Photocritic photography blog

So, you start taking photos. First, you take photos of an apple. Then, perhaps, you move on to people. If you’re serious, you move on to slightly faster-moving items, such as running people, or even bicyclists.

Move over, Ansel, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Andy Lees’ photos - he’s one of the world’s top Formula 1 photographers, with a massive library of pics from tons of race tracks.

Interesting enough in itself, perhaps, but far more excitingly, the man’s written a guide to how he works, which was where my ears stood up and my attention was well and truly captured… Read the rest of the article »

I’ve written about Lomography once before (if you have no idea what I’m on about, you’ll probably wanna have a peek at that post first), and briefly talked about what it is, how it works, and how there seem to be a huge bunch of nutters who love the art-form (I’m one of ‘em).

The question that remained, though, is ‘how can a camera allow you to take special photos’? After all, all cameras adhere to the same laws of physics and optics - so how do Lomo photos manage to look so distinctive and different? Read the rest of the article »

I don’t normally write about camera equipment launches - there wouldn’t be much space for anything else on this blog if I did - but it’s rather worth noting that Canon are launching their brand new baby-brother of the digital SLR family, the 400D. Read the rest of the article »

If you like clothing, photography, and are between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, you’d be bloody nuts not to enter the Nikon Young Fashion Photographer of the Year awards! Read the rest of the article »

As some of you might have cottoned on to, I work in automotive publishing*. As such, I wade my way through thousands of press releases. Most of them are completely pointless, some of them are interesting, and others again spark my interest. There is a lot of amazing photography that happens when trying to show cars from their best angles, for example.

When the World Cup was raging at its hardest a couple of months ago, I saw a photo something quite unlike the others. Basically, it was a single photo, taken from the air, of 400 Toyota Yaris cars (you may know them as Toyota Vitz or Belta, depending on where you live) parked in the shape of a St George’s cross.

Today, I stumbled across the blog of the photographer who did the photos… Read the rest of the article »

Do you ever look up at the sky, a towering office building, or an expansive landscape and wish your photos could capture everything you can see with your eyes? We do, so of course, there is a way to do it. Otherwise, why would we bother writing about it? :) Read the rest of the article »

I only recently stumbled across Zerotopia. Despite being a commercial website, they do have a rather specialised information section, attempting to help models - and people who would like to become models - along in their quest. Read the rest of the article »

Some of you who are reading this may recall the Prince Naseem Car Crash pictures and the ensuing court case that followed; We recently stumbled across the account of the day from a Photographer’s perspective.

The photographs were done by Gary Bagshawe, who bagged a cool £8,000 (US$14K) in one day from the pics,work, and is still making money off the photos today. Read the rest of the article »

I haven’t actually tried it myself, but I recently stumbled over a piece of software called HeliconFocus. It promises to eliminate the DOF problem you get when photographing objects. Just imagine: You can photograph on the sweet spot of your lens (around f8 seems to be the highest sharpness / DOF tradeoff for most of my lenses), yet get everything in the image in complete, perfect focus!

Of course, this is a genius invention for people who work with Macro photography especially… Read the rest of the article »

There’s a lot to be said for going back to basics every now and again. Photography is quite a simple subject, but in order to be able to understand what your camera is doing, you’re going to have to know a thing or two about the simple basic theory of how it all fits together.

My mate Bill Huber has done a superb series of write-ups he calls the Basics of Photography. Read the rest of the article »