Archive for Featured Articles

Making money off your photos

To most photographers, Photography is - and always will be - a keen hobby. Some of us, however, are burning to take the hobby to the next level, and want to start making some cash from it. Perhaps not enough to buy a Ferrari, or even enough to pay the electricity bill, but at least enough to be able to buy a couple of photography toys along the way. I worked as a photographer full-time for a couple of years, and ended up deciding that the lifestyle wasn't for me. Even though I jacked in my career as a photographer, I'm still making money off my photos. How? Well...

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DIY Toy camera presets for Lightroom

Given the popularity of the Holga, Lomo, and the other toy cameras out there, I suppose it was only a question of time before some enterprising soul would release Hipstamatic, the app which lets you take cool, toy-camera like photos on your iPhone. There's something about that app which jars quite viciously with me, however: Unlike the 'real' toy cameras, this app doesn't actually alter the iPhone camera at all. And despite getting pretty awesome results (if you like that style of photography, of course), it's all post-processing. That got me thinking... It has to be possible to make my own post-processing presets for Lightroom, to turn my carefully lit, exquisitely sharp and ridiculously high-resolution camera RAW images into blurry, colourful, vastly attractive garbage. So I created a couple of presets for Lightroom 3 - and I'll walk you through the thinking behind one of them and I'll show you how to make your own. How's that for a double whammy of awesome?

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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.

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Implied nudity in portraiture

It doesn't take much of a brain to fathom what a 'nude' photo is. If bits that are normally covered up on the beach are on display, then it's a nude. Similarly, a 'non-nude' photo is pretty straightforward: There are no hoo-hoos, wee-wees or breasticles on display. So, what is all this 'implied nudity' stuff all about? Well, it turns out that there's an 'in-between' stage of nude photography: Implied nudity. Used creatively, it can add an interesting dimension to your portraiture. Here's how and why.

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Attracting better feedback

As photographers in this Internet age we read about photography, and share our work, in hopes of honing our craft. You could be pursuing a career as a wedding photographer or a sports shooter and either way you're searching for articles, subscribing to photography blogs, and participating in photo forums in hopes that there are gems of knowledge that will take your photographic prowess to the next level. What most photographers, especially those that didn't do any formal art training, are missing from their arsenal of learning tools, is the art of critique.

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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.

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Paid-for photo competitions

The blog you're currently reading is relatively high profile. I have written about photography competitions in the past (including the inspiredly-named 'How to win photography competitions', which, if you haven't read it, is worth a peek, if I may say so myself, and I may, because, well, this is my website, and I happen to quite like promoting my own articles in ridiculously long run-on sentences in parantheses when I really ought to be writing about completely different things, like the actual topic of this article, and I hope that you might in time forgive me for wasting your time with this aside). Anyway, as a result, I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions. Recently, however, I've received a series of e-mails (about ten in the past few months!) asking if I would pretty please judge their paid-for-contests. The idea is that aspiring photographers pay an entry fee (anything from $10 per photo via a $500 site membership to a $100 per photo fee structure). They then get entered into a photography contest, and the best photo wins.

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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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