Archive for Meta

No longer looking for n00bs (thanks!)

Edit: I'll keep this post here for posterity, but I have all the help I need. Thank you all so much for your feedback and interest! So, I'm a writer. I write books about photography. And I get a lot of e-mail from people, asking if I can recommend a good book for someone who knows absolutely nothing about photography. Sadly, I can't say that I've found such a book quite yet. The problem with photography books out there is that they are either too technical too early (I happen to find shutter times deeply fascinating, but it's too hands-off for many people who want to get out there and take photos), or they are too tutorial-driven. Several of the most popular photography books for beginners are written in the form of 'hey, see this photo? Isn't it awesome? to take it, set your camera to X, Y and Z, and press the shutter', without actually explaining why you need those settings, and what would happen if you changed them slightly. Only today, a good friend of mine, Sally, asked me if I could recommend a book. that re-awakened the idea I had: Maybe the time has come that I write my own book for complete beginners.

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Photocritic by Email!

I know a lot of you are deeply gutted whenever you miss an article on Photocritic. Well, I'd love to think that anyway. But guess what, now there's a new way of staying up to date - by the power of Email! Such technology! Such splendour! Such a lot of words to basically just make an announcement which could have been done on Twitter! Oh well.

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Book: Put another dime in the jukebox

Some of you have caught on to the fact that I'm sort of fond of this whole concert photography thing - and I've written about it at length here on Photocritic, and I've got a big(ish) portfolio of concert photos over on Flickr. One thing I've been meaning to do for a while, though, is to distill my photographs and what I know about concert photography into an article. As I was working on said article, I realised that, well, what I'm working on isn't an article at all. It's a book. Which is fair enough, I thought, I'll just create a book on it instead. So, I give you: Put another dime in the Jukebox: A guide to concert photography by yours truly.

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The man behind the blog.

The other day, I received an e-mail Stephan D, one of my readers, with a load of questions about me and my photography career. I occasionally get questions about who I am and why I run Photocritic, so I figured that I might just do a post about the man behind the blog, as it were. What photographer(s) inspires you to create images? There are a lot of photographers out there who really do it for me. I'm particularly fond of Philip of Lithium Picnic fame, and Ilyssa (isky on dA) also has a beautiful portfolio of photos. I love collecting my fave photos on Flickr (as you can see in the side-bar of this post). To be honest, I take inspiration from lots of different photographers. The 'best of' or 'most popular' images on Flickr and DeviantArt are always a good place to star the flow of creative juices. Of course, Earthshots is also a great starting point...

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King of the Road!

As some of you will have caught via Twitter or Facebook, I've recently left my job as a Senior Producer at Channel Five, and am about to set up on my own, as an editorial consultant. Sounds posh, means very little indeed, beyond the fact that I'll be spending a lot of time writing books, and being a freelance journalist / writer / busybody and MAN OF LEISURE. Before I embark on my new career as the boss of the freshly minted Kamps Consulting Ltd, however, I'm going to ride my rather awesome yellow Kawasaki Versys (FAQ: No, they don't come in yellow. Yes, I painted it myself. No, it's the kind of paint they use to paint lines on the roads with. Yes, I did paint it with paint rollers. Well, if you don't come too closely, it looks quite good) all around northern Europe. I'm setting off in exactly a week (the 10th of June), and will be gone the rest of the month, so there won't be too many tweets or Photocritic updates in June - apart from this page, of course, where you can keep track of my progress!

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Photographers on Twitter Database

Sorry about the twitter-focussed posts as of late; I have been very busy with work (I have to wrap a lot of things up before I'm leaving there to look after Photocritic and being a writer), and I haven't had much time or energy to do a lot of photography writing. On the bright side, after the 'twitter on photography' thing became so popular, I decided to do a bit of PHP/MySQL magic, and I've integrated the list with Twitter itself.

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Name your Dream Assignment – Winners!

If you can remember back to mid February, I did a post called If you can dream it, you can do it - which, among other things, called out for entries for the Name Your Dream Assignment competitions. I was one of the judges, and Christ with a jetpack, if people didn't come up with some absolutely awesome ideas...

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Photocritic Logo: The Making Of

I've had a lot of great, very nice comments about my new logo, and a few questions - Oliver, who made the logo, kindly agreed to talk about it a little bit. If you don't care much about design or logos, feel free to skip this post :)

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Photocritic Greatest Hits vol.2

Early last year, I did an article titled 'Photocritic Greatest Hits' - which basically just listed the most popular articles on this site. The reason for repeating it is down to a comment by Sharon on Twitter, who mentioned that she loved Strobist, but hadn't really gone through much of its backlog - which is a shame, really, since the Strobist blog is positively awesome. While I'm no Strobist, I'd like to think that Photocritic also has some articles in its history that are worth visiting - so hereby, a list of 'if you read nothing else, read this' Most commented, most viewed, and most awesome - all for you!

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Photocritic’s new logo

If you're a regular to the Photocritic site, you'll notice that this page looks a little bit different than usual - well, if you're reading this on the page, that is. If you're reading it in a feed reader, then it'll look perfectly normal, but in that case, just this once, come have a look, because I'd like to show you something I'm a little bit proud of; the new Photocritic logo.

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