Photocritic photography blog

It’s old advice, but it certainly hits the spot…

Since the dawn of the commercial web we have been warned to not be suckered by “too good to be true” online deals. Keep your friends close and your credit card closer. Over and over scummy retailers are exposed but a quick name-change are back online trading their crap, fake or purely imaginary goods. Read the rest of the article »

You may have spotted the lightbulb, cloud, electricity and woodshed symbols on your camera’s screen or menus. You may have also ignored them as being yet another degree of complexity that you don’t need to know about.

Alternatively, you may have seen people on the Internet earnestly discussing colour temperature and swearing by all sorts of essential products that will guarantee perfect results, if you re-mortgage your house this one last time. And ignored it as another expense that you can probably do without.

Well that thing you’re ignoring is one of the most powerful ways of making your photos convey the scene you wanted to capture: white balance. Read the rest of the article »

Photo editing falls into two categories: Adjustments, which affect the whole photograph (much like our introduction to contrast, using the levels tool, from yesterday), and spot editing, which affects a smaller part of an image. Any photo editing you do with brushes, selection tools etc would be a spot edit.

While spot editing can be useful, it’s adjustment editing which is the big advantage for most photographers. Exposure a little bit off? Fix it in Photoshop. White balance problem? Photoshop. Want your picture in black and white? Photos… you get the idea.

What most photographers don’t know, however, is that you can do a wide array of adjustment editing experiments without even touching the original photograph. You can do this by adding so-called adjustment layers. This is a layer added on a photo which affects all the layers underneath. The upside of using this technique is that you can turn adjustments layers on and off, you can change their order, and their parameters. The main effect is that it is much easier to experiment with your photos, in the hunt for finding a combination of adjustments that makes your photo perfect. Read the rest of the article »

I know I keep going on about this, but there’s no denying that photography can be an insanely expensive hobby: Especially if you’re curious about why people start shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars/pounds/euros on glass with a little red L on it… Once you’ve shot a couple of hundred photos with professional equipment, it’s too easy to reach for your credit card and let ‘er rip: The sheer sharpness of the photos and the vastly superior results than you get from average-grade consumer lenses is staggering.

The solution, many people find, is renting camera equipment for a weekend or so. But how do you go about choosing what you rent? And what are the benefits of renting over buying? What are the downsides?

My good friend Andrew over at Golden God has taken a closer look, exploring the topic in greater detail in this guest writer article. Read the rest of the article »

As a kinda-sorta follow-up from my most recent critique, where several of the commenters mentioned that they felt that their photography got better when they imposed rules on themselves, I started thinking: Which other constraints can you put on photography?

First of all — why? Well, in a machoistic kind of way, making rules about the way you take photos is a creative way to think about photography. Take this restraint, for example: For a day, only take photos that have a strong diagonal. It means you start thinking about framing your photographs in a completely different way than you would otherwise. Perhaps you don’t get home with a single photo that is actually worth using, but the lessons you learn from the experiment will come in very handy for later photography assignments. Read the rest of the article »

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. Read the rest of the article »

Have you ever thought about why digital compacts with built-in flashes have such an obvious shadow on them? Well, obviously it’s because the camera is too damn small to get some distance between the lens and the flash. Quite apart from the problem with red eyes (which, luckily, is easy to avoid), it means that the shadow thrown on your subjects is annoying. Read the rest of the article »

There’s a lot to be said for the persistency of time lapse photography - it makes life rather interesting. Reducing a period of a few hours (like a flower opening to the sun), a few months (like a flower growing or a baby growing inside a mother’s belly) or a year (seasonal timelapses, construction work) is amazing stuff. Read the rest of the article »

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at portraits over the last couple of days for various reasons I shan’t get into in details, but there’s one pet peeve I’m afraid I’m going to have to share with you…

Why are people always so damn serious when they are being taken photos of? Does nobody understand the art of portraiture anymore? Read the rest of the article »

If you’ve ever taken a photo of a group of people, you’re probably used to the chant of ‘oh no, I blinked’, usually from that obnoxious little blonde that you can’t stand the sight of. But did you know that there is actually some science behind taking photos of people, and whether they blink or not?

Behold - the guide to avoiding people’s half-closed, semi-drugged looks! Read the rest of the article »