can still follow you around.

Any kind of tripod-mountable pocket-sized video camera or sub-six ounce (170g) point-and-shoot will also attach to the base and let you record yourself in all your mobile glory. If you want to have a go with your dSLR you're out of luck, though.

Swivl's makers, Satarii, are anticipating that the device will ship early next year. If you're interested, you'll need to sign up now and when they're ready to go, you'll be asked to convert your interest into an order. But the bad news is that at the moment, they're only shipping to North America and there isn't any word on how much it'll cost yet, either.

Still, it's so cool when a crowd-funded project comes together!

Authorities raid Olympus' HQ

I'm guessing that 'Authorities raiding the office' was pretty close to the bottom of Shuichi Takayama's, the President of Olympus', wish-list. But that's just what has happened, as a team of prosecutors attempts to get to the bottom of the accounting irregularities that have pervaded the company for the past two decades.

Japanese TV recorded a train of officials tramping their way into the office. It wasn't just Olympus' Tokyo HQ that was over-run, though. The home of ex-President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and three offices of businesses that played their part in hiding Olympus' losses amounting to ¥117.7 billion (£960 million) were also raided.

Olympus has stated that intends to co-operate fully with the investigation and has issued an apology to its investors, shareholders, and customers for the 'troubles and worries' it has caused them. Their troubles and worries are far from over, I'd venture. Whatever the investigation might turn up, the raid isn't going to help Olympus' share prices, which have already taken a colossal hit since the scandal broke in late October. Furthermore, Olympus' revised accounts, submitted to the Japanese Stock Exchange a whisker before the 14 December 2011 deadline, have revealed a serious cash-flow problem that could prove even more serious without some rapid restructuring at the company. It's all looking a bit bleak. 

(See also the BBC and The Guardian.)

Wander - an app to let you explore the world through pictures

Did you know that there are 518 photography apps in Apple's App Store? (I checked this evening.) And that there are 222 paid-for photography apps in the Android Marketplace? That's a lot of photography-related technology floating around attempting to sidle its way into our lives. If something is going to take off and make it onto our screens and stay there, it needs to be a bit special, a bit different. Your average photo-sharing or photo-editing app just won't cut it. So I'm holding out a bit more hope than usual for Wander, which does seem to have the requisite degree of different.

I suppose that you could think of Wander as being a more technologically sophisticated version of having a pen-pal. Someone from half a world away will pop up on your screen and if you want, you can connect and then begin to share daily life and where you live through daily photo challenges over the course of a week. Maybe you'll enjoy lunch together or explore how you travel pictorially.

Your pal, or guide, might be from one of 80 countries, and the chances are that you'll begin to want to talk about things in more depth and learn more about their lives. To help that along there's linguistic support for English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Right now, Wander is only available on the iPhone, but an Android version is on its way. The app is free to download and getting started is simple. You have to answer a few basic questions - after all, you probably don't want to be offered a connection with someone ten miles up the road - and that's it. There's a whole new world waiting to be discovered, all through pictures on your phone.

Wet-plate photography

You're probably familiar with taking photos with a digital camera. If you're adventurous (or mature) enough, you've probably had a go at taking photos on film as well. As a true film aficionado it's interesting to dig deeper into the history of photography, and give wet-plate photography a shot, too. If you manage to avoid poisoning yourself or blowing up half your city, it can give awesome results!

Wet-plate photography is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: You don't use film; instead, you expose a wet film plate (usually a plate of glass or metal) that is covered in a still-wet chemical solution. You have to 'pour' the plate (i.e. add the chemicals), 'activate' them, expose your photo, and then develop it in a very short span of time - usually less than 20 minutes. That means that you can forget about taking a quick series of photos: Once you've prepared your plate, you have to run and take your photo, run back, develop it, and see how it turned out. If you messed up, you've wasted 20 minutes, and you have to start over again from scratch.

Because your final result isn't an enlargement of a photographic print, the detail in wet-plate photos can be absolutely astonishing - it is as if you are looking at an enormous negative, chock-full of glorious, glorious detail, often without a trace of 'film grain' - because there was no film involved in the first place.

Wet plate photography as it is done today is often known as the Collodion process, invented more than 150 years ago.

It's worth noting that wet-plate photography can be quite dangerous; you are working with volatile chemicals that have been known to catch fire, oxydise or explode (nitric acid, nitrocellulose and ethyl ether). Some of the chemicals used in these processes are poisonous (pyrogallic acid, silver nitrate, zinc bromide, cyanide and denatured alcohol), corrosive (silver nitrate), or bad for you in other ways - it's definitely a good idea to get someone who knows what they are doing to give you a tutorial - in person - before you try it yourself.

What do you need to have a go?

For starters, you would need a View camera (or 'field camera', which is the smaller, more collapsible version of the same). This will usually be a large- or medium-format camera that will accept your plates. It doesn't have to be big - the world's smallest wet-plate camera has a wet-plate size that takes half-inch square plate images, but part of the attraction is the huge sizes you can work with.

Glass plates will become your negatives or positives. For positives, you'd typically use black glass, or you can experiment with aluminium or polished steel if you want a different 'look' to your photos.

In addition, you're going to need a lot of chemicals; there's the Collodion mixture (consisting of pure alcohol and various chemicals), A Siver Nitrate bath used to make the plates light sensitive, a developer to develop the plate, a stop bath (usually just water), and a fixer.

To get a proper idea of what is involved, "The Wet Plate Collodion Process" by Quinn Jacobson on YouTube is a pretty decent introduction showing the photography process.

So; it takes a lot of practice to get right, it's dangerous to your health, and taking 10 wet-plate photographs will take approximately twelve thousand times longer than taking the same number of photos with your SLR camera. Sounds like a challenge!

Most local colleges and some photography clubs that have a photography department occasionally run wet-plate induction nights - or search online. There's a few very active forums where you can learn more, and perhaps you'll be able to find someone local to you who can show you the ropes before you blow up your face, set your poodle on fire, and poison most of your city.

Good luck!

Photo Credit: Andi Todea on Shutterstock.com

Letting kids loose with the Sakar Disney AppClix camera? Not my first choice.

Mickey makes it cute and all; but it still doesn't endear me.

Occasionally I read the spec for a product and I'm left with an overwhelming urge to try get inside the head of the designer in order to figure out just what it was that she or he was thinking when embarking on its birthing process. Sometimes it'll be a case of 'Wow! That's so amazing what inspired you?' Others it'll be a much more cyncial 'What, exactly, were you thinking there?' When someone pointed me in the direction of the Sakar Disney AppClix camera, it was definitely a case of the latter.

It's a Disney-branded camera, it comes emblazoned with Mickey or Minnie Mouse, Tinkerbell, a princess, or Phineas & Ferb. It's clearly aimed at kiddies. And I'm so in favour of getting little ones interested in photography that I'll always take notice of something intended to do just that. But this one has it, well, wrong.

Oh for sure the specs on this make it a fairly desirable piece of kit, with seven megapixels of resolution, 4× zoom, a micro SD card slot, and the ability for it to function without having to connect it to a PC, but it has one major flaw. It's designed to be attached to an iPad. Whilst it is certainly convenient to have a camera on an iPad, the iPad is in no way a convenient device to function as a camera. And it certainly isn't one that I'd thrust into the hands of an eager seven year old.

Its size, its shape, its primary function... just... no.

At $60, it is reasonable, especially because it comes with its own internal rechargeable battery, and there's a free companion editing app, too. But you attach it to a piece of kit that starts at $499.

Nope. When you've a youngun who really wants to have a go at photography, get a decent point-and-shoot at under $100 (I'm a big fan of the Fujifilm Z90), with an even better lens and video capability, too, and let her or him loose with that. They'll have a proper camera to call their own and you won't be fretting about your iPad. Everyone wins.

(Headsup to Engadget)

My week with Q

Small, very small

When you read the specs for the Pentax Q, you know intellectually that it's small, but it doesn't really hit home until you see it for yourself. It really is tiny. In fact, it's so dinky you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's a toy… before you hold it in your hand (just the one).

It definitely doesn't feel like a toy. There's a decent heft to it and nothing about its build feels tinny or plasticy. It's a camera that's been made to do business, despite its diminutive size. Fitted with the standard 8.5mm (47mm equivalent in 35mm format) f/1.9 lens, it slipped into my handbag or coat pocket, but not my jeans pocket.

So it came with me everywhere for almost a week, including a visit to my brother over the weekend, a walk in the park to photograph some wildlife, and a Christmas party where it generated plenty of oohs and aahs. It's these experiences on which I've based my review, so there aren't any painstakingly photographed charts to test white balance. But I'll admit to setting up a shot to test the filters when I felt a bit creative, and I wanted to take a closer look at the ISO, so I messed around doing that for a bit.

Hands on

I got used to the layout and menu system fairly quickly. Sure, it was unfamiliar initially, but that was to be expected. You choose your mode, from fully manual to fully auto, using the dial on the top of the camera, where there's also the wheel to adjust aperture or shutter speed. There's a dial on the front that can accommodate your favourite filters and a green button on the back that you can customise to access your most-needed function.

The four-way controller on the back covers white balance, ISO, flash, and the timer. There are also the information and menu buttons to take you down into the guts of the camera. Seeing as the camera's so small, it's hardly a surprise that its buttons are, too. I coped fine with them, but anyone who's a touch bigger than me or has finger nails a sliver shorter than mine might struggle, let alone if you're a body-builder in your spare time.

The flash has a pop-up facility, which I found suitably amusing and of course is useful for preventing the curse of red-eye and ensuring that your extra light won't just bounce off of a longer lens. I was slightly concerned that it might take out my eye if I were to deploy it in a hurry, though.

The response time between switching on and being able to take a photo was good, and navigating between and adjusting shutter speed, aperture, and ISO was intuitive. But when I began taking photos, I ran into a couple of problems.

Frustrations with focusing; irritability with exposure

First, I kept running into arguments with the autofocus. There would be occasions when it simply focused where it thought it should be focusing, not where I wanted it to focus. If I'd had it on auto mode, that might be just about understandable, but in fully manual, it's beyond comprehension and terribly frustrating. You don't get many second chances in photography and seeing them float by because of a tipsy autofocus was disappointing.

Second, every now and again the metering would seem to waltz away and have a party of its own, leaving my images wildly under-exposed. This wasn't nearly so prevalent as the autofocusing issue, but it did mean that I was more exasperated with a camera than was exactly healthy.

Post-processing fixes

So what of the images? I've taken some photos that I really like and my favourites are up there for you to see. The colours weren't muddy or washed-out, although the white balance was occasionally off by a quarter country mile - so much so that my poor brother looked green in a few portraits - but that was nothing that a bit of post-processing couldn't fix. The noise levels didn't want to make me scratch out my eyes until at least ISO 800 or 1000, which is entirely reasonable.

When I compared the RAW and jpeg images straight from the camera, what struck me the most was the barrel distortion from the lens. The warped horizons on landscape shots was very noticeable, and I found the bent look in my office floor almost alarming. Sure, the jpeg option straight from the camera does correct it, and it's something that you can fix yourself in the RAW file in post-processing, but it's rather significant.

Fun with filters

There are more filters and options to do crazy things with colour and processing in the Q than I think I've had hot dinners this year. At first it was almost overwhelming, but as soon as you surrender to your childish desires to combine posterising with bleach-bypassing, or grimace at just how hideous you can make a perfectly decent picture look with selective colour, it's a lot of fun.

Verdict?

When it came to packing the Q into its box and sending it back, I was a lot more reluctant to do so than I thought I'd be. Despite the odd temper tantrum involving autofocusing or exposure, I've enjoyed playing with this camera over the past week or so, and doubtless I'd continue to if I had it for longer. But I've a sneaking suspicion that a great deal of this fun is reliant on knowing that I've a proper optical viewfinder and a much better sensor waiting for me in my dSLR, and my S95 slips into my jeans pocket, has a lens that's far more versatile than the 8.5mm standard lens on the Q, and produces images of about the same quality. If the Q were my only camera, I think I'd spend a fair chunk of my time feeling frustrated.

There's no denying that Pentax, Nikon, Olympus, they're all on to something with teeny-tiny interchangeable lens cameras. These are a significant development in the photographic world, but they're not there yet. So I can't recommend that you buy a Pentax Q when for less you could pick up a Canon S100, a Nikon P300, or an Olympus XZ-1 that delivers just about the same image quality with greater versatility and in a more compact package. One day, maybe; but not today.

What now for Olympus?

If you were Shuichi Takayama, President of Olympus, what would you do now?

Olympus has just escaped, by a whisker, being delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange. The financial reports that were submitted on 14 December to prevent this grizzly fate showed an ¥84 billion ($1.08 billion) reduction in net assets, and a loss of ¥32.3 billion ($414 million) over the past six months. And as a consequence, share prices have fallen by another 20%; let alone the descent that they took between the end of October and now - as a financial scandal of epic proportions unfolded before the world - which would have made Bode Miller proud.

On top of this, your board sacked the guy who uncovered all of these financial misdealings, basically because he had the audacity to do it. Of course, he's probably the person with the nous to get you out of this hole. Sorry, crater.

Olympus is running short on cash, your net assets are currently valued at ¥46 billion, and you need to do something, fast.

You've hinted at the possibility of a merger, either in the form of a capital tie-up or an operational or sales tie-up. This would help to bring the firm some much-needed cash, but at the cost of its independence. And who would you seek out for this tie-up? Hoya has just cut loose Pentax, so has the cash, but does it have the interest, and Fujifilm is on the up-and-up. But is this going to be best for Olympus?

Michael Woodford, the CEO whom you so unceremoniously sacked in October, has been quite open about his willingness to resume a role at Olympus, but it would be at your expense. He thinks it would be best to wipe the slate clean with a mass culling of the board, and the independent inquiry commissioned to find out just what was going on in your company suggested something similar. You of course would rather stay where you are, or at least ensure that who ever is in control next is of your choosing. Does this really help Olympus?

Woodford knows that Olympus needs to recapitalise, and swiftly, but he's against any kind of merger that would threaten its independence and he doesn't want to break up or sell the company to which he dedicated 30 years of his career. Instead, he'd seek out private equity or even consider a rights issue, when existing shareholders are issued warrants to buy new stock. Would he manage it? Who knows. Who knows if the rot hasn't set in too badly and Olympus isn't beyond redemption. But maybe he has the best chance.

If you want to rescue the company that we all suspect you love, Mr Takayama, from an ignominious fate, it might be optimal if you and the rest of the board fell on your swords. It might appear a drastic action, but the situation is dire. Piecemeal offerings, the continued taint of scandal, and puerile attempts to ensure some degree of control of the company even after you've gone won't help. Go now, and go with grace.

(More on the BBC and from Reuters.)

The world's slowest fastest camera

So we get excited by cameras that have burst speeds of 60 frames per second at a resolution of three megapixels. How about a camera that can shoot a trillion frames per second? That's fast enough to capture a burst of light travelling through a Coke bottle, bouncing off of the cap, and reflecting back into the bottom. In slow motion.

It's something that Andreas Velten, Professor Ramesh Raskar, and Professor Moungi Bawendi have been working on at MIT.

Problem is, apart from costing $250,000, it also takes about an hour for the camera to capture a sequence of events that takes, ooh, about a nanosecond.

The camera that they use is a streak camera. Its aperture is a narrow slit; photons pass through it and through an electric field that deflects them in a direction that's perpendicular to the slit. Later-arriving photons are deflected more than earlier-arriving ones. But this means that the two dimensions in which it captures images aren't both spatial; one is spatial (the one corresponding to the direction of the slit) and the other (corresponding to the degree of deflection) is temporal.

So that it can record that beam of light in the coke bottle in a format that we'd recognise as 2D, the sequence has to be recorded again, and again, and again. Each time, the camera has to be moved slightly so that a 2D image can be constructed. That, of course, means that it isn't exactly useful for anything that isn't perfectly repeatable. And hence the moniker 'the world's slowest fastest camera.'

It might have the ability to make anything in the universe look slow, but it takes a while to manage it!

For scientists, the streak camera can record light passing through or being emitted by a chemical sample. But what about practical uses for photographers? One day, it might be at the foundation of developing better flashes. As Professor Raskar put it: 'With our ultrafast imaging, we can actually analyse how the photons are travelling through the world. And then we can recreate a new photo by creating the illusion that the photons started somewhere else.'

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(Headsup to Engadget, and take a look at the MIT news site for a far more in depth explanation.)

Photographing Lightning with the Triggertrap

The most frequently requested feature on the Triggertrap is a deceptively simple question with a wickedly complicated answer: “Can the Triggertrap be used to photograph Lightning”. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this one, because it’s not as easy to answer as you’d think.

The problem is that cameras are not as fast as you would like. No matter how fast the Triggertrap reacts, an SLR camera has to do several things before it is ready to take a photo: Flip the mirror out of the way, and open a shutter curtain, among other things. These things don’t take a lot of time, I’ll grant you, but it’s not for nothing that “fast as lightning” is a pretty standard expression. Lightning is fast. Very, very fast.

The Triggertrap unversal camera trigger is also very, very fast – much faster than your camera, in fact. It can react in about 2 milliseconds, which makes it fast enough to use it as a slave flash trigger. However, only a flash reacts quickly enough to the Triggertrap; a camera will always have a delay. And I probably don’t have to mention that there’s no point in trying to trigger a flash in response to lightning: we have light a-plenty, but what we really want, is to get the camera to trigger.

Enter the Triggertrap: Taking luck out of the equation.

My standard method of taking photos of lightning is basically to dial in a long shutter speed (10 seconds, perhaps), and then just hold down the shutter button and cross my fingers. Eventually, you’re bound to get lucky, and get a beautiful lightning photograph.

Of course, the ‘spray and pray’ approach has its problems: There are short periods of time between exposures where you aren’t taking photos, and it’s sod’s law that that’s exactly when your lightning will strike. This gets more complicated as well if you are shooting in raw (and you should…), because depending on your shutter speed, you might find yourself running into problems with your buffer filling etc. Anyway, if we plot this approach on a graph, we get something like this:

Gaps. Gaps are bad.

So, how can you hedge your bets? Well, it’s simple: Use two cameras, and trigger them alternately. It’s pretty easy to do this using some electronics; set a timer, and make sure the cameras alternate:

No gaps! That's an improvement.

Of course, that still isn’t perfect; as we already discussed, cameras have tiny delays between shots, and if you trigger them electronically, there would in theory be no gaps. In practice, however, there are going to be times when one camera is closing its shutter, and the other one is still flipping up its mirror, and you’d still be missing your photographs. Useless!

The next logical step, then, is to make sure they overlap a little:

Ah! That's better!

Now, every milisecond of the thunderstorm would be captured; and we’d even have a tiny little bit of overlap for good measure. Fabulous.

Adapting the Triggertrap

“But Haje”, I hear you cry. “The Triggertrap only has one camera port, how are you going to get around that one?!”

Well, true, it does only have one camera port, but it does actually have two triggers built in: The Focus and the Shutter triggers. If we decide that we don’t need the ‘focus’ trigger (because we’ve pre-focused our cameras”, that frees up one of the triggers. All you’d have to do then is to create a cable that enables you to plug in two Triggertrap cables into the same Triggertrap. Easy:

By using 3.5mm sockets, you can continue to use the Triggertrap cables you already have; plug it directly into the Triggertrap to use it as normal, and plug it into the above-described gadget to split the signal so you can plug in two cameras.

The rest is all software

By overlapping the shots, you can guarantee to capture whatever is happening in the night sky; whether it's star-trails, a meteor shower, a lightning storm, or anything else you can think of!

The Triggetrap doesn’t have a Lightning mode built in, but it is fully Arduino compatible, and as soon as we get a final version of the software, we’ll open up our Github repository and open-source the code so you can hack it to your heart’s content.

Since we haven’t yet got a final version of the code, I’m not going to post my hacks here (yet! I’ll do it as a proper tutorial once we have a final release version of our source-code) – but you’ll be pleased to know that it didn’t take me very long to get a working version of the Triggertrap Lightning Trigger to work.

Now all I need is a lightning storm so I can test it properly…

Learn More

To learn more about the Triggertrap, check out Triggertrap.com. If you want one, try the Triggertrap Shop!

Rights and Respect in photography

Today, I stumbled across an article on Found Photography, titled ‘Your rights as a photographer‘. At first, I was intrigued, thinking that it would have something to do about copyright.

Instead, it turned out to be about photographing Amish people, who, according to the article, "The Amish don’t like to be photographed because it might cause them to be tempted by pride". The article then finishes with some tips about your rights, if you come across Amish people in public places, and what your rights are regarding photographing them.

This reminded me of a different discussion I had a while ago, which regarded photographing people who didn’t want to be, also for religious reasons: Some Native tribes, for example, believe that a photograph of them means you steal their soul. It would, therefore, be less than wise to photograph them.  

The rights, as described in the article, are as follows:

1. Almost anything you can see you can photograph. If you can see it, you can take a picture of it. If you are standing on public property you can photograph anything you like, including private property. It is important to realize that taking a picture is different than publishing a photo, which leads to point number two.

2. As long as you are not invading someone’s privacy, you can publish their photo without permission. You can take someone’s picture in any public setting and publish it without consequence (even if it portrays the person in a negative way) as long as the photo isn’t “highly offensive to a reasonable person” and “is not of legitimate concern to the public.” You can even publish photos if you took them on private property. While you may be punished for being on private property, there is no legal reason why you can’t publish the photo from prison!

3. As long as you aren’t using someone’s likeness for a purely commercial purpose, you have the right to publish the photo. You can use your photos of other people without their permission for an artistic or news purpose, but you can’t use them for a commercial purpose (such as an ad). You could sell a photo of a person without their permission, but you couldn’t use the photo in an ad saying the person endorses your product.

Whilst this is all correct, and really important to keep in mind, there is a different consideration to keep in mind, which brings me to the point of this article...

Respect in Photography

As a photographer, I have experienced feeling that I have touched people in a ways I wish hadn’t. An accidental invasion of privacy, so to speak, which made me feel as if I had commited the rudest form of sexual harassment – without even being aware of it.

In photography, One day, you can take a photograph of someone who is not wearing any clothes, but it will be okay. The next day, you can take a picture of someone who is fully dressed, even if you don’t see their face, and it is the worst of possibly imaginable sin. What is okay in one situation can be wrong in another.

The legal aspect

Many countries in Europe have added the European Convention on Human Rights as part of their set of laws. This convention has something that is devastating to privacy, called Section 10.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include to receive and impart information without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” In practice, this is roughly the same as the 1st Amendment in the American Bill of Rights – the freedom to expression.

The conclusion drawn from the 1st amendment and Section 10 is that you can always take pictures. Even on private property, you have the right to photograph anything you can see.

Despite of something being legal, it doesn’t mean that you should, though.

The moral aspect

Several minority cultures believe that taking a picture is the same as stealing somebodys soul. Taking a picture of a member of such a culture is inexcusable. Upon having taken the picture – as far as they are concerned – it is too late.

If you, as a photographer – especially as a professional photographer – make the mistake of taking a picture of a member of such a minority group, you have fucked up beyond forgivenness. Call it a breach of professional conduct, or a kick to the shins of common sense.

Other times, however, you meet people of whom you really couldn’t have known their aversion to photography. I have experienced taking a picture of a couple looking wonderfully in love. When they realised I took the picture, the male half of the couple came over and asked me for the film. Apparantly he was married, and didn’t want me to publish the picture. What was I to do? I decided to promise him to not use the image, and deleted it off my camera. Not a legal choice - a moral one.

In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t been a photographer for all that long. Situations like that will arise again, I am sure. And I am certain that modesty, along with a dose of appropriateness, will get me through those situations.

I have a few friends who work as wartime photographers. In the job, they see some of the most horrible things known to man. The pictures in the newspapers are the mild versions of some of the pictures I have seen people come back with. And the pictures never go outside their photo albums. Why? Because some things don’t need to be shown.

A man far wiser than me said to me once: "These things are not secret, but they are sacred, and should not be taken lightly".

I know of no respected photographer who didn’t have respect for the subjects s/he photographs. And – even if you aren’t the best photographer in the world – showing respect will get you the respect you need to get a good start in the lion’s den that is Photography.

A photo competition for December!

It's a blackberry-studded chocolate meringue layer cake. (Made by me.)

So how about a bit of a photo competition? With a theme? And a prize? Yeah? Great!

Seeing as it's December, and December is my birthday month, we'll go for one of my favourite things as the theme. Food. From cake to carrots to crab. It doesn't matter if you're preparing it, eating it, or admiring it. We want something that's beautiful and clever and, well, looks good enough to eat! The winning entry receives a photo of the photographer's choice made into a gorgeous 12" Fracture.

The details are easy: one submission per person to the Small Aperture Flickr pool; the competition opens today (Wednesday 7 December) and closes on Wednesday 28 December 2011.

There are a few rules. Nothing complicated, we just have to have them. So:

The Rules

• If you decide to enter, you agree to The Rules.
• You can’t be related to either me or Haje to enter.
• One entry per person – so choose your best!
• Entries need to be submitted to the right place, which is the Small Aperture Flickr group.
• There’s a closing date for entries, so make sure you’ve submitted before then.
• You have to own the copyright to your entry and be at liberty to submit it to a competition. Using other people’s photos is most uncool.
• It probably goes without saying, but entries do need to be photographs. It’d be a bit of strange photo competition otherwise.
• Don’t do anything icky – you know, be obscene or defame someone or sell your granny to get the photo.
• We (that being me and Haje) get to choose the winner and we’ll do our best to do so within a week of the competition closing.
• You get to keep all the rights to your images. We just want to be able to show off the winners (and maybe some honourable mentions) here on Pixiq.
• Entry is at your own risk. I can’t see us eating you or anything, but we can’t be responsible for anything that happens to you because you submit a photo to our competition.
• We are allowed to change The Rules, or even suspend or end the competition, if we want or need to. Obviously we’ll try not to, but just so that you know.

If you've any questions, please just ask!

Olympus' management was rotten, but it wasn't linked to organised crime

The full report is 178 pages long; the summary is 38 pages. Olympus' own investigation into just what has been going on in its company was conducted by five lawyers and one accountant. It unearthed lots of very dodgy financial transactions and a culture at the top of the management tree that resembled a mediaeval personal monarchy, but the concerns that Olympus was somehow linked to 'antisocial forces' (that's the delicious euphemism for Yakuza) seem to be unfounded.

The broad summary of just how the management conceived to cover up losses that amounted to around ¥132 billion (roughly £1.09 billion; $1.7 billion) amounts to a structure that wasn't subject to sufficient checks and balances on its activities; a culture that was intolerant of questioning (hence Michael Woodford's dismissal); an executive that ran the company almost as its own fiefdom, without consideration for the company, its employees, and its shareholders; a succession of auditors that do not appear to have their jobs properly; not making proper financial disclosures to the Tokyo Stock Exchange; and inadequate staff rotation that allowed misdemeanours to take place unchecked.

At the centre of the book-cooking were Hisashi Mori and Hideo Yamada, the former vice-president and internal auditor respectively. They dreamed up an elaborate scheme that concealed the losses Olympus had accrued from high-risk investments in the early 1990s. Through a combination of external agents' advice and Olympus' own poor management practices, they were able to get away with it for over 13 years.

It was when Michael Woodford was appointed as CEO in October, and dismissed two weeks later for rocking the boat when he asked some pertinent questions about the acquisition of a British medical imaging company called Gyrus, that the scandal came tumbling out into the public sphere. Since then, the company's shares have plummeted and it is at risk of being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, not to mention undergoing investigation by the Japanese authorities, the SFO in London, and the FBI in the USA.

Meanwhile, the investigating committee has recommended an overhaul in the senior management, changes to the company's management systems and mindset, an end to nepotistic appointments, and for those who were involved to be held legally responsible.

Doubtless Olympus is heaving a sigh of relief that nothing else unsavoury was trawled up in this investigation, but there's still a long way to go to recover their credibility and the company's share prices.