Photocritic photography blog

Right, this is mostly a service announcement, so if you don’t use RSS or Twitter, feel free to ignore this post. Or you could, y’know, start using RSS and Twitter (Check out ‘RSS in Plain English and How to use Twitter on VJ).

SO… 2 things:

Twitter - Photocritic now has a Twitter account; you can see the updates in the side-bar (look for the Twitter-coloured box, you can’t miss it really) or follow me @photocritic. Go on, you know it makes sense. If you’re really curious, I’ve got a personal Twitter account too…

RSS / Syndication feeds - Turns out that the 30,000-odd RSS subscribers (Yes, really! Amazing stuff - thank you everybody!) are taking their toll on the server, so I’ve moved the RSS feeds across to Feedburner. I’ve done some clever redirection malarkey, so if you were already subscribing, you should just simply be redirected to the new feed, and you don’t have to do anything. If you’d rather get the feed from feedburner directly, check out feeds.feedburner.com/photocritic

In July about 3 years ago, I gave up my freelance photography business, Photocritic Ltd, and suddenly had a spare internet domain. As a promotional exercise for my company, I had written a few article for PhotoCritic, and I decided that perhaps it was worth putting those articles out there… An idea which came to fruition exactly 3 years ago today. So; what better excuse for a retrospective of what’s been going on, and sprouting lots of completely pointless statistics at you? Read the rest of the article »

Of course, Photocritic is your favourite photography resource in the whole wide world, and you’d be mad to think otherwise. Nonetheless, I have to admit that there are some pretty damn amazing websites out there. This is my attempt at collecting some of my favourites - which isn’t easy, considering how many bookmarks I have.

So, I give to you, 50 of my favourite photography websites - these should keep you busy for a while… Read the rest of the article »

Back in April, I did a Top 15 entry-level camera round-up, and it’s one of those posts where the comments stayed relatively calm, but I got tonnes of e-mail afterwards, with suggestions, comments etc. I was surprised at the level of passion people had about that one single article, but it got me thinking: I love trying to come up with interesting ways of doing photography, but what if people really want some buying advice? I discovered long ago that this particular blog isn’t really the place, but still… I figured I could do better than a top 15…

So I decided to launch a new website to help you out.
Read the rest of the article »

Hey guys,

Sorry about more of the geekery, but basically, I’ve spent the past 48 hours trying to make Photocritic better. Part of that was getting shy of my (ludicrously expensive) colo-server, and getting myself on a virtual server instead. One of the geeks I work with (thanks Stuart!) pointed me at SliceHost, and I’m an absolute convert.

I’ve had a couple of problems with getting Photocritic moved over properly (mostly due to the fact that I’ve never set up Apache myself before, so I’m stretched well beyond my usual geekdom), but I think most things should be working properly now.

If you do stumble across anythign that ain’t working as expected, please post a comment with a desctiption, and I’ll look into it.

Finally, don’t worry, I’m about to launch into a series of wicked articles - they is gunz beez awsum, as te lolcats posse would have said :)

Anyway, Slicehost come with the warmest recommendations, and now I’m going to try and move some of my other sites across. Wish me luck :o

- Haje

Lack of updates

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, I’ve been mad busy with my day-job recently (excitingly, we just launched our version of BBC’s iPlayer, known as Demand Five, yesterday), and I’ve got an exciting extension to Photocritic which is coming up soon, so I’ve mostly been doing behind-the-scenes work.

Read the rest of the article »

You’ve probably heard of RSS - also known as Really Simple Syndication. You haven’t? Oh my golly, you really should!

RSS allows you to keep track of your favourite websites, when it suits YOU. You don’t spend hours and hours checking your bookmarks and seeing if they have updated their site recently, just subscribe to the RSS feeds. Use Google Reader, or any of the others of dozens of RSS readers, both on-line and off-line, out there.

You don’t get full functionality, but at least you know when something has changed, and is worth having a peek at!

So… Take the RSS feed from /feed, and add it to your reader or client.

Or, if you use LiveJournal, why not add the LiveJournal-friendly syndication feed to your friends list?

Rock on.

Even though it won’t go on sale for another couple of months, things are starting to happen really quickly now. I’ve finished most of my involvement of the book, and I’ve handed it over to the project-, copy- and technical editors, designers, and publishing boffins.

They never told me quite how much work it is to write a book on macro photography. It’s been a hell of a ride, and I’ve loved every second of it.

I was first contacted by the publishers on the 10th of August last year. Today, nearly six months later, I am sending the last files of the last chapter to the publisher. Read the rest of the article »

The hawk-eyed among you will have noticed that we’ve got a couple of new features here on Photocritic. The most noticeable is a competitions calendar in the sidebar on the Photocritic home page.

You might have spotted that I’ve every now and again included some competitions into the site. This is because I love the idea of using competitions to turn you into a better photographer. Sadly, keeping a complete list of photography competitions up to date is damn near impossible, especially because that would detract from some of the other things I would like to talk about here on Photocritic. Instead, I’ve teamed up with the gang over at Photo Competitions. You should probably subscribe to their news feed anyway, but just in case you forget about entering a competition, you will have a reminder in the sidebar!

The other news item is that I’ve started promoting Earth Shots a bit more, by including their ‘photo of the day’ in the sidebar of the article pages. I really enjoy their photos, and quite frequently they serve as a reminder of why I became a photographer in the first place — to capture some of the beauty we surround us with.

Photo Competitions and Earth Shots — Welcome to Photocritic!

I frequently get e-mails about people who don’t quite grasp the concept of red eye — why it happens, and what you can do about it. I had to explain it to a friend in the pub last week, and drew a little diagram that made them go ‘ahaaa! I finally get it’ (yeah, i’ve got some really dim friends. Sorry about that.)

Anyway, I decided to implement the drawings into my existing red-eye article with the imaginative title “Red eyes and how to avoid them“, so if you feel like you could do with a bit of a brush-up on that aspect of photography, go re-read that article!