Photocritic photography blog

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 »

Of all the types of memories people cherish warmest, the birthday parties of young ones come high on the list. But there is so much to think about!

The Digital Photography school site has come up with a dozen tips to maximising the photographic evidence of a birthday party of a little one. Much of it is rather obvious, but there are a couple of nuggets among the tips. If nothing else, it’s worth taking a quick peek just to see the pictures of the happy kids. After all, you’ve gotta party like it’s their birthday! Read the rest of the article »

Bloody hell, we didn’t half open a can of worms! It seems as if everyone, their dog, and their uncle have views on concert photography. Great, of course, but not all of it makes sense. In the past we’ve covered live photography at big and smaller venues, and both of those entries attracted a lot of insightful comments (you may want to go back and re-read the posts and comments, because there really is a lot of good going down there). Read the rest of the article »

I am quite fond of bicycling (I recently did the London to Brighton bikeride), so when I stumbled across a guide to making a steadycam mount for a bike, my curiosity was instantly set ablaze.

The creator explains:

I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn’t want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn’t want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build my own “steadicam” camera mount that would absorb some of the shock, providing a better quality video.

Read the rest of the article »

Over on Photon Detector, Nicolai has collected a great sample of odd pinhole photography projects:

The great thing about making cameras is that they’re really dead simple: box light detector (film or sensor) hold for light = camera. When there’s no lens involved, there’s heaps of room for creativity. While many people opt for more traditional materials like wood, metal, foamcore, or modify an existing camera, some people go all out.

Read the rest of the article »

Many of us trust our autofocus implicitly - because it’s just one less thing to worry about, really. But what when the lens starts to do weird stuff?

My mate Chris over at DSLR Blog has the skinny:

If you auto-focus on an object the camera will attempt to fix the focus at the correct distance between the camera and the object. Front focusing is when this calculation goes wrong and it focuses before the object, back focusing is where it incorrectly focuses behind the object. Either way what you achieve is a photograph where the focus is in the wrong place making your object blurred or soft. Manually focusing still works but in effect something is wrong with either the lens or the camera.

Some more info, along with tips as to how you can test for these problems, in the Front and Back Focussing Explained article.

Think what you will about the World Cup (football, as played with the feet, as opposed to the type you, er, don’t), but it has spawned a couple of interesting discussion in the media world - most recently, about Wayne Rooney, posing Jesus-style, whilst painted in the St George’s cross.

I couldn’t give two pence about football, but the discussion extremely interesting to me - I started to think about why a photo can become controversial, even if its separate elements are relatively inoffensive. Read the rest of the article »

As far as presenting photographs goes, you can’t get much more unique than having it professionally transferred onto proper artists’ canvas. To some, it could be prohibitively expensive, but Tocco are currently running a competition where, if you win, you can get your photo printed completely for free! Read the rest of the article »

Dust on a DSLR’s sensor is one of those unfortunate facts of life that basically every owner will have to deal with at some point. Shooting outdoors, changing lenses, and even simply using your camera puts you at risk for dust on the sensor. If you don’t have dust now, you will later so be proactive and learn now what you’re options are for dealing with it. Read the rest of the article »