Small Aperture

Front focus? Back focus?

Haje Jan Kamps — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:28:37 +0000

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.

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Coherency in photo exhibits

Daniela Bowker — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:12:29 +0000

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write a review of a photographic exhibition. I wasn’t especially concerned by which exhibition, more that I wanted to look at an exhibition holistically: as a collection of photographs that had been brought together with a specific aim or purpose. I wanted to consider what I thought worked, what didn’t, and what could be done better. Ultimately, I wanted to be able to say if I thought that the exhibition had achieved its aim, or if it had made me feel something.

When I was on holiday – exploring Flemish cathedrals and drinking Trappist beer – I spent an afternoon at the Antwerpen FotoMuseum, or FoMu. Amongst its other exhibitions, it was displaying a collection of photographs taken by Belgian photographers in the inter-war years.

The potential for the exhibition was sweeping. Its introduction said how: ‘…the period between the two world wars was a time of sweeping social changes. Developments in photography reflect this,’ as well as mentioning the ‘fierce conflict’ that arose between traditionalist and modernist photographers. I was looking forward to an exhibition of contrasts and of conflicts, a series of photographs that illustrated progress in photography and changes in society. I looked back on an exhibition that disappointed me and didn’t live up to its potential.

What I saw was an interesting selection of photographs – portraits and landscapes, street scenes and still lifes, abstracts and studies – that had been beautifully framed, some of which were unusual and some thought-provoking, but I felt as if there was nothing more to the exhibition than a group of pictures taken between 1918 and 1939. There was no sense of cohesion, no aim, no signal emotion aroused by the images. If there was an objective to the exhibition, I couldn’t tell you what it was, and in my case it certainly didn’t accomplish it.

Organisation

Perhaps the most obvious way to arrange the collection would have been chronologically, which would have charted the devastated landscape, shredded society, and ruptured economy of 1918 that rose, grew, and progressed through the 20s and 30s to women’s suffrage, the jazz age, and technological accomplishment, before collapsing into the abyss of the totalitarian invasion in 1939. But it wasn’t chronological. I wasn’t able to see social change and innovation depicted in a series of photographs.

It’s possible that a curator would prefer to move away from the obvious, perhaps instead exploring the photographs thematically. The vast range of pictures available could have been arranged according to any principle you might imagine, and within those principles it would have been so easy to compare the traditionalists with the modernists and enjoy the artistic conflict of the time. Portraits, landscapes, and still lifes; studies in light and shade, texture, and natural phenomena; contrasts of mundane and usual. Instead, I found myself looking at a pair of beautiful studies of light and shade – chess pieces in shade and a woman’s hand holding a coffee cup – that had been flanked inexplicably by a street scene and an uninspiring still life. A series of three nudes were hung between a picture of a child doing arithmetic and a woman rowing on a lake. Whatever feelings those nudes might have aroused were superbly stifled by the pictures adjacent to them.

Tucked around a corner, as the exhibition reached its close, were two beautiful abstract portraits: a pair of eyes and a hand resting on a book. How effective could it have been to pair these with more traditional portraits? A sort of compare and contrast exercise, if you like. Instead, I very nearly missed them. It was only because I took a second turn around the gallery that I found them. I’m sorry if someone else should have missed these gems.

The art of showing less

FoMu had an opportunity to present something beautiful here; something unusual and enlightening that displayed some searing pictures. Instead, I felt as if the exhibition curator was so overwhelmed by the possibilities to present the pictures that he flung them at the walls and hung them where they stuck. Rather than leave the exhibition feeling as if I’d enjoyed a journey through the Belgian photographic psyche, I felt a sense of discordance. I didn’t know what the angle of the exhibition was and I had no lever into it. All the same, I’m glad that I went, and there’s a picture of some piercing eyes that I’ll not forget in a hurry.

Pictures have a wonderful ability to inspire, be it awe, surprise, amusement, social enlightenment, even historical insight. Let them do that.

Photography in Belgium Between the Wars,

FotoMuseum.be / FotoMuseum, Waalse Kaai 47, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium

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iPhone photography exhibit

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:11:50 +0000

The virtual image of the iPhone gets exhibited in the real space on the walls of the Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley, CA.

Since the advent of the coupling of the digital camera with the mobile phone, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of photos taken: A folk art form has unfolded where the depiction of reality and spontaneous events has been assisted not through the sophistication of the camera, but through its ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives.

iPhone images are crude with low resolution, so they must be judged by their basic composition and the manner at which they capture the moment, as well as how well the photographer uses the limitations of the camera to express a vision. With this show we are not looking for seductive images loaded with technique, but images that are alive with the ephemeral spirit of reality.

Join the fun

200 images will be printed and displayed in the gallery for the month of February 2010, and will be sold as individual works of art. A book will be published that will include all of the images along with names and a short bio of each iphonetographer.

We welcome all applicants and encourage amateurs, since there is no such thing as a professional iphontographer, at least not yet, as far as we know. For many of the artist this will be their first introduction to having their work shown in a gallery, and we look forward to the chance to discover new talent!

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FocalPop and ‘reverse stock photography’

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:38:34 +0000

There are a lot of reasons why photographers are interested in making some extra money these days. An obvious reason is the economy in general, which has left many of us without our day jobs and photographers with less work.

There’s also the shift towards microstock, which has made it easy for buyers to get very cheap photos while photographers’ commissions continue to get smaller. For many new photographers, it may be the case that you’ve never sold your photos and you’re not sure what kinds of things to shoot or how to go about selling your photos.

A new site called FocalPop is aiming to build an alternate marketplace for photography that that shakes things up a bit.

Here’s how it works:

People seeking photos fill out a detailed request on www.focalpop.com
Photographers are notified of new requests and can submit their photos if they fit the bill
The seeker selects a winner and that photographer gets paid the request.

The idea is to give photographers more information about what buyers want, when they want it, and how much they’re willing to spend. It’s free to sign up and anyone can participate in the photo requests. Photographers can upload photos they already have or shoot new work providing just what they buyer wants. The best part is that the commissions are high, starting at 70%, and FocalPop has a suggested pricing tool to ensure the buyers are pricing their requests fairly.

FocalPop is celebrating its official launch this week, after a three month beta period that began this fall. Looking at all the photos uploaded to the site during beta, it appears that quite a few photographers are interested in this kind of solution. What remains to be seen is if the photo editors of the world have the time to wait for custom photos, or if they’d rather just get their photos off a regular stock photography site…

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Digital Camera POTY exhibition

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:19:06 +0000

I’m a huge fan of Digital Camera’s Photographer of the Year competition (or ‘PotY’ among friends), but the problem is that you usually only get to see the winners in the magazine – or the POTY, as it is known among friends.

Anyway, later this month (December 9th through 13th), if you happen to be in London, there’s an opportunity to check out the winners in all their glory!

The competition features creativity from photographers of all levels from amateur to professional, from a variety of categories, including “This is Britain”, “World in Motion”, “Man-made”, “Planet Earth”, “Fashion”, etc.

The exhibit is free, open from 10am – 5pm every day, and can be seen at the Mall Galleries, The Mall (near Trafalgar Sq). Go on, it’ll be fun!

If you can’t make it to the exhibit, check out this article over on Photoradar for a taster, or see the full shortlist.

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Reflections in Raindrops

Haje Jan Kamps — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:10:19 +0000

Welcome to the first weekly issue of Technique of the Week (or TOTW – doesn’t that just roll of the tongue?! I imagine you pronounce it Tottewh or something like that. Answers on a postcard.) Anyway, this week, I’m featuring Reflections on Raindrops!

This photography technique is quite easy to achieve, but has fantastic results: The trick is to find a surface that has nice, large raindrops (you can, of course, help with a mister spray bottle or similar).

Place something in the background that you would like to show tens (if not hundreds) of times, and focus carefully on the droplets. Position your camera so the subject behind the raindrops is represented well, and snap away – experiment with moving closer or further away in order to ‘frame’ the background object inside the raindrops.

Feeling it? Good. Here’s some inspiration:

A simple technique with a huge effect

Place something in the background to repeat it in the reflection.

If you want more reflections, simply add more raindrops - simple!

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Do you know of a cool product we need to write about? e-mail me. Do you fancy writing a news story about something? A review of a product? An opinion on a popular photo technique – or on a technique which you feel ought to be popular? Drop me an e-mail!

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High-def high dynamic range video

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:55:42 +0000

You’ve probably seen HDR photography by now, but have you ever stopped to think that you can do the same thing with video? My friend Jay Burlage just created a new showreel of his rather impressive HDR video work, and boy is it beautiful. For several of the clips, I find myself being in awe of each and every frame of the video clip.

You know what they say – an image is a thousand words. So here goes nothing: 3 minutes and 27 seconds at 30 frames per second should equate about 6.21 million words – and each of them gorgeous visual poetry indeed.

Check out the video below, and Jay’s website over on HDR Timelapse, too.

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The scourge of paid photo competitions

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:33:34 +0000

As I keep a relatively high profile photography blog which has written about photography competitions in the past (including the inspiredly-named ‘How to win photography competitions‘, which, if you haven’t read it, is worth a peek, if I may say so myself, and I may, because, well, this is my website, and I happen to quite like promoting my own articles in ridiculously long run-on sentences in parantheses when I really ought to be writing about completely different things, like the actual topic of this article, and I hope that you might in time forgive me for wasting your time with this aside), I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions.

Recently, however, I’ve received a series of e-mails (no fewer than six in the past few months!) asking if I would pretty please judge their paid-for-contests. The idea is that aspiring photographers pay an entry fee (anything from $10 per photo via a $500 site membership to a $100 per photo fee structure). They then get entered into a photography contest, and the best photo wins.

Personally, I think paid-for photography competitions are absolute shite. Why? Well, for one thing, there are plenty of free photography competitions out there – witness the site ran by my good friend Will (of Earthshots fame), and there’s no way that you should be paying silly money to enter a competition.

Goldmines for the organisers

Okay, so this photo has nothing to do with this article, but how do you illustrate something like this anyway? Click on it for my recent gallery of photos from Vietnam.

Look at the math – at some of these competitions, they charge $100 per photo entered (!) and offer prize values of about $10,000. I imagine the ‘values’ are retail values, which means that they can pick them up for cheaper, either as gray imports, or via discount retailers, for about $8,000 or so. That means to break even, they have to get only 80 entries into the competition. Of course, to get enough people entering, they need to get a lot of photographers to enter. And how do they do that? By approaching high-profile bloggers to be competition judges, in the hope that the judges will blog, tweet, and promote their competitions for free.

Where it gets really sinister, however, is that several of the people who have contacted me recently, have also offered me a commission for each person entering the competition – so in effect, they’re not even trying to be sneaky about it: They just want to make a craptonne of money, and are willing to give the judges money (!) based on how many people they manage to get involved in the competitions. Most recently, they said they would “like to offer you $10-$20 per every person signing up through your link. $10 for the first 5 participants, and if you bring more than 5, we will pay you $20 per each participant including the first 5″

Only 50% spent on prizes

Next, they made the mistake of apologising for the low kick-back – and revealing how much money they are making off these competitions: “I know that [$10-20] doesn’t sound much with the entry fee being a $100, though please bare [sic] in mind that 50% out of it will go to prizes.”.

So the business model is like this: Profit = Entrants * $100 * 40%. So 100 entries into the competition is a $4000 clean profit, $1000 paid back as commissions, and $5000 spent on prizes. With numbers like these, no wonder these paid-for competition sites are popping up all over the place.

So there we have it. The honourable, exciting activity of photography competitions reduced to a simple, affiliate-driven business model. Is it just me, or is that bloody appalling?

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Canon 7D reviews round-up

Haje Jan Kamps — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:40:15 +0000

If the reviews are anything to go by (and, well, they generally are), it’s looking like the new Canon EOS 7D is turning out to be a right peach – Competitively priced, it’s as close to a professional camera as what most of us will need – and it’s rather impressive indeed. I’ve done a round-up of some of the reviews that’ve been posted out there so far, and it’s looking rather good. Check it out:

DPreview says “The Canon EOS 7D is a camera that can convince in all areas, and at its current pricing is going to be a very serious competitor for Nikon’s flagship APS-C DSLR, the D300S” – read the full review

PhotographyBlog says “When the Canon EOS 7D was announced at the beginning of September 2009, many people instantly dismissed it because of the lack of a full-frame sensor. On closer inspection, that seems to be their loss, as the 7D is a fantastic APS-C DSLR” – read the full review on PhotographyBlog

Imaging Resource says “This is the camera that Canon enthusiasts, indeed many camera enthusiasts, have been waiting for.” – read the full Canon EOS 7D review on Imaging Resource

TechRadar says “The 7D’s high-ISO performance is hardly bad, and compared to the 5D MKII it’s £200 cheaper, offers twice the maximum frame rate and a significantly more advanced auto-focus system.” – Read the full review on Tech Radar

Photo.net says “The EOS 7D boasts significant EOS advancements including a completely new 19-point Autofocus system, a new Canon iFCL Metering System (Intelligent Focus, Color, Luminance) and a new Intelligent Viewfinder” – Read the full review

Camera Labs says “The EOS 7D is pitched directly against the D300s and clearly intends to become the new high-end cropped body of choice. As such it’s not surprising to find Canon equipping the 7D with a higher resolution sensor along with the addition of more movie modes” – check out their full review

CameraTechnology has a video review, too:

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Review: Canvas printing

Haje Jan Kamps — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:41:07 +0000

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.

I’ve done canvas printing a few times before, but I figured I’d give it another go in order to create a present for someone who’s got a birthday coming up (so if you are my sister, stop reading now. If you know my sister, don’t tell her, because that’d just be cheating).

The photo I had printed was one of my long-time fave photos I took in a safari park a few years ago – in fact, my sister was there when I took the photo (I’ve written about that trip before, on my private site, in an article titled The Lions might have a thing for Minis, but the monkeys destroyed my car. Don’t ask.), which is one of the reasons why I figured it might make a good gift.

Enfin, I was shopping around for a decent printing site when I came across Full Size Posters, and instantly fell in love.

Finally, someone who understood that I didn’t really want to faff about with a load of tickboxes and suchlike, just a simple, smooth way of printing a canvas print. Even better; they offer the option of not having it mounted on a wooden frame, which allows you far greater flexibility with how you put the photo on the wall.

The canvas print took about a week to arrive (and then another week for me to be able to get my act together and pick it up from the post-office, but that’s a different matter altogether), and I was rather impressed when I had a look at it.

I should tell you this though: Canvas prints aren’t for everyone; they’re a trade-off. What you lose in sharpness, you gain in character. There’s no doubt that regular prints have better colours, more detail, better sharpness and a high impact, but canvas prints have a beauty about them that you just can’t show off otherwise.

My initial idea was to go to town on the print with thick, translucent lacquer. By adding a layer of brush strokes, I figured, the photograph could turn into a half-painting.

Then again, my sister is quite a good painter herself, and I changed my mind: it would make an even better present if I turn it into a collaborative effort: I give her a canvas with a photograph on it, and I challenge her to paint on top of the canvas to turn it into a true artwork.

And thus, the true magnificence of canvas printing came to light: they’re great on their own, but even better as a basis for further artistic expression. Fabulous.