Photocritic photography blog

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 »

Retro is the new modern. Just look at the new design of this website! Anyway, as far as we can call the 90s retro, there was a distinctive trend in photography that developed rapidly, and has since all but vanished: The ring flash.

Giving an even, smooth light without casting shadows, and giving the funkiest reflections known to man, ring flashes are expensive, but cooler than a penguin’s testicles dipped in liquid nitrogen. The phat bit is that you can make them yourself. You’ll look like a right plonker when you use it, but never you mind - it’s all about the results, isn’t it? Read the rest of the article »

Lomography has been covered at length before, but people keep giving me fantastic tips about lomo photos, so I just can’t help but going back to the topic again and again.

This time, I got a tip about someone who’s made a digital version of the Lomo Coloursplash - essentially a cheap camera with a coloured gel in front of the flashgun.

What a brilliant idea! Read the rest of the article »

As a response to our Darkroom on a budget post, Stefan asked us if you need to have an enlarger in the dark-room.

Well, technically, you don’t, but it depends on what you wish to do with your dark-room. To be honest, I never owned an enlarger myself. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Read the rest of the article »

We’ve told you what Lomography is, how it works, and we’ve even established that, while the results are rather special, Lomography doesn’t magically defy the laws of physics (aw, shucks).

But what do you do if you cannot be bothered to actually buy a Lomo camera?

Enter the 21st century: What we can’t do with cameras, we’ll replicate digitally! The upside of this is that there are quite a few different ways to Lomotomize* a photo! Read the rest of the article »

Displaying photos is becoming a strenuous task. With services such as Photobox, you can print your photos cheaply, but who wants a stack of paper anymore? Alternatively, you could go the digital photo frame route, but the price of these devices is a bit silly, for what it is.

Unless… Well, the answer is in the head-line, really. Why not make your own? Read the rest of the article »

I only recently stumbled across Zerotopia. Despite being a commercial website, they do have a rather specialised information section, attempting to help models - and people who would like to become models - along in their quest. Read the rest of the article »

I am quite fond of bicycling (I recently did the London to Brighton bikeride), so when I stumbled across a guide to making a steadycam mount for a bike, my curiosity was instantly set ablaze.

The creator explains:

I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn’t want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn’t want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build my own “steadicam” camera mount that would absorb some of the shock, providing a better quality video.

Read the rest of the article »

Introduction

The Unsharp Mask is an old photography trick that has become available to ‘the common man’ through the introduction of digital editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop.

In this article, I will share with you my knowledge and experience of the Unsharp mask tool in the darkroom, and also a thorough introduction to its digital name brother, the Photoshop USM filter. Read the rest of the article »

Dust on a DSLR’s sensor is one of those unfortunate facts of life that basically every owner will have to deal with at some point. Shooting outdoors, changing lenses, and even simply using your camera puts you at risk for dust on the sensor. If you don’t have dust now, you will later so be proactive and learn now what you’re options are for dealing with it. Read the rest of the article »