Archive for Photo Critique

Get a photo critique!

I have been doing Photo Critiques on this blog in the past, but it's starting to dawn on me that perhaps a blog isn't quite the right way of doing these, so instead I'd like to start doing them on Flickr. If you would like me to critique your photographs, here's how to get on the list...

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A shot at street photography

Recently, I realised that while I do an awful lot of writing about photography, I'm not actually spending all that much time actually taking pictures myself anymore. A sad state of affairs - especially as I recently bought a gorgeous Canon 50mm f/1.4 prime lens. (I could rant about prime lenses for hours, but I've done so in a previous post, which (if I may nest my parantheses and be so bold as to recommend one of my own articles) is well worth a read), and I have a fabulous city right on my doorstep. Anyway, so I have never really done that much street photography before, but I figured it'd be a crying shame not to have a go at it...

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When less is more

It can often be incredibly tempting to try and fit more information into a photograph. Understandably so - wherever you turn, you find a barrage of information. Minimalism truly is a lost art in photography, and you'd be surprised to find that it's actually quite difficult to get right. In this photo critique, I am doing things in a slightly new way, and I'm cherrypicking some of the best photos that have been submitted to me over the past couple of months. Together, we'll explore photographic minimalism, and how you can make hellastrong photos with less.

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Portraiture: Borrow their soul!

A few years ago, I was part of a creative arts project in Arizona and southern Utah, where we did a lot of work with Native American people -- a 'world through our eyes' type thing. One of the things that was brought up when we were dealing with more traditional tribes, was that we weren't to take any photos. Perhaps surprisingly, some people believe that when you take photos of them, you steal a part of their soul. Religions and superstitions aside, I think it's a good way to look at portraiture. Stealing souls is a bit harsh, but if your photographs don't at least borrow a little bit of soul from your subjects, I believe you may have failed as a photographer. For this article, I've chosen to do a critique some of the photos submitted to me by Isaac - an USC film student with a passion for photography. His images illustrate very well how adding a touch of feel (or soul, if you will) can lift your portraiture.

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Doing a photo critique

I've spent a lot of my days critiqueing stuff. Back in the days, when I did a lot of writing, I went to Folkehøgskole. (kind of like an artistic boarding school where you faff about for a year while you decide what to do with your life. As far as I know, it's a Scandiwegian concept -- I've written more about the folkehøgskole over on Everything2.com). Part of the school idea was to give each other feed-back on writings done in class. Giving feed-back on something is really easy. Giving useful feedback on a subjective matter -- such as photography -- is, in fact, extremely difficult. That's why I've created sort of a check-list with some tips as to how I like to do critiques.

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Rediscovering black and white

In our newest instalment of the photo critique series, I'm taking a look at a series of black and white photographs taken by Kevin Bost. In the process, I'll be exploring why Black and White photography still has a valid place in today's colourful society...

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Think of photos as paintings

There's a lot to be said for how the accessibility of affordable digital cameras has improved the level of photography overall, and I'm strongly in favour of the idea that digital photography is a good thing. The downside of digital photography is that we are seeing a whole generation of people who never saw a frame of film as something precious. There are thousands upon thousands of photographers out there who only started thinking about photography when they weren't limited to 24 or 36 frames before bringing the film to the local shop, and then wait for hours for the results.

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Using Shallow depth of field

So, you've got your exposures down pat, and your framing is getting better by the day. Excellent. What is next? Well, the lovely Andrew Ferguson, who I know via LiveJournal, submitted a couple of photos for critique that illustrate the next logical step forward: Using shallow depth of field in a creative context.

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Expose for the highlights…

Today's topic came about after I was sent some fabulous images from Ben Darfler, as part of our photo critique series. He sent me four excellent photos, and I picked two that illustrate a common theme: How to expose a photo correctly. You would think that exposing a photograph correctly would be easy - you just point the camera at what you want to take a picture of, and let the machinery take over from there, right? Well, most of the time, that will give pretty good results, but if you have ambitions of developing as a photographer, manual exposure is where it's at. The way you choose your exposure is one of the biggest differences between film and digital photography. When photographing with film, you want your shadows to be drawn as well as possible; because of this, my high-school photography teacher would drone on about "Expose for the shadows; develop for the highlights." Well, digital changed all that...

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