Archive for Presenting your work

When RAW is not enough

One of the first pieces advice I give to people who wonder where to start getting their photos to become better, is to shoot in RAW. There's many obvious reasons for why this is a good idea. With RAW, the final result can be sharper, you have better control over white balance, you get wider dynamic range, you can do HDR photography, and, well, it's what all the cool kids done. Recently, however, I have moved away from shooting in RAW for several reasons. Or, to be precise, I have started shooting in RAW+JPG. Here are some compelling arguments for why you should do the same...

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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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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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How to hand-colour your photos

I recently had a conversation with Bob Keefer - a talented photographer who has decided to hang on to some traditional techniques in a world which is accelerating at full speed toward better, faster, stronger... His party trick is impressive: Take a black-and-white photograph, and colour them. By hand. Creating gorgeous, real-yet-unreal photo-based art which redefines how you'll think about photography and digital retouching? Obviously, I had to catch up with Bob to see what, how - and perhaps, most importantly - why...

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How to organise your own photo exhibit

A year ago, the Oxford Flickr Group, a group of slightly geeky amateur photographers, were sitting around a table in a pub somewhere in Oxford. This is not at all unusual, but the difference was that, on this occasion, they decided that it'd be a marvelous idea to hold an exhibition. None of them had had any real experience of organising or taking part in an exhibition but hell, why not give it a go? Jump ahead to the present day, a year later, and their exhibition is about to open. So how they get this far? How on earth do you go about organising this sort of thing from scratch? Anna Badley explains... The Big idea We hold regular photo meets and pub social meets in Oxford, and at one of these meets it turned out we'd missed the deadline for the annual Artweeks event that takes place locally – so we decided that we'd go it alone. We're quite an active social group, there are probably 40 or so people who turn up to the meet ups so we thought it might be worth a go. That was about 12 months ago. The first step was finding out where we might be able to stage the exhibition as that would determine the space, how many pictures people could hang and how much that might cost per person. We found a helpful bar/restaurant/gallery that suited our informal group better than a very formal space, and worked out that we could hang 30 fairly large pictures in the space they had – so, 30 exhibitors. The next step was to find out who in the Group might be interested in exhibiting. There are around 1,500 members at the moment and we had no idea how many of those might be actually located in Oxford and interested in putting in a picture. We thought we'd get loads of people expressing an interest who would then drop out things really got going, but that didn't happen. Also rather surprising was that quite a few of the final 30 had never been along to any of the meet ups and we had no idea who they were – we'd never met them. This did make us a little nervous at first; what if they didn't pay up? What if they didn't turn up with a picture? The plan takes shape [caption id="attachment_2360" align="alignright" width="212" caption="The poster for the Flickr exhibit in Oxford (click on the image to see it full-size)"][/caption] By the end of March this year we were pretty much set on what we were doing, we'd got our 30 exhibitors, and 5 organisers (not quite sure how they were elected, it just sort of happened). We had a bit of a break in early Summer then got the money in from the majority of the exhibitors during July and August. That was far less of a hassle than we'd imagined it might be, but apart from putting the money down on the venue not a lot else happened over the Summer months. The exhibitors had a theme to work to; we wanted to show a different side of Oxford to the one the tourists see when they visit. So we'd asked everyone to try and show their own perspective on the city, and tried to give them as much freedom as possible. Oh my God it's only 8 weeks away, how did that happen? With only 2 months left before opening night, there was a sudden flurry of activity. A summit was held with the five organisers and a horribly large task list of things that needed checking, fixing, chasing, designing and printing – the whole lot. By the time the summit had finished, we'd divided up the tasks; collecting the high res jpg files to put in the accompanying book, keeping in touch with the venue, writing the press release, designing the map for the photos to be placed on and setting up the email address were some of the more major ones. Somewhere along the line the exhibition also got a title – Made In Oxford – and suddenly we were almost ready to go! One of the group also had a tame graphic designer who immediately set to work on making us a fantastic poster. It was definitely worth having someone professional do this because as soon as we saw how good it looked it was pretty clear none of us had the design skills to even get close to that. Final tweaks [caption id="attachment_2361" align="alignleft" width="258" caption="The Made in Oxford book is available to purchase via Photobox for £21"][/caption] Finally, we arranged a meet up (mainly as we were really intrigued as to who our mystery exhibitors were) and had a frankly scary meet-up that felt more like a board meeting than a group of photographers! Thankfully we managed to fix that problem later in the evening with a few ales, once all the important information had been dished out. The book was proof-read by three of us (not taking any chances there) and is now available to buy from Photobox! When we first looked at all the pictures together it became apparent that the majority of photos had nobody, or just a lone figure, in them. Many were taken at night or very early in the morning. Even the usual tourist traps and colleges look deserted which is not something you ever see during the day. It was really exciting seeing a completely different side to the city and we were happy that the theme we'd chosen had actually been okay to work with. So we're currently four days before opening night. We've had plenty of local press interest and the posters are starting to appear round town. We have 29 pictures ready to go and the last one is almost there so it looks like everything is ready to roll. Once all the pictures are safely hanging on the wall in the venue we're intending to get the beers in and sit back to enjoy what's been achieved, and maybe even start thinking about next year's theme – well, maybe not quite yet. The exhibition is open 7 days a week to the general public from 3rd-31st October 09, at the Jam Factory, Hollybush Row, Oxford, UK OX1 1HU (map). Hang on a minute. What on earth is the Oxford Flickr Group? We're an offshoot of the online photo-sharing site, flickr.com. We love taking photos, finding interesting things to shoot here where we live and welcoming new people to our city. There is normally a degree of photographic geekery happening but it's certainly not a pre-requisite for joining in; we don't care if you use your iPhone, a dinky little point-and-shoot camera or a fancy-pants film SLR with all the lenses. We certainly don't compare mega pixels (okay, most of us don't do that). There's no charge for joining and we're a friendly bunch so if you're interested in saying hello, come and find us on Flickr! Oh, and of course if you're not in Oxford, UK, there are loads of other local Flickr groups all over the world. If there isn't one where you are, nothing's stopping you from starting your own - get busy! This article was written by the inimitable Anna Badley (Flickr / website), who in the past has written the Beginning in Portraiture article here on Photocritic. If you would like to get involved and write a guest article, drop me an e-mail!

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Photoshop Makeovers

So there you are, taking rather fantastic photos, and then, one day, you realise that everyone else seems to be getting better results. Unfair? Possibly. Or perhaps they're just handier in Photoshop. Like my old friend Maxwell. I recently came across three of his photo-shopped portraiture sessions (one, two, three), and was rather impressed. For the purpose of this article, let's shelve any reservations you might have about the ethics of photoshopping the hell out of a portrait or fashion image (you've all seen this video, right?), and have a look at how it can be done. As a wise old man once told me, only if you have the skills to do something do you have the skills to choose not to do it... Maxwell graciously accepted the challenge to talk us through how he edits his portraits, and is using a photo of himself to go through the process... Take it away Max!

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The International Exhibition

The internet has a funny way of erasing the feeling of the world being of any useful size at all - I regularly get visits from nearly 190 different countries, for example. In an exchange with the lovely (Swedish) Håkan Dahlström recently, I mentioned that his funky-looking photograph XAO wouldn't have looked out of place in an East London wine bar. We joked about a bit, but I was suddenly thinking: What is stopping us, photographers, from creating ad-hoc photography exhibits all over the world? So, in an epic effort of internet crowd-sourcing, I want to be the first curator in the entire world who creates a truly international art exhibition: The International Exhibition, or TIE for short.

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Publishing your own photo book

A while ago, I was talking with my good friend Randy Kruzan, who told me he had self-published a book - or, as he likes to put it - how he made the transition from "being a fool with a camera to being a fool with a book". There's a lot of things that go into creating your own book (I should know, I've helped friends and clients self-publish things in the past, and I've been published with my own stuff) - but the interesting thing is that a lot of the things that take time aren't the things you'd think... I managed to talk Randy into writing a guest article for me here on Photocritic, explaining how his book came about, and what you should do if you want your photos to end up as a coffee-table book yourself.

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Making an epic collage

When I moved from Liverpool to Bristol a few years ago, the first couple of weeks in my new house, I didn't have an internet connection. I felt rather lonely, and decided to look through some images of my old friends. I grew to realise that I had an incredible amount of them. So many, in fact, that I figured I might as well turn them into a piece of art...

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Canvas printing

There's web galleries, there's your mum's photo printer, and then there is this... One of the most beautiful ways of presenting photographs has to be getting your photos transferred onto canvas. The cool thing is that you can get quite creative what you do on a canvas - just ask Rembrandt & co! There are a lot of companies out there who are offering the service these days, but I recently stumbled across one that stands out from the crowd with its snazzy Web 2.0 interface and its glorious prints.

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