Photocritic photography blog

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at portraits over the last couple of days for various reasons I shan’t get into in details, but there’s one pet peeve I’m afraid I’m going to have to share with you…

Why are people always so damn serious when they are being taken photos of? Does nobody understand the art of portraiture anymore? Read the rest of the article »

Geekery and science meets photography: Cross-polarization is a fantastic little technique that exploits a quirk in the way polarizers work.

Think of light as wooden ice-cream sticks that are flying towards a set of bars. The bars will only let the sticks that happen to be aligned with the bars through, and absorbs all the other sticks. Before the filter, the light is moving in lots of different polarizations. After it has passed through the filter, all the light is moving in the same linear polarization. Read the rest of the article »

Right, I don’t have a lot of time to do a post today, but I just thought out something pretty cool - You all know what I look like, but I have no idea what you all look like. So how about a square portrait challenge?

Rules: The picture has to be perfectly square, has to be in black and white, and has to feature yourself.

…. Go!

My entries, to serve as some inspiration, or something, are below. Take the photo, post it on Flickr, Deviantart or something, and then post a comment below! 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 »

It’s so simple, yet so effective - grab a burning torch, use a tripod, set to a long shutter time, and write in the air. What more could you possibly want? It’s FIRE!

Now go outside and play!

Read the rest of the article »

As you are all probably aware of by now (mostly because I just won’t shut up about it), I’m writing a book. Part of the whole process means that I’m taking a lot more photos than normally, and I am playing with some pretty nifty equipment while I’m at it.

Last week, I was in Holland for a couple of days, and was digging through an attic, where I found an old saw. A plain, boring wood-saw. I cut something in half (I was helping my mother doing some DIY), and then spotted tha the blade was quite rusty. ‘Hmm’, I thought, ‘This whole rust thing is actually quite nifty’. So I decided to try and take a couple of photos. Read the rest of the article »

I quite frequently get e-mails for people who want me to promote their site, and I can’t blame them. After all, this website rules more than words can possibly describe (I guess I’ve been reading a little too much of Maddox‘ work recently).

A large proportion of the sites I get e-mails about are various competitions etc, and most of them are complete and utter rubbish. So when I got an e-mail from Will, suggesting I have a look at his photo of the day competition website, I was elated - finally, a decent example of how it should be done! Read the rest of the article »

So, you’re a fan of independent cinema, are you? How do you feel about turning your photos into what could have been still frames from an indie movie?

I found a tutorial that does just that over on Art World, but to be honest, I thought it wasn’t well enough thought through, and in addition, I immediately spotted a couple of possibilities for improvement… So here’s my take on the same subject! Read the rest of the article »

A lot of people are into autocross and rally racing, and even more are into photography. This article fuses the both of them, into a fantastic guest article written by my good friend Alecu.

If the thought of hanging out in a cloud of dust and flying pebbles, as hundreds of horsepower blast past you, you don’t wanna miss this article… Read the rest of the article »

Philip is one of the photographers I’ve been following for years and years. He is a tremendously good photographer, and he has been an inspiration to me for years.

I’ve mentioned him before, as part of our writeup on concert photography, as the guy is a fantastic concert photographer. That only deals with a tiny fraction of where his real skills lay, however… Read the rest of the article »