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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?

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Visualising studio lighting

Once you feel you've started to get the knack of pointing your camera at things and clicking the button, it's time to start taking control of all the lighting in the scene. But, as it turns out, that's bloody tricky. I keep having to explain how to 'visualise' different types of lighting to people, and it turns out that it's rather difficult - not because what I'm doing is particularly advanced, but because sometimes, it's just tricky to make the connection between what is happening in a photo, lighting-wise, and how the lights are set up.

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Backing up your photos

As photographers, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to take the most beautiful photos ever. How often do you back them up, though...? If you have to think for more than a fraction of a second to answer that question, the real answer is 'not often enough' Here's a couple of tips to poke you in the right direction.

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Darkening a room by adding light

I was doing a photo shoot a few days ago, where I was photographing a lemon suspended from a piece of thread. I wanted to make it look as if it was hovering in pitch darkness. Upon seeing the results, someone asked me an interesting question: Isn't it difficult to focus your camera in the dark? Well, no, because the photo was taken in the daytime, with my lights on. So, how come does it look like it was taken at night? That, my friends, is the power of contrast in lighting. You have to remember that you don't need a dark room in order to make a background completely dark - you just need to ensure that your foreground is significantly brighter than the ambient light. Here's how and why...

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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.

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Why I don’t need an expensive camera.

On My Flickr Feed, I some times get questions about my use of camera. "Why", it is asked, "do you shoot with a 450D"? I understand the question completely. When I was photographing professionally, I wouldn't have dreamed of using the then-bottom-level camera (the 300D, at the time, I think) even as my back-up camera. The 10D (and later the 20D and 30D) was my the back-up and second-lens camera to my 1D. So how did I end up photographing with the bottom-of-the-range model from Canon only a few short years later?

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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.

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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's 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.

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Protecting your copyright in a digital world

Hi. I'm Haje. I'm a writer and a photographer. I am probably not the best writer in the world, and I'm certainly not the best photographer in the world. And yet, I make my living as a writer, which means that I'm good enough that quite a few editors and publishers out there think that it is worth paying me money to write. A lot of my writing goes into magazines and books, but I also do a lot of writing for free, especially here on Photocritic. Why? Well, I have a lot of words in me which are pining to escape, and I rather like having an outlet where I am my own editor: I decide what gets published, what gets said etc. And I take a perverse pleasure from looking at the statistics. Put together, my top 3 most-read articles (smoke photography, macro photography and top 50 websites) have been read more than a million times. That's a lot of people reading what I have to say about photography. Of course, whilst the content on Photocritic is 'free as in beer' for my end users, I do enjoy some benefits from running a moderately successful blog. My books are selling quite well, which is at least in part because people become aware of me and my blog. I make enough money via Google AdSense to pay for my hosting costs and to buy a bottle of beer every few weeks... And, well, I enjoy the fact that people are reading and commenting on my stuff: Without my blog, I wouldn't have nearly as big an audience, and I enjoy the feeling of being 'on the pulse' of the photography community across the internet. When people steal my content on the internet, I get very angry. At some point, I decided to fight back. This post explains why and how.

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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.

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