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Visualising studio lighting

Once you feel you've started to get the knack of pointing your camera at things and clicking the button, it's time to start taking control of all the lighting in the scene. But, as it turns out, that's bloody tricky. I keep having to explain how to 'visualise' different types of lighting to people, and it turns out that it's rather difficult - not because what I'm doing is particularly advanced, but because sometimes, it's just tricky to make the connection between what is happening in a photo, lighting-wise, and how the lights are set up.

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Backing up your photos

As photographers, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to take the most beautiful photos ever. How often do you back them up, though...? If you have to think for more than a fraction of a second to answer that question, the real answer is 'not often enough' Here's a couple of tips to poke you in the right direction.

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Darkening a room by adding light

I was doing a photo shoot a few days ago, where I was photographing a lemon suspended from a piece of thread. I wanted to make it look as if it was hovering in pitch darkness. Upon seeing the results, someone asked me an interesting question: Isn't it difficult to focus your camera in the dark? Well, no, because the photo was taken in the daytime, with my lights on. So, how come does it look like it was taken at night? That, my friends, is the power of contrast in lighting. You have to remember that you don't need a dark room in order to make a background completely dark - you just need to ensure that your foreground is significantly brighter than the ambient light. Here's how and why...

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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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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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Learning by example

Some people learn best when they start at the basics: This is a camera. Press this button to make it go 'click', and it takes a picture. Change the aperture to... etc. Me, I like to work the other way around - I learned a long time ago that photography - like computers, cars, etc - is interesting mostly for its results, rather than for its technology. Who cares if your camera can do 1/4,000 second or 1/12,000 second shutter times... Unless, of course, you need the faster shutter time to achieve something.

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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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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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Choosing your first dSLR

It's nearly December again, which means that the retailers are rubbing their money-grabbing little paws in glee, in anticipation of making a killing over the holiday season. Be that as it may, fact remains that there's a lot of choice out there, and whether you're buying your first camera, or whether you're out shopping for a friend of family member, you might need a hand. Welcome to the Photocritic guide to entry-level dSLR cameras: What should you be looking for, what should you be buying, and why? It's all in our handy shopping guide, right here...

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