Archive for Recommended by Photocritic

50 must-read photography books

Cameras are digital. Developing is digital. The internet is digital. Surely, we've moved on beyond a world where we have to look at books for our photographic enjoyment, improvement, and development? Well, you'd be right in one way, of course: You can find nearly everything you might want to look at / learn about on-line. And yet, there's something unique about photography which makes books all that more enjoyable. For one thing, I believe the vastly higher resolution of a well-printed photography book is a more natural way of looking at photography. Best of all? Books don't have to be expensive. You can buy 'em for cheap via the internet (type in the ISBN number into a search engine), you can buy them second-hand via the Internet (Amazon has a huge second-hand market of used books, and eBay ain't bad neither), you can mooch them for free via sites like BookMooch, or you can head to your local library (you do have a library card, don't you?), and check 'em out for free.

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Recovering lost images from a memory card

The biggest 'Oh... Shit' feeling I've ever had on a photo job was when I had a rush-job: Press deadline was at 5pm, and I had to photograph an event at 3pm. The event was meant to last until 4pm, which would give me half an hour journey time back to the office, half an hour of Photoshopping... Tight, but doable. Then the worst thing imaginable happened: The event was delayed in starting, and my time was ticking away. When I finally got in the taxi on my way back, I decided to clean out all the photos I knew I wasn't going to use from the memory card, using the camera itself, so I could spend less time downloading and sorting, and more time just fixing it, so we could drop in the images and get the magazine to print. I selected a batch of photos. "keep that one, lose that one, keep, keep, lose, keep, that'll do, Format. Yes, of course I want to format. Yes. Confirm.". I sat back in the cab, mentally going through what I had to do when I made it back to the office. Then it suddenly hit me.. 'Format?' Shit! No! Surely not... NOOOO!!!! Here's what to do if you are as big a plum as I am...

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Travel Photography Tips

Whenever I travel, I have a very loose approach to packing my stuff. Mostly, I pack in less than 20 minutes - regardless if I'm going away for a night or three weeks. There are four checks: Passport, tickets, credit card, and camera. It's just the way it goes, you can't get by without either of those items (except perhaps tickets, if you are travelling with an airline who has embraced eTickets). If your journey is especially designed for photography, however, the task may be slightly different.

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Picking an SLR camera

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.

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Never miss an issue of Photocritic!

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.

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Taking photos through windows

When you're inside a city, getting high up is easy, but you do have to suffer taking photos through windows. It isn't that difficult, but you do have to do it right. Your biggest enemy when trying to catch photographs through windows is reflections, but if you know how to get rid of them, you're laughing. With a bit of practice, you can make your cityscapes look as if they've been taken from a helicopter - like the photograph to the right, which is an impressive city-scape of Chicago!

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My book on sale NOW!

Hi guys, Sorry about the lack of updates recently, it's been rather hectic in Haje-World recently: I've recently moved, and I've got a new job, so I've been a bit stacked with stuff to do. Finally, I haven't got the internet sorted at home yet, so I'm typing this from an internet cafe with sticky keys, bad coffee and worse music.

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Do snappers have a responsibility?

For photographers who sell microstock, or who sell a photo every once in a blue moon, getting serious pay-outs for a single photo may sound as a dream. For those of us who deal in licenced photography, however, serious levels of payment aren't unheard of. Personally, my best-selling set of photos have netted me a fair sum of cash: They're very specific, and get sold again and again. Today, I stumbled across the work of Thomas E. Witte, in a brilliant article over on Sports Shooter. Witte managed to snap a couple of photos that turned out to be pure gold dust: A high school football player who doesn't have any feet. The photos netted him $12K. What makes me wonder, though: Could it be argued that the photographers have an obligation to their subjects directly? Should Witte give the football player some of the money he earned in this case? Or does the opposite apply -- like for photographers who cover conflict zones -- that if you get involved, you are immediately unable to do your job properly?

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Learn photography step-by-step

I think it's pretty safe to say that I've got a new favourite website: instructables! It uses a flickr-style, very web 2.0 approach to doing 'do it yourself' guides: Hover-over-image items for descriptions of what you are looking at, and many of the instructables available guide you through projects baby-step by baby-step. There are a lot of them available already, mostly for geek projects. Luckily, there are some wicked photography DIY projects as well - well worth a peek!

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Showing Panoramas on-line

If you're anything like me, you at some point discovered a button alowing you to take panorama pictures. Perhaps you try it once or twice, and then you think 'well, that was fun, now what?' and promptly forget about it. You did, didn't you? I knew it. Finally, there's a solution...

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