Archive for Opinions and Rants

The white balance of your eyes…

People have been thinking about how we perceive the world since the dawn of time. You can go all the way to ancient philosophy, with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, for example, where Plato wonders whether if you never saw the 'real' world, whether you would know. Or, indeed, even care. The senses are curious, because how would you know whether you see the world the same as somebody else? To me, for example, the rainbow never really made much sense: Sure, it looks the way I have always seen it, but that doesn't mean it makes any sort of logical sense. How do I know, for example, that what I think of as 'red' isn't what the rest of the population sees as 'blue'. Of course, I've been pointing at colours and naming them since I was barely able to talk, so it's pretty well-ingrained that 'red' is 'red', and that 'orange' is 'orange'... But what if they aren't? Deep philosophy about the very core of colour theory aside, I know for a fact that I don't see the world the same as other people. Specifically, I know that what I see isn't the real truth, because both of my eyes are giving me a different impression. Yes, really. Two eyes, two realities I noticed many years ago that my eyes are subtly different from each other: My left eye has a 'colder' colour balance than my right eye. I've spent a bit of time experimenting, and it appears that there is about an 800 kelvin difference between the two. That means that if I look at the left photo with my left eye, and the right photo with my right eye, these two look identical: It's been a bit of a curiosity for me for a while, and a while ago, I tweeted about it. As a result, I got a pretty big response, with the vast majority of responders saying something along the lines of "omg, me too!". That got me to thinking... Seeing as both my eyes are different from each other, there's a 100% chance that one of them is 'incorrect'. On the other hand, there's nearly as big a chance that both my eyes are 'incorrect'. Of course, white balance can be measured objectively, but ultimately, as photographers, we make a subjective judgement call on how we want to white balance our photos. How can you test it? Honestly, I have no idea how you can test it scientifically - but I find it's most noticeable when I'm indoors, in medium-to-low light (presumably because my pupils will be bigger, but I have no physiological explanation for why this might be the case). Hold a hand in front of one eye, then move it to the other. You'll see the picture 'jump' slightly to the side, but if your eyes differ from each other, you'll also see the colour temperature change slightly. Have you done the test now? Swell - give us your results here, so I can see exactly how much of a freak I am, in the grand scheme of things :) n{democracy:80} So what does that mean to me as a photographer? Nothing, I think. There are ways you can correct for your colour vision, apparently (you can wear slightly tinted glasses or contacts, for example), but ultimately it makes very little difference: Your eyes are absolutely incredible at capturing light, and your brain can handle colour balancing perfectly fine most of the time. In fact, your eyes / brain combination is vastly superior in this respect than a camera / computer combo. I just think of it as a curiosity, and secretly, somewhere deep inside, I'm quite pleased that nobody in the whole world sees their surroundings exactly identically to what I do.

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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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Why I don’t need an expensive camera.

On My Flickr Feed, I some times get questions about my use of camera. "Why", it is asked, "do you shoot with a 450D"? I understand the question completely. When I was photographing professionally, I wouldn't have dreamed of using the then-bottom-level camera (the 300D, at the time, I think) even as my back-up camera. The 10D (and later the 20D and 30D) was my the back-up and second-lens camera to my 1D. So how did I end up photographing with the bottom-of-the-range model from Canon only a few short years later?

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Protecting your copyright in a digital world

Hi. I'm Haje. I'm a writer and a photographer. I am probably not the best writer in the world, and I'm certainly not the best photographer in the world. And yet, I make my living as a writer, which means that I'm good enough that quite a few editors and publishers out there think that it is worth paying me money to write. A lot of my writing goes into magazines and books, but I also do a lot of writing for free, especially here on Photocritic. Why? Well, I have a lot of words in me which are pining to escape, and I rather like having an outlet where I am my own editor: I decide what gets published, what gets said etc. And I take a perverse pleasure from looking at the statistics. Put together, my top 3 most-read articles (smoke photography, macro photography and top 50 websites) have been read more than a million times. That's a lot of people reading what I have to say about photography. Of course, whilst the content on Photocritic is 'free as in beer' for my end users, I do enjoy some benefits from running a moderately successful blog. My books are selling quite well, which is at least in part because people become aware of me and my blog. I make enough money via Google AdSense to pay for my hosting costs and to buy a bottle of beer every few weeks... And, well, I enjoy the fact that people are reading and commenting on my stuff: Without my blog, I wouldn't have nearly as big an audience, and I enjoy the feeling of being 'on the pulse' of the photography community across the internet. When people steal my content on the internet, I get very angry. At some point, I decided to fight back. This post explains why and how.

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The case for Pentax

When I recently posted my guide to choosing your first dSLR, I was ripped to shreds in the comments for overlooking Olympus and Pentax... Which is quite wrong of me: Pentax have long made some pretty awesome cameras, with features that Canon and Nikon haven't had (like being able to remote control external strobes - a feature Canon has never had until the introduction of the Canon 7D!) Someone who was particularly outraged is the most fabulous John Cavan, who wrote a passionate and well-articulated plea to stop ignoring Pentax - and he's got a pretty damn good case, actually... here's why:

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Laser-engraving my MacBook

Those of you who follow my Flickr feed will have seen a couple of photos of my Black Macbook (affectionally known as BlackBook the Second), as it's going through the process of getting the Photocritic.org URL engraved on the back - WITH LASERS! Obviously, everything to do with lasers has to be in all caps. Those are the rules. Sadly, it seems as if something Bad Happened when I had my laptop engraved - luckily, the technician who did it has a solution: Why not colour it in with a Sharpie? Back story I've had my BlackBook for quite a while now, and I was considering replacing it in favour of one of those rather tasty-tastic new 13" Macbook Pro computers... One of my friends recently bought one, and my credit card has been sizzling in my pocket ever since. On the other hand, my current BlackBook is still relatively current, and it's been upgraded to the max (I don't remember what it started its life as, but it's now a 2.0Ghz/4GB RAM/250GB HDD monster, which is perfectly adequate for most task, and still has reasonable battery life). So instead of plunging £1300 on the 13-inch MacBook Pro I'm lusting after, I decided to keep the BlackBook for another few months - or at least until the Apple Care runs out in March 2010. To celebrate potentially saving £1300, I decided to spend £100 on getting the BlackBook laser engraved, because, well, lasers are reason enough in themselves. I did a bit of Googling, and settled on using RazorLab; For one thing, if it's good enough for Apple, it's good enough for me, but also, they were among the first to get back in touch with me with a coherent response, and they're based only a 10-minute motorbike ride from my house. I drafted in a good friend of mine to try and help me design the logo; and while his design was absolutely wicked, it was a little bit too complicated. Instead, I ended up getting a vector graphic off istockphoto, and using that as the basis of my design. At Razorlab So, I booked my appointment, and went to see the lovely Soner who runs RazorLAB - he's a true inspiration of a man; some of his product designs that were kicking around his office were positively brilliant. He took a look at my mock-up design, and discarded it out of hand; turns out that the machine can only handle vector graphics - luckily, I had also sent him the font I use on the logo and the vector, so we re-created it on his computer. Then, a whole lot of precise measuring, placing the laptop inside what is, essentially, a fancy laser-printer (literally! It even uses printer drivers, which really amused me for some geeky reason) which can burn through all sorts of material. Thankfully, the engraving on the laptop was done at 30% power; I didn't fancy having 'photocritic.org' permanently etched into my motherboard either. About 45 minutes, a lot of interesting discussions about lasers, product design, Life as a Laser Etcher and £95 later, I was back on the street outside of RazorLab, with a freshly engraved MacBook and a renewed spring in my step. The results When we were doing the etching, Soner did warn me that engraving large surfaces could cause some streaking; he also showed me an aluminium casing which had some slight streaking on it - not so much that I would be worried about it; it still looked pretty awesome. On my laptop, there was some white on some of the engraving, which Soner said was dust - so when I got home, I tried to clean it off, but to my surprise, it was going nowhere - whereas half of the laptop is very subtle (in fact, it looked bloody awesome - you can tell something is engraved on there, but you have to look quite closely to see what is engraved; it looks brilliant), the other half is streaked and milky white. I tried cleaning it a couple of times, but the streakyness continued - so I e-mailed Soner to find out what I should do. Not much, as it happens: He said that "The problem with engraving big areas is that as the laser head moves away from the origin point (in this case top-left), the engraving results in different streak patterns -because of acceleration and speed changes at far corners". It seems as if the problems are quite rare, too: "so far, we did not have any complaints with regards to this issue as people usually treat this as part of the process -it is within laser engraving's nature to do these kind of effects." Of course, I knew I was going to be writing this review, so I tried to find out if there was any way to solve the issue - To be honest, and as I told Soner, I don't mind the streak patterns, I actually think they are sort of cool, the issue is that they aren't really even across the whole back of the laptop - the other thing that confuses me is that when you do a quick search on Flickr for 'blackbook laser engraving', you'll see that there's loads of people who have quite elaborate engravings on the back of their laptops - both with big areas and smaller areas - and while streaking is evident in some of the photos, it's never uneven from one side of the laptop to the other; also most blackbooks seem to go a bright white when they are engraved (see this one, this one, this one, this one and this one, just to get a feel for it). I spoke to Soner about trying to find a solution, and he said that while it would be possible, in theory, to re-do the engraving; in practice it's impossible to line-up the laser with the previous engraving, so there wasn't much that could be done. What to do, then? "The only suggestion I could give is to paint the white areas with a permanent black marker. That should help to get rid of the gray gradient." So there we have it, I guess - As high tech as laser engraving is, if something goes wrong, the only thing you can do, it seems, is to break out your Sharpie. Needless to say, I'm not particularly happy with the final outcome of the laser engraving, but as you can see from the Flickr links posted above, it's possible to get gorgeous results. If anyone know what went wrong here, feel free to post a comment below - in the meantime, I'd probably recommend thinking twice about getting your expensive equipment laser engraved. Photos! For the photo gallery, check out these here pics on Flickr; or keep on scrollin': The original design I came up with, before we had to re-create it as a vector The design is ready! Soner preparing the LASER Results close-up Results close-up: the URL The back of the laptop I completely love the subtlety of the left-hand side of the laptop - just such a shame about the white streaky mess on the right-hand side of the lappy, where the logo is :( Looks pretty good when I'm working in a cafe - shame the logo is a bit lower than I had hoped (it is not really visible when the laptop is standing on a table - I'd hoped it was about 2 cm higher) Featured on the Consumerist! Seems as if one of my favourite publications - The Consumerist picked up on this story and did a short feature on it - which in turn attracted some good advice from Shane (see comment #2, below). Thanks for your help everyone!

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The best camera is one you actually use

Those of you who are following @photocritic on Twitter (or, in fact, if you were paying attention to the RSS feed), can't have failed to notice that I was out on the road. If you're making a particularly good job of stalking me, you'll also have noted a load of photos posted to my Flickr stream, most of which were taken with my iPhone, and some of 'em were taken with my little Canon Digital Ixus camera. Yes, that's right, I was out globetrotting - on a motorcycle, to be precise. Due to the extremely limited space I had available to me, I didn't bring my full assortment of lenses with me. In fact, I only brought a single lens; My mighty fine Canon 50mm f/1.4 prime lens (I know I keep banging on about it, but you need a prime lens). Then, as I was traveling around, something very, very interesting happened; I didn't use my SLR camera at all.

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Street photography and the law

A lot is said and written about photography and the law - and to be honest, you'd be mad to get involved in the fray. Of course, I am that mad, which is why the Rights vs Respect in Photography ended up published here on the site. Now, the other day, one of my readers, Brad, posted a rather fantastic and soberingly clear comment about what the law actually means to photographers. It was written from an US point of view, but frankly, the law is similar in much of the world. Beyond the law, however, you should be looking for a helping of 'common sense'. This 'common sense' thing isn't as common as its name would indicate, so hereby; a healthy dose of common sense and a quick refresher of what you can and can't do when you're out and about with your camera...

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When the media steals your photos

The story of a photographer whose photos went astray – and got re-published by one of the UK’s biggest newspapers without permission There’s something really difficult about looking after your copyright on the internet. Every single word I’ve ever typed in this blog, for example, is duplicated at least a couple of times around the web. The problem is that words are easy to find. Pictures, on the other hand, are a different tumbler of guppies... As Maciej Dakowicz found out, when his photographs suddenly surfaced on the Telegraph’s online edition...

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Enough with the megapixels already

I'm all for camera phones - for a photography nut such as myself, there's nothing quite as awesome as always having a camera in my pocket - but things are getting a little bit silly now. Earlier this month, Sony Ericsson showed off a prototype of a 12 megapixel camera phone, and apparently the Swedes are planning to have 20 mpx crammed into phones in time for the 2012 olympic games. So why am I being whiney? Well, just like horsepower isn't everything on a car (a Mazda MX-5 would trash a 1000 horsepower drag racing car on a twisty race track) and clock frequency isn't everything on computer processors (a 2 Ghz current-generation processor wipes the floor with a 4Ghz Pentium 4), Megapixels by themselves mean absolutely nothing.

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