Photocritic photography blog

Okay, so technically it’s ‘hacking’ rather than cracking, but that’d ruin my beautifully alliterative subject line.

Anyway… If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box.

With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on it.

Pure, unadulterated awesome - check it out here! (via)

We’ve all seen the seductive photos of vividly colorful fresh vegetables, sumptuous cherry pies, and golden-brown roasted turkeys. These pictures, often found in glossy cookbooks and magazines, make us believe that if we follow the recipe we, too, can create such delectable dishes. And many of us can. Well, almost.

A peek behind the kitchen door would reveal the sometimes bizarre tools of the food photography trade that transform fresh baked brownies and juicy crown roasts into science fair projects masquerading as culinary delights. Food is among the more difficult of subjects for photographers. The laws of nature guarantee it: Hot foods cool, moist foods dry out, frozen foods melt especially fast under hot lights, vegetables wilt, and fruit turns brown. But determined food photographers rise to these challenges with their extraordinarily inventive bag of tricks.

And yes, that includes motor oil, spray deodorant and and brown shoe polish… Read the rest of the article »

A lot of people take photos. No, seriously. A lot of people. But the number of people who actually do something with their photographs are an absolute minority. I decided to catch up with a friend of mine - Jason - to see how he turned his hobby into a multi-million, global sales success. Okay, so I’m full of it: he barely even breaks even. But still - he’s found a cool way of trying to do something with his photos. And that’s worth taking a closer look at, methinks! Read the rest of the article »

I’ve written about bulk loading before, and praised Josh Wand’s excellent FAQ, only to find it vanished off the internet. While it’s probably a slightly dodgy thing to do, from a copyright standpoint, I think it’s more important that the bulk loading FAQ stays available on-line, so I’m mirroring it here for everybody who needs it.

If you have further tips for how people can do their own bulk loading, please e-mail me or drop a comment in the, er, comments, and I’ll update this FAQ Read the rest of the article »

If you’ve got a compact camera, you know how bloody annoying it is to have to clean your lens. It’s tiny, and it seems to attract dust as if it was a lamp, and the dust were moths, confused by the lovely, bright source of light. Right? Right? Right.

There’s a ridiculously simple solution worth trying: When you know you’re going to be in a particularly vulnerable situation (a desert, a dusty place, or a night on the lash*, for example), you could do some pre-emptive maintenance: Just cover up your lens with a piece of high-quality scotch tape!

Important: Obviously, only use the following tip if your front lens element (that’s the glass bit) doesn’t actually stick out further than the lens barrel. Otherwise, you’ll make your lens sticky and dirty and the whole point is gone! Read the rest of the article »

The main problem of taking photos free-hand is that your hands aren’t particularly sturdy. Myself, I find using a heavier camera makes it a lot easier (the inertia of the camera means it is reluctant to move, so up to a point, a heavy camera is easier to hold still for the duration of a photographic exposure than a very light camera.), but what about lighter cameras?

The obvious answer is a tripod or a monopod, but these devices can be terribly heavy, and they are not particularly portable. One solution is to hold the camera against a surface (a tree, a building, or a signpost), but that doesn’t always work either, and none of these items offer an awful lot of flexibility. Read the rest of the article »

DSLR sensor chips collect dust. That is a Photoshop-time-consuming fact of digital life. At The Sun, whenever we send in our DSLRs to be otherwise repaired, one nice little bonus is that (along with the obscene repair bill) they come back with a freshly cleaned CCD.

Which, of course, lasts for about a week. Two if you are lucky. Read the rest of the article »

Photo frames are an easy way to add some gusto to your images. The future of this particular business, of course, is digital photography frames. You just upload some of your favourite photos to the frame, and then the frame cycles through the photos for you. If the frame is cleverly enough disguised and lit, it looks like a perfectly normal frame, with the only difference that the photo changes before your very eyes! Read the rest of the article »

So, you fancy yourself a bit of a photographer, do you? Awesome, that makes two of us. Or, judging by the number of people regularly visiting his blog, a few thousand of us. If you’ve ever played around with pinhole photography (and if you haven’t, you totally should), you’ll have stumbled across Paper Negatives - or the idea of using photosensitive paper rather than film - to make photos.

My good friend R. James Davis (check out his website, his photograhy rocks) recently wrote a wicked little piece about what Paper negatives are, what they are, and how (and why) they are used. Read the rest of the article »

If you’re used to manual lenses, you know how easy it is to stop them down. If you are a little bit more advanced than that, and have ‘graduated’ to more advanced lenses, stopping down a lens (i.e making the aperture smaller) while it is not attached to a camera body can get a little problematic. There is a way to do it, however… Read the rest of the article »