Photocritic photography blog

Making money off your photos

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:22:48 +0000

To most photographers, Photography is – and always will be – a keen hobby. Some of us, however, are burning to take the hobby to the next level, and want to start making some cash from it. Perhaps not enough to buy a Ferrari, or even enough to pay the electricity bill, but at least enough to be able to buy a couple of photography toys along the way.

I worked as a photographer full-time for a couple of years, and ended up deciding that the lifestyle wasn’t for me. Even though I jacked in my career as a photographer, I’m still making money off my photos.

How? Well…

High-impact images will always sell well - especially if they can be used to illustrate a point

Over the years of working as a photographer, I built up a pretty sizable library of photographs. Some of them are covered by some sort of restriction (model release, contract, or otherwise), meaning that I cannot publish them further, and that means they are of no value to me further.

Where I do still make quite a bit of money, however, is by selling stock photos.

A stock photo is an image that someone could conceivably want to use for something. Imagine if you’ve taken a photo of a pretty girl holding a mobile phone to her shoulder, and typing on her laptop at the same time. If you have a model release for the picture (i.e if the model doesn’t mind her photo being used, and you’ve got a piece of paper confirming that), there are a thousand and one uses for the picture. A newspaper may be doing an article about stress. A magazine may need an image to illustrate the dangers of mobile phone use. An job advert might need to appeal to a female audience. The possibilities are endless, but key to all of this is your photo.

Look at the kitty! Isn't it cute? Now buy my photos. Please?

Now, think wider. Fabulous landscapes. Extreme macro photos. Portraits of people doing things. Photos you’ve taken of events, actions taken by police, and stuff like that. Let me give you a piece of advice right now: As someone who works in the automotive trade, I can never find enough photos of police making arrests of motorists, of speed cameras, and of speed humps. You’d think it was obvious, but I guess it’s not. Point being? Take pictures of everything around you – it costs very little to keep the pictures on-line, and you never know what people are going to need.

There are people out there making fortunes off photos they have taken of different types of boats, certain plants, and who have libraries of photos of different types of food. You’d be amazed.

Selling your pictures

So what do you need to do to get in on the action? Well, first of all you need to be a pretty good photographer, but that bit is easy – you’re reading the right blog, at least :) From there on, you need to find a way to sell your photos. At first, I used to sell my photos via my own website, being naive enough to think that there would be people out there who would find my photos. In reality, picture editors in newspapers, magazines, and books are two things: a) extremely busy and b) extremely lazy. If they spend 10 minutes to find a photo on a website, why should they trawl the web to find a different photo?

So essentially you need to find someone who can sell your photos for you. It’s slightly counter-intuitive, but think about it: The bigger a website is, the bigger the chances are that a picture editor can find an image right there and then. And more importantly, the bigger the chance is that they will end up buying from you.

I’ve tried a variety of different sites out there, but ultimately I ended up settling on Photo Stock Plus. For one thing, the website has a lot of functionality that others don’t, but most importantly, they took care of me right from the beginning.

You can sell stock photos, which is a big bonus to begin with, but you can also sell prints and gifts featuring your photos to friends and family via a slick eCommerce interface.

Colourful images tend to sell well... Unless they have text on them. I doubt this'd sell at all, actually.

Bulk upload tools make uploading your photos easier, and if you decide to go with a pro account, you’ll get all sorts of fancy-arse possibilities, including your own URL, possibilities to pick from a stack of designs, getting special assignments from commissioning editors, good deals on business cards and flyers, and even a press pass (which, personally, I doubt will be worth jack, but then I’ve got a ‘real’ one, so I’ve never tried it).

No reason to be worried about your photos either – The site will watermark them all for you, and Photo Stock Pro keep full track of all of your photos for you. You can set your own prices too, which is exciting in itself – charge too high, and nobody buys, charge too low, and it won’t be worth your time – but I’ll be writing more about that in a future article.

And the really clever bit? They only take a 15% commission, which is next to nothing, compared to some of the other sites out there, and you can try it all for free before you decide if you like it or not. Give it a shot!

This article was guest written for Photocritic by Simon Askildsen – thank you, Simon!

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The white balance of your eyes…

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:00:19 +0000

People have been thinking about how we perceive the world since the dawn of time. You can go all the way to ancient philosophy, with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, for example, where Plato wonders whether if you never saw the ‘real’ world, whether you would know. Or, indeed, even care.

The senses are curious, because how would you know whether you see the world the same as somebody else? To me, for example, the rainbow never really made much sense: Sure, it looks the way I have always seen it, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sort of logical sense. How do I know, for example, that what I think of as ‘red’ isn’t what the rest of the population sees as ‘blue’. Of course, I’ve been pointing at colours and naming them since I was barely able to talk, so it’s pretty well-ingrained that ‘red’ is ‘red’, and that ‘orange’ is ‘orange’… But what if they aren’t?

Deep philosophy about the very core of colour theory aside, I know for a fact that I don’t see the world the same as other people. Specifically, I know that what I see isn’t the real truth, because both of my eyes are giving me a different impression. Yes, really.

Two eyes, two realities

I noticed many years ago that my eyes are subtly different from each other: My left eye has a ‘colder’ colour balance than my right eye. I’ve spent a bit of time experimenting, and it appears that there is about an 800 kelvin difference between the two. That means that if I look at the left photo with my left eye, and the right photo with my right eye, these two look identical:

It’s been a bit of a curiosity for me for a while, and a while ago, I tweeted about it. As a result, I got a pretty big response, with the vast majority of responders saying something along the lines of “omg, me too!”.

That got me to thinking… Seeing as both my eyes are different from each other, there’s a 100% chance that one of them is ‘incorrect’. On the other hand, there’s nearly as big a chance that both my eyes are ‘incorrect’. Of course, white balance can be measured objectively, but ultimately, as photographers, we make a subjective judgement call on how we want to white balance our photos.

How can you test it?

Honestly, I have no idea how you can test it scientifically – but I find it’s most noticeable when I’m indoors, in medium-to-low light (presumably because my pupils will be bigger, but I have no physiological explanation for why this might be the case). Hold a hand in front of one eye, then move it to the other. You’ll see the picture ‘jump’ slightly to the side, but if your eyes differ from each other, you’ll also see the colour temperature change slightly.

Have you done the test now? Swell – give us your results here, so I can see exactly how much of a freak I am, in the grand scheme of things :)

Do your eyes have the same white balance?

So what does that mean to me as a photographer?

Nothing, I think. There are ways you can correct for your colour vision, apparently (you can wear slightly tinted glasses or contacts, for example), but ultimately it makes very little difference: Your eyes are absolutely incredible at capturing light, and your brain can handle colour balancing perfectly fine most of the time. In fact, your eyes / brain combination is vastly superior in this respect than a camera / computer combo.

I just think of it as a curiosity, and secretly, somewhere deep inside, I’m quite pleased that nobody in the whole world sees their surroundings exactly identically to what I do.

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Framing in portraiture

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:28:10 +0000

I spend a lot of time giving feedback on photos. One of the comments that pops up again and again is that I’ll feel as if an image is framed awkwardly.

Some times, I’ll find that an image is nigh-on perfect, but it fails to make the mark because it’s difficult to understand the motivation of the photographer: What are they trying to achieve with this photo?

It’s true for all photography, of course, but it’s more complicated with portraiture, as it isn’t necessarily very intuitive. How, after all, can you connect a story to the way a portrait is framed?

This is not a tutorial. Hell, it isn’t even much of a rant. Just some thoughts. Use of it what you will, and ignore (with great prejudice and much glee) everything you deem to be complete and utter bollocks. There will probably be some of both.

In this image (of myself. because I’m too lazy to dig through my backlog of umpteen million photos to find another one), the subject is dead centre in the image. The quality of the photo itself is unimpressive, and the lighting needs work, but that’s beside the point – we’re talking about framing here.

Centre-framing

Framed dead centre. Not very attractive. Nor is the framing.

In this image, the vast blackness on both sides of my ugly mug means that I’m surrounded by… something. But we can’t see it If I had a fear-struck look on my face, instead of looking smug, this composition may have helped to hint at something I was afraid of. perhaps something lurking in the shadows. But I’m looking vaguely content, so that doesn’t make any sense. In fact, the image has very little impact at all.

Looking into the frame

Cropped so I am looking 'into' the frame.

For my next book, I'll probably use something like this as my author photo. Because I've come a long way as a portrait photographer since my 'steeped in blackness' mysterious stranger days. (clicky for bigger)

So instead. it is recropped like this. Suddenly. I’m looking across a vast nothingness. Into… into what? I’m looking at something just outside the frame, lire image doesn’t hint at movement, nor does it show any particular emotion, so whatever is off frame isn’t engaging me.

Perhaps I’m watching television. Or I may just be at ease with myself. Due to the framing, the image has very little tension, and serves only to show off my face – great for the jacket-cover of that book I wrote, perhaps (Lo and behold, this is actually the photo I ended up using in my macro book.

This image is vaguely better than the one above. because it has some purpose. It draws the eyes the left, but simultaneously leaves you wondering what it is I’m looking at – And why it is so far away from me.

Looking “out” of the frame

Well will you look at that, miss moneypenny! This time, I'm on the right of the picture! It's pure unadulterated magic. MAGIC, I TELL YOU!

In this image, suddenly something else happens. I’m closer to the edge. Closer to action. Am I about to move towards the light? Am I dead, moving towards the light? At the very least, I appear more curious. And I’ve left a wasteland of darkness behind me. Or perhaps I’m just the first one to step out of the shadows?

This image has the sense of movement, somehow – a dynamic property, which wasn’t there in the previous image – even though the only difference is a net of black pixels.

So, er, what’s the point of all this, Haje?

Well, the main message, I suppose, is test it out, and keep the rule of thirds in the back of your mind.

Take an image, crop it in different ways. See how it impacts the photo, and see if it becomes more interesting. Think about what message you are trying to convey, and see if the image is actually supporting that message. If it is: Great! flit isn’t, perhaps a re-crop, or even a re-shoot would solve the problem.

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DIY Toy camera presets for Lightroom

Haje Jan Kamps — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:04:39 +0000

Given the popularity of the Holga, Lomo, and the other toy cameras out there, I suppose it was only a question of time before some enterprising soul would release Hipstamatic, the app which lets you take cool, toy-camera like photos on your iPhone.

There’s something about that app which jars quite viciously with me, however: Unlike the ‘real’ toy cameras, this app doesn’t actually alter the iPhone camera at all. And despite getting pretty awesome results (if you like that style of photography, of course), it’s all post-processing.

That got me thinking… It has to be possible to make my own post-processing presets for Lightroom, to turn my carefully lit, exquisitely sharp and ridiculously high-resolution camera RAW images into blurry, colourful, vastly attractive garbage. So I created a couple of presets for Lightroom 3 – and I’ll walk you through the thinking behind one of them and I’ll show you how to make your own. How’s that for a double whammy of awesome?

Toy cameras tend to get their special look by being terrible cameras. Their light meters will be off by a quarter country mile (so we need to either over- or under-expose the images for a start). They are likely to have light leaks (so we ought to add streaks to the picture), and the hip and cool crowd is fond of cross-processing the film, so we need to make a couple of changes to the way the colours are being displayed.

Exposure and sharpness

So, I’m going to start messing about with the exposure in this photo. I’m being conservative by only over-exposing it by 0.75, but you can always change this later, if a photo suits a bigger mis-exposure. Next, I’m ramping up the blacks a little bit to get a feel of a smidge of extra contrast, and I’m whacking the contrast and brightness right up. Yes, this makes your photo look wrong. And no, there’s nothing wrong with that!

Finally on this screen, the clarity goes down a lot. This adds quite an appealing blur to the image, which is typical for the kind of Polaroid effect I’m going for here.

Colours

It’s surprisingly difficult to get a realistic cross-processing look, but since I’m messing about with a polaroid-alike photo here, I’m on safer ground: adding some highlight and shadow toning gives that deliciously ‘not quite right’ polaroid look. To find the settings that work, keep experimenting – it’s not always easy to come up with the look you want.

Crop

Set the crop tool to 1:1 (that’s square), and crop your image. Then, it’s time for a spot of Vignetting – these are meant to be toy cameras after all…

Light leaks

The light leak effects are typical for toy cameras - and my little preset wouldn't be complete without 'em!

To get the proper feel of a toy camera, you’re going to have to try to add some light leaks. This is pretty easy, actually: Simply add a Graduated Filter across your image, with some interesting characteristics.

Personally, I decided to just brighten and then re-darken the image. I created one thin graduated filter with the settings shown below … And then another one just underneath it which had the opposite settings (approximately – it’s not as if toy cameras are an exact science). This creates quite a realistic bar of light leakage across your image.

Of course, light leaks are meant to be unpredictable and a bit random, but the great advantage of doing them in Lightroom is that you can take some of the guesswork out of them. Use the opportunity to move the light leaks around, and highlight the bits of the photo you would like – or hide the bits of the photo you’re not too fond of. There are no rules – make your own!

Finally, I saved all the above settings to a preset called “broken Polaroid”, and now I can go ahead and drastically reduce the quality (and improve the interestingness) of my photos!

Okay, then, let’s see some examples

A couple of guys on a motorcycle in India were a prime candidate for toy camera tasticness

This was the image I used when I first created the Lightroom preset, and I think it works quite well

A street photo from Oslo, Norway, took on a completely different flavour with my new toy camera filters

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What went wrong?

Haje Jan Kamps — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:31:19 +0000

A good friend of me recently posted on a social media site that a recent photo shoot he had done had gone horribly wrong; sure, some of the photos came out all right, but none of them fulfilled the ‘vision’ he was hoping for from his shoot.

It’s heartbreaking when a lot of effort doesn’t pay off – but all you can do is to chalk it up as a writing experience. Analyse what went wrong, and then don’t do that again. It’s a slow way of learning things, of course, but things learned the hard way are generally learned properly – so there is a bit of a silver lining after all.

What can you do when you feel as if you’re properly starting to get the hang of photography, but you still want to learn more? There’s a simple trick you can use… And it really works, trust me.

Even photos that come out very well deserve a second thought. If I was in this situation again, what would I do differently? (click for full size)

Some of you might know that I’ve spent a lot of time working towards my advanced motorcycle licence with the Institute for Advanced Motoring. It’s bloody hard work, but it’s awesome as well: It serves to illustrate that even though I’ve got my full motorcycle licence, I didn’t really have much of an idea about how to keep myself in one piece on two wheels.

The IAM course (which, incidentally, is built on the Police system for Motorcycle Control. Check out Motorcycle Roadcraft or Roadcraft, the car version. It’s a bit of a revelation) teaches you to become psychic on the roads; I find myself slowing down for hazards that don’t even exist yet, I change lanes instinctively before something dangerous happens in my line, and I do overtakes on split-second decisions. And I can control my motorcycle better than I thought ever possible. It feels bloody awesome.

Haje, I didn’t come here to read about your two-wheeled prowess…

Because studio work is generally repeatable, it's a great candidate for constant improvement.

Okay, okay, my apologies. But trust me, there is a link here: All the things that are relevant to learning how to control a motorcycle at speed are relevant to photography as well; the ‘psychic’ element comes in when you’re working with studio work, for example – once you understand your equipment well enough, you can visualise what happens if you just add a smidge of power to your fill light, or add a slight warming filter to your main.

And, like riding a motorcycle, it feels flippin’ brilliant when you know something is going to happen. Then you do it. And then you check what happened. And it worked. It makes you feel great about yourself. Only recently, I was standing next to a photographer who was struggling to get the shot they wanted. Without even looking at their settings, I surmised they were shooting in Program mode, when what they wanted was a particular shutter speed to get a panning shot right. So I told them that a 1/45 second shutter time might be easier. They looked at me, changed their setting, and rammed home the shot. And bought me a pint, which I thought was a nice touch.

Once bitten, twice shy: If you can't learn from other people's mistakes, you've got to learn from your own. No, I agree, this caption doesn't really make sense, but I don't really have anything to say about this photo.

Anyway – I’m not the greatest of photographers, but the trick about getting much better at what you do, is to do everything consciously – even things that are instinctive. What I mean by that is that if you feel you need to change a setting or a lens, go ahead and do it. But the important bit is to go back to it later. Find out why you felt that way. ‘Because it was the right thing to do’ is not a valid reason – there was something that made you ‘feel’ that you could improve your photo in one way or another.

That feeling is extremely valuable. That’s your experience talking, and you have to talk back: It’s a skill, but more importantly, it is a skill you can develop with practice. So, if it’s practicable, stop right there and then, and have a think. Why are you making a choice to make a change? What is wrong with the photos you are getting, and what will the effect be of making the change? The answer to those questions will help you develop and become a better photographer. But you have to be conscious about it. Write it down, add it to your Flickr notes, tell other photographers about your choices. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but make sure you vocalise it. The next time you’re in the same situation, the perfect photo will roll out effortlessly.

Oh who are we fooling, I’ve never taken a perfect photo. And nor will you in your lifetime. But that’s the point: You become a better photographer by polishing one aspect of a photograph every time – and hopefully, the photos you take will be closer and closer to perfect for every day of shooting.

Didn’t you mention a simple tip?

God, I don’t half ramble on, don’t I? Do forgive me, I get very excited about photography. And motorcycling, for that matter.

It's worth re-visiting your photos after some time. This one, for example, sat in my archives for five years before I realised it was actually sort of a wicked shot - all it took was some Lightroom magic to make it sparkle.

Anyway: The real reason I started burbling along about motorcycling is that this is a tip I learned as part of my IAM training. Replace ‘ride’ or ‘drive’ with ‘photo shoot’ below, and you get the gist of the tip.

After every photo shoot, spend one minute to think about one thing you would improve about your most recent shoot. Don’t worry if you made lots of mistakes. Don’t worry if everything went wrong. Pick one thing you would improve. And think about how you could improve it.

The great thing about picking just one thing is that it’s bite-sized. You can process one thing, and you can come up with a plan with avoiding it next time. Missed the sunrise? Get up earlier. Didn’t get the photo of the soccer goal? Stand somewhere different. Scene too bright? Bring neutral density filter. Got your camera equipment stolen? Buy a big Rottweiler. Couldn’t get the toddler to smile? Bring that hyper-colourful hawaii shirt your wife hates so much. It’ll make the kids smile, trust me.

Eventually, you become good enough a photographer that most of your development will come from your own experience and the fact that you are challenging yourself. Always remember, though: There is always something you can improve. But only if you’re consciously working on it.

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Low-light action photography

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:40:38 +0000

Low-light photography is something that often confuses the metric bejesus out of photographers: It’s very tricky to get right, and even if you do everything 100% correctly, often-time you’ll find that your photos still don’t come out as you dreamed of. Now, multiply that with the trickyness of photographing action, and you’ve got yourself a true cluster-copulation of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Everybody will sooner or later end up in a situation where you’re photographing moving things in the dark. To concert, event and dance photographers, it’s part and parcel of their chosen photography work.

I’ll be honest: I don’t consider myself a very good low-light photographer (with the exception, perhaps, of my concert photography portfolio, but in those circumstances you’ve got an entirely different set of challenges.

Today, though, I’ve got a wicked treat for yourselves: One of my colleagues and friends in Australia, David Wyatt, agreed to share some of his observations of low-light action photography with us. He’s a scholar, a gentleman, a legend, and a bloody great photographer… Take it away, David!

Dance and stage photography are two areas of photography that often intertwine with each other. They can be wonderful to watch: They’re full of dramatic moments that can include moving silhouetted outlines of dancers or actors performing while being back-lit by a single strobe light – which is a great effect from the viewpoint of the audience, but which can make life for you, the photographer, incredibly frustrating!

The following notes are simply intended as a guide only to ways of coping with low light photography, particularly for photographers just starting out in or thinking about trying dance or stage photography – practice is the only effective way to develop experience and increase your photography skills, and there are thousands of great sources out there providing methods of increasing your photography knowledge, depending on the area of photography that you enjoy.

Equipment

My camera bag looks a bit like this: I use a Nikon D700 with a 70-200mm and a 17-55mm f2.8 Nikon lenses, and have recently upgraded from a Nikon D300. I also sometimes use an SB-800 flash unit for posed shots, and never use flash during dance or stage performances, unless I’ve previously received permission from the event or performance directors to do so.

I started taking photographs of dance and stage performances eighteen months ago, and love it. There’s nothing like capturing a shot of a dramatic moment on stage, or of a passionate glance between a couple dancing together, and knowing that the same moment captured within your camera will never occur ever again in precisely that same way.

The lighting challenge

Up, up, and and away: The more dynamic the photos, the better they tend to be! © David Wyatt

Dance and stage performances can often have scenes or components which are entirely under-lit or which have fluctuating lighting levels, and sometimes fast movement at the same time, which together can make it very difficult to balance between a shutter speed that will be slow enough to let sufficient light into the camera to illuminate the image, while using a shutter speed that will be fast enough to freeze the movement. On the other hand, slower shutter speeds can also be used to amazing artistic effect with tripods or monopods through blurring the movement of dancers to give an impression of high speed in the photograph. (If you’re confused about exposure, check out How Exposure Works).

One of the main aspects of low-light dance photography in particular is that having faster glass will always makes a large difference in the kinds of shots that can be achieved. With an f3.5-5.6 lens, you can try to compromise in low-lit venues by lowering the shutter speed and opening the aperture as widely as possible using manual control settings on the camera, but chances are that those setting may still not be enough to freeze motion without using flash if the action is fast-moving, particularly if you may be wishing to capture the background as well as nearby action through using a smaller aperture for greater depth of focus (i.e., f5.6 – f11).

It's difficult to get too much energy into a dance shot - but you can try, if you want! © David Wyatt

Increasing the ISO levels can help with taking shots at a fast enough shutter speed to try to freeze the motion, though depending on the kind of camera you use, grain in the images at higher ISO levels can tend to become a problem, especially between ISO 1600 to 3200. While the f2.8 lenses more suited to low-light work are quite expensive, some of the f1.8 prime lenses are much more affordable and fantastic quality lenses for low-light performances, especially for photographers on a budget. The downside with prime lenses is that they require footwork to move around to frame the image properly, and without footwork or mobility, can require extensive post-shoot cropping for composition requirements, which is the compromise that offsets the price of the f2.8 lenses with zoom capabilities.

There will always be a dance or stage performance in low-light where you may not be able to capture the action effectively purely because of the low lighting that may be involved, or because of the distance placed between yourself and the dancers/performers. If that happens, it may simply be a matter of needing to upgrade your equipment if that’s an option, trying to use a slower shutter speed with a tripod or monopod (shooting at 1/40 and 1/60 shutter speeds with a monopod can still capture stationary non-moving images very well, when there may be a pause in the action), or checking if you can use flash at those events, which may sometimes also be an option.

Colour, motion, passion; what more could you want from a photo? © David Wyatt

There is also some excellent free software out there for image editing (including brightness and light levels adjustment) and for noise reduction in images, including GIMP, Picasa, and Neat Image. Neat Image is a nifty piece of software great for reducing noise/grain in images that may have been taken using a high ISO, though using noise reduction can substantially decrease the quality of images it has been applied to. Images with a large amount of noise reduction applied may still be fine for website display at small-medium size, though trying to print those same images may be a different story entirely due to the loss of detail through the noise reduction process. The new Lightroom 3 has some pretty awesome noise reduction algorithms built in, as well – so if you’re using LR, don’t forget to give that a shot, too!

What I’ve written here is a snippet of my own experience of low-light photography through dance and stage work, and I’m still continually learning as I go along. I base my abilities to a higher degree on the quality of the photographs that I’m yet to take at future performances, and to a lesser degree on my previous work. A bit like the acting adage that actors are only ever as good as their next performance.

Dance and stage photography in low-light environments are both some of the most difficult kinds of photography to capture effectively, although both forms also have some of the most beautiful and dramatic human moments that can be captured on film, which make the hard work infinitely worth it!

David's website is worth a peek!

About the author

David Wyatt is a dance and stage photographer based in Melbourne, Australia, with a wicked eye for a good photo. Check out his website over on Capturing Images.

He loves a bit of feedback, and is available for assignments – contact details are on his site, so knock yourself out!

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Book review: Photo Trekking by Nick Onken

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:08:31 +0000

As a semi-prominent photography blogger and photo writer, I occasionally am sent books to review. It’s pretty exciting, actually, because it gives me a great insight into what’s happening in the photography publishing world, and hey – it’s always a great idea to keep an eye on the competition. The problem is that I’m frequently not the target audience of these books: I’m an advanced photographer; I love to write for all photography audiences, but if my ongoing photography course for newbies project has taught me anything, it’s that photography looks very different through other people’s eyes.

So, this time, I decided to ask a friend of mine – the always lovely Ella Bowker takes a closer look at Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World, by Nick Onken.

Take it away, Ella…

I recently came back from a long weekend in Italy with my family (check out the pictures on Flickr!). I schlepped along a collection of books to entertain me on the plane, and I’d like to tell you about one of them: Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World, by Nick Onken (Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. Travelling with a travel photographer’s book seemed highly appropriate. It’s not as if one needs much inspiration to take beautiful photos in the Tuscan hills, but perhaps this book would be able to help me take even better photos. Flicking through the glossy pages of exotic photographs, I noticed that he’d taken some shots not all that far from where I was staying, too. How exciting!

Uhm, so who is it for?

Unfortunately, I found the subtitle of this book to be a tiny bit misleading. It turns out this book isn’t aimed at the general travel photographer – those of us who take fairly good photos above the standard of the usual holiday snaps and want to do it a bit better. Instead, it is aimed at amateur photographers who wish to spread their wings and give professional travel photography a go.

Fantastic photos - but Ella Bowker finds that she'd prefer it was a proper cofee-table book, rather than a half-way house between how-to guide and photographer's portfolio

Call it a bugbear of mine, but it really bothers me when writers haven’t fully identified their audience. Or rather: Onken has identified a very specific audience here, but delivers a book which goes too far in some areas, and not far enough in others. Now, I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m not nearly good enough a photographer to aspire to do it in a professional capacity. To be entirely honest, I don’t think that I’d want to even if I were. Having said that, the premise of the book piqued my interest, and I threw myself at it in an attempt to learn about the life of a professional travel photographer and where exactly I’d need to start in the unlikely event that I did decide to pursue this as a career.

Perhaps I wasn’t the designated audience for his book, or may be I was slightly disappointed to discover that the content wasn’t actually what I thought it would be. Either way, I finished it and was left feeling that Onken hadn’t quite delivered what the book’s covers seemed to promise. Don’t get me wrong, the book shared some very useful information, such as what the different markets for travel photographs are,how to make initial contact with them, and how best to promote yourself and your work. However, all the while I had this feeling that the book didn’t go far enough. It was scratching at the surface of life as a travel photographer and not telling you enough of what you needed to know.

What’s it got?

The book is divided into five chapters: the world of travel photography, preparation, shooting on location, tips for taking great travel photographs, and after the shoot. Onken takes you through planning your shoot to ensure that it evokes the right feel for the client and includes anything that is a ‘must see’ for that location. The ‘How to budget for a travel shoot’ section was interesting, and discusses everything from airport transfers to local guides. But when it came to issues such as local etiquette and cultural nuances, coverage was rather thin. There was one more thing which struck me as odd: I’d have thought that if someone is seriously considering a career in travel photography, the chapter looking at photography tips is likely to be well below their level of expertise.

Each chapter, with the exception of thetips for taking great travel photographs chapter, contains at least one ‘Traveler’s Journal’ which gives the back-story to a series of photos taken in locations ranging from The City of God in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Kyoto in Japan. These sections worked well to communicate the human element of Onken’s photographs and his experiences in order to take them. If each chapter had been built around these journal entries, they might have achieved the degree of depth that this book needs.

I do feel that more could have been said about the grueling travel schedule and exhausting days of a travel photographer; the shots that made the cut and those that didn’t could have been examined; and the outcomes of that particular trip could have been looked at, too. Yes, it would have been a very different approach to the book, but one that I think could have worked.

Onken’s book feels more as if it were an exercise to get his photos on to people’s coffee tables. In order to do so, he settled on the niche audience of wannabe travel photographers. But there’s nothing wrong with a photo book for a photo book’s sake; Onken is clearly a talented photographer – but it just seems a bit curious to have them presented in a setting like this book.

It’s a cursed shame, really – there aren’t any books out there that covers this section of the market all that well, and after reading this book, I can’t but conclude that, well, there still aren’t any. But if there was one, I’d buy it.

Photo Trekking: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide to Capturing Moments Around the World by Nick Onken. Published by Amphoto Books, New York, available from all sorts of lovely book shops everywhere.

About the guest writer of this post

Ella is an avid amateur photographer based in London. Her Flickr stream is a documentation of her process of becoming a better photographer. She wrote Teaching Photography to a 5-year-old and Taking photos for the future for Photocritic.org

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Implied nudity in portraiture

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:20:15 +0000

It doesn’t take much of a brain to fathom what a ‘nude’ photo is. If bits that are normally covered up on the beach are on display, then it’s a nude.

Similarly, a ‘non-nude’ photo is pretty straightforward: There are no hoo-hoos, wee-wees or breasticles on display.

So, what is all this ‘implied nudity’ stuff all about? Well, it turns out that there’s an ‘in-between’ stage of nude photography: Implied nudity. Used creatively, it can add an interesting dimension to your portraiture. Here’s how and why.

Not a terrible portrait, but it isn't exactly super exciting ever. But there seems to be a lot of skin on display. Hmm, I wonder if I can make this photo more interesting... (click for bigger)

Put very simply, implied nudity happens in one of two ways: The model is dressed, but the photo is shot in a way where it looks as if she might not be. Or the model might be in some state of undress, but the photo is shot in such a way (through lighting, perhaps, or by the model’s position), where you can’t be sure whether or not they are naked.

So, er, what’s the point?

Humans are funny creatures: our minds constantly play tricks on us. When pieces of information are missing, our minds tend to ‘fill in’ the information. When you read smthng lk ths sntnce, your mind doesn’t really struggle to fill in the missing letters, for example – the same happens in photography. In a photo where a model is covering up her breasts, your mind will automatically ‘fill in’ the missing bits.

With this in mind, you can use that to your advantage as a photographer: By hiding your model’s dangly, bouncy, or naughty bits, you can sometimes create a photo which is even more allusive and erotic that one where it’s all on display.

Now that's more like it. All it took was to de-saturate the image, fiddle with the contrast a little, and do a tighter crop, which in effect hides all her clothes.

There are a few different situations where this works extremely well. In the past, I have been known to do ‘nude’ sessions with models (especially models who aren’t that experienced), and then taken photos only of their face or head-and-shoulders. Some people relax (or tense up) in a completely unique way when they are not wearing clothes – which gets reflected in their face.

I think I’ve taken some of my best portraits this way – simply because the model was concentrating on making their bodies look good, so they forgot to worry about their face. The result? Beautiful, intimate portraits where you would never have known the model wasn’t wearing clothes.

The opposite is also true, of course: You might well find yourself working with a model who would love to do nudes, but is too shy to actually strip off. Using these techniques, you can create the illusion of nudity.

Showing more by hiding more

You can use implied nudity to create tension in a photograph... She's in a graveyard. Surely, she's not naked. Is she? (clicky for bigger)

We all have different tastes and preferences for what we think is attractive. Combine this with the afore-discussed tendency for people to ‘fill in the blanks’, and you can see what might happen: In a photo where something is hidden, it gives the viewer the opportunity to read as much (or as little) into the scene as they want to.

The great thing is that the viewer tends to ‘fill in’ the blanks with whatever their own fantasies or beauty ideals are, which means that by tapping into the fantasy world of your viewers, you can actually make your model more attractive: After all, your viewers are going to be attracted to whatever their fantasies cook up!

You can't see much (is she wearing a bra? Is she not?) - but it's the implication of nudity which makes this photo. (clicky for bigger)

So – a rather long and picture-heavy post to make a rather simple point: If you haven’t experimented with implying nudity in portraiture before, why not give it a shot – you might like what you come up with!

Show off your work in the comments

I’m not just saying that because I want to ogle apparently naked lads and lasses, honest – I’m curious what you all come up with along these lines!

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Attracting better feedback

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:28:37 +0000

As photographers in this Internet age we read about photography, and share our work, in hopes of honing our craft. You could be pursuing a career as a wedding photographer or a sports shooter and either way you’re searching for articles, subscribing to photography blogs, and participating in photo forums in hopes that there are gems of knowledge that will take your photographic prowess to the next level.

What most photographers, especially those that didn’t do any formal art training, are missing from their arsenal of learning tools, is the art of critique.

Defining Art Criticism

Sometimes, it can be fiercely difficult to know what's missing in a photograph. The easiest way to get a bit of help is simply to ask for it - but you've got to do it right.

Simply put: Art criticism is the discussion of the evaluation of art.

And having your peers, especially those whom you respect, evaluate your photography in a constructive manner will make you a better photographer.

And yes… it can seem scary.

We often think of critiques as negative and judgmental. They don’t have to be. And if they are…well, you just shrug it off. Chalk it up to the learning process.

There is an alternative.

You could upload your images to Flickr and join groups where they require comments and post badges and prizes galore! You’ll be inundated with happy unicorns and shiny gold medals. Comments like “Wow!” and “Nice!” will flood your comments sections and you’ll be able to see through rose coloured glasses for days!

While that may be okay for the occasional ego-boost I’d argue that those kind of groups are doing you more harm than good.

I mean, let’s get real for a second…did you actually learn anything from those kinds of comments? Did you become a better photographer because you got a scripted response from someone else looking for tons of comments filled with other scripted responses?

I didn’t think so.

Get Better Photo Critiques

I know from experience that there's nothing more difficult than getting harsh critique or a ton of suggestions for improvement on a photo you're particularly proud of. But stand tall and take it like a (wo)man - it's the fastest way to get better.

Getting better photo critiques starts by going to the right places (hint: you’re already at one of them).

You may already know that Photocritic does photo critiques and I highly recommend adding your photos to his queue.
Flickr has a rather large assortment of groups that are dedicated to criticism and critique. Simply search Flickr for “critique” and find the one that best suits your tastes and style of photography.
DeviantArt also has groups dedicated to criticism. What’s unique about DeviantArt is that you’ll get critiques from artists of varying mediums, not just photographers, which can add a different perspective and unique insights.
Photography forums often have sections dedicated to critiques. You’re probably already part of a photography forum, or know of a good one, so search for critique threads.

So you found a place that does critiques. Now what?

Upload some of your photographs then submit or post them to the groups or threads in the critiques section.
Participate! When you join a new group or forum you’ll likely get ignored for a little while in the beginning. Don’t worry, this is natural in every social setting. You need to be pro-active and start conversations. Critique other photographs. When you start critiquing other people’s photographs you are essentially inviting them to critique your work as well.
Keep the conversation going. After someone has left a critique of your work it’s a good idea to thank them for their time and/or insight. This simple act of “conversation” will encourage more participation from others who may be sitting on the sidelines.

Keep it constructive or you won’t really gain much.

The day you think there's nothing left to learn, you may as well eBay all your camera equipment and give up. Trust me; that day will never come. And if you think it has, you're wrong.

Feel free to set guidelines on your work. Not everyone will pay attention, but many will. On every image I post on my flickr account I add “While your comments are greatly appreciated, your presence is enough reward. Please do not post awards or banners, leave a comment or a thought instead. I know you can!” in the description box. Think about how you could set guidelines on your work to get the best comments and critiques that you can.
Make friends with photographers that you respect. Keep in contact with those that do constructive criticisms and maintain a conversation with them.
Give the best critiques you can give by avoiding annoying and overused comments and critiques and other’s will more likely reciprocate.
Be as objective as you can. You aren’t going to agree with all of the comments and criticisms you get and they’re not all going to be right. One of my best selling photographs got slaughtered in two separate critiques (one group critique and one published *yikes!* critique).
Research. If someone calls your photograph out for not having or overdoing a certain artistic element you need to look it up (especially if you think you know what it means) before you disagree with them in an open platform. Otherwise you alienate anyone else from leaving critiques
Be gracious and objective. This can’t be stated enough!

Following these guidelines will help you garner better critiques and comments on your photographs. You’ll learn how others look at your photographs and you’ll learn whether or not you are achieving your goals as a visual story teller. Did I miss anything? Do you actively pursue critiques?

About the Author:

I’m a huge fan of Damien Franco’s work. He’s obviously exploring; finding his feet as a photographer, but more importantly, he’s always ready to share what he knows. He works as a contemporary fine art photographer working in West Texas and writes photography tutorials when he’s not fighting tumble weeds, cactus, and oil tycoons. You could do a lot worse than following him on that there Flickr thing.

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BeetleCam: Safari via remote control

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:36:33 +0000

I’ve done a fair bit of work with Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas in the past – they’re both ludicrously talented photographers and great guys. They also have a knack for DIY – and I have to say that their newest project is one of the ones that has interested me most recently – What do you get when you strap a camera to the top of a remote controlled car? You get their incredible BeetleCam.

The modern world of wildlife photography is saturated with thousands of talented photographers producing a huge number of fantastic photographs. As a result it is difficult to produce original shots without really pushing the boundaries and striving for new perspectives. Often, this means putting yourself (or the camera) into places that many would consider impossible.

Matt and Will with the fantastic BeetleCam

Tired of the dangers of wildlife photography, Will and Matt set out to invent something. “We were driven to embark upon an ambitious project to photograph African wildlife from a new perspective”, Will tells me over coffee: “Traditionally, you get close to animals by using camera traps – stationary cameras triggered by a trip beam or remote. The problem with this method is that it requires a great deal of time, patience and luck. Therefore we decided to invent something a little more proactive!”. Easier said than done, but they did come up with a brilliant solution: The BeetleCam. Put simply, it’s a DSLR camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy.

When was the last time you captured a shot like this? Incredible, eh?

They booked a trip to Tanzania and set about designing, building and testing BeetleCam. The first step was to get up to speed on the necessary robotics and electronics that would be required to build such a device from scratch. Having conducted our research, they sourced components from around the world. Construction then began in earnest with sawing, soldering, sewing and super gluing taking place around the clock in Will’s garage.

This was the last thing the poor Canon 400D saw before it was mauled by lions. Literally.

BeetleCam’s primary challenge would be getting over the uneven African terrain with a heavy payload of camera, lens and flashes. “We therefore ordered the most powerful motors we could find”, Will recalls, “and large off road tires, too”. After all, BeetleCam had to be able to operate for long periods without being charged, so they also ordered massive batteries.

Next, they constructed a split ETTL off-camera flash cord that allowed the camera to control the output of two flashes depending on the light conditions (this would be important for filling in the shadows cast by the bright African sun). The finishing touches were to camouflage BeetleCam and seal the camera and internal mechanisms from the environment.

The beetle cam in full camouflage

The prototype was finished with a month to spare but it proved to be catastrophically unstable. Whoops – you don’t want to go retrieve a camera from the midst of a pack of angry lions! An emergency redesign was undertaken to lower the centre of gravity and, a few days before their departure, BeetleCam was ready for to be let loose in the wild!

“We decided to make our first subjects elephants.”, Will says, and his face says it all: This was not going to end well. “Photographing them proved difficult”, he laughs. It turns out that their hearing and high intelligence made it very hard to outsmart them. “Eventually we developed a technique that involved manoeuvring BeetleCam into their path and waiting for them to approach”. Needless to say, this took a great deal of guesswork but perseverance paid off and they were able to take some amazing photographs of huge elephants towering over the camera.

You'll be much happier standing a few hundred meters away with a remote control than to actually be pressing the button here yourself. Trust me on this one. Or just ask Will.

Spurred by their success, Will and Matt got brave. “Our second subjects were lions and these proved easier to get close to”. sadly, though, it turned out to be just a little bit too easy. “Within 20 seconds of deploying BeetleCam, the lions had rushed over to investigate, bitten our Canon EOS 400d and run off into the bush carrying the actual BeetleCam itself”. A dramatic recovery mission ensued and they eventually retrieved their battered camera and BeetleCam. The camera would never take another photo, but imagine their excitement: “The 400d had captured some incredible shots in its final few seconds of life!”, Will laughs. Fortunately, they were able to patch BeetleCam up with some string and a few bits of wood. “We replaced the 400d with our only other camera, a Canon EOS 1d Mk III. Obviously we weren’t going to deploy near lions again!”

With our expensive 1D mounted on top of BeetleCam, they were were quite nervous when they decided to try photographing a group of old bachelor buffalos. If you’ve never had the honour of trying to capture ‘em; Buffalos have a reputation for being grumpy and unpredictable! “To our surprise and great relief, these old brutes turned out to excellent models”, Will explains. “they were very cooperative and posed beautifully as we drove BeetleCam around them!

Stunning. Absolutely stunning.

“Upon returning to the UK, we were thrilled with the photographs that we had managed to take during our two-weeks in Tanzania. We have already started work on BeetleCam Mark II and plan to return to Africa later this year to take more photographs.”, Will concludes.

Follow the Burrard-Lucas brethren’s crazy adventures by subscribing to their newsletter or checking out their RSS feed. Videos of the BeetleCam in action and more pics taken with it can be seen on the BeetleCam section of their website.

A huge thanks to Will and Matt for being interviewed for Photocritic. All photos are © burrard-lucas.com. Images used with explicit permission – please contact Matt and Will for further copyright info.

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Paid-for photo competitions

Haje Jan Kamps — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:20:59 +0000

The blog you’re currently reading is relatively high profile. I have 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). Anyway, as a result, I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions.

Recently, however, I’ve received a series of e-mails (about ten 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 crapton 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 [$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.

Finally, many of these competitions will make you pay money to enter and try to grab your copyright off you at the same time (more about this in my Be Careful what you Sign article), making it doubly sinister.

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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The Canons of Navarone

Haje Jan Kamps — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:20:25 +0000

Something interesting has happened in the world of photography: Canon currently have two cameras on the market, at basically exactly the same price point. The Canon 550D (EOS Rebel T2i) costs £705 in the UK and $799 in the US, whilst the Canon EOS 50D costs £726 / $850.

Shop around further afield than Amazon, and the prices are so similar that they are practically identically priced. Which is a curious and interesting situation. The question, then, is as follows: You will buy one of them, but which one would you choose?

Comparing the specs

When you compare the specifications side by side (made a lot easier by using dpreview’s fantastic side-by-side comparison tool of the two cameras), there ain’t much between them. The 50D is slightly faster, the 550D has a slightly better screen and higher resolution.

Some would argue that the 550D makes more sense because I have the memory cards already (HD/SD), but the 550D generates massive files, and I probably have to buy new, bigger memory cards anyway, so that point is moot.

In favour of the 550D

A very tasty camera indeed.

The 550D has a full-HD movie mode, which isn’t something I generally look for in a stills camera, but I have seen some beautiful results, and I’m tempted to give it a go.

The 50D doesn’t have particularly good high-ISO results in some tests, which is a downer, while the 550D appears to have inherited the absolutely epic low-light skills from the 7D camera.

Resolution means nothing, and the difference between 15 or 18 megapixels is practically non-existent. Having said that, having a little bit higher resolution can’t harm, but the key thing is that imaging chips in general are slowly getting better – seeing what the 7D has been able to do with a ‘very similar’ imaging chip, I’m leaning towards the 550D based on its innards

In favour of the 50D

A very tasty camera indeed.

I’ve owned many cameras in the xxD series in the past – the 60D, 10D, 20D, 30D, and 40D have all been in my possession at some point, and I trust Canon to do a good job on it. They’re a lot more solidly built than the xxxD series, so that’s a huge advantage if you mistreat your camera (which I generally don’t).

The 50D is also faster in general: It starts faster, it takes photos in continuous mode faster, etc.

What would you do?

So, the 550D and the 50D cost practically the same, and have different advantages. Which one would you buy?

It’s an interesting (and fiercely difficult) choice to have to make; choosing between these two, very similar-yet-different cameras. I know which one I am leaning towards, but I’m very curious to hear what you would choose – and why. Vote above, comment below, make it good!

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Visualising studio lighting

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:29:23 +0000

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.

I’ve put together a collection of examples which I hope will help. For these photos, I’ve used a figurine with a nearly round head – this will be very useful to determine where the light is coming from; but remember that all of this is as valid with more complicated shapes, including people.

This picture of HappyHead is part of a series of photos designed to explain some basics of studio lighting.

If you’re curious, this is the equipment I’m using throughout this post (and when I’m taking photos in general, for that matter).

For most of the photos, the lighting set-up is like this:

Check out the Flickr page for a detailed breakdown of everything you see in this photo.

A couple of basics

Picture 1 – Lit by a single 580EX II flash from top left at 1/32 power output.

Picture 2 – Same as Picture 1, but with an additional flash from the right, slightly behind HappyHead, at 1/64 power, to lift the shadow a little.

Picture 3 – Same as Picture 2, but with an additional flash at full blast on the background. Note the light fall-off to the right, due to the flash being too close to the wall, and not aimed correctly.

Picture 4 – Shows just the flash to the right, slightly behind HappyHead.

Picture 5 – Shows just the flash behind HappyHead, used to blast the background.

Troubleshooting lighting.

The observant among you will have figured out that Picture 1 + Picture 4 + Picture 5 = Picture 3. As a general rule, you can often just switch on one flash at a time to figure out which flash gives what kind of light – but only when they are in manual mode, obviously: In E-TTL mode, the flashes will attempt to compensate for the missing flashes.

Gels add a touch of colour

Picture 6 – introduces the use of coloured gels. This is basically Picture 1 plus the same set-up as picture 2. However, the gelled flash has a much higher power output (1/32) to help overcome the light loss from the blue gels

Umbrellas or softboxes make the light softer

Picture 7 – This uses the same flash setup as we’ve had so far, but with an umbrella on the left-hand flash to make the light softer. Notice how much gentler the light fall-off (i.e. how much less harsh the shadow is) is in this photo compared to the ones before int his series

Preventing spill-light

Picture 8 – Same as picture 7, but I have turned the right-side flash to the background, with the blue gels on it. Note how the blue in the background looks quite washed out. This is because the umbrella is great at spreading the light, but it also throws a lot of light onto the background, which causes the blue light to be ‘contaminated’ with white light

Picture 9 – Same as picture 8, but here, I have added a piece of cardboard to the flash on the left, to ensure less of the light hits the left side of the umbrella:

That, in turn, that means that less light is diffused onto the background, so now the blue flash can do its job better. Note that the flash output in Pic 8 and Pic 9 is identical – the only thing that changes is a tiny bit of cardboard. Incredible, eh?

Don’t forget about reflectors

Picture 10 – Okay, back to the original (this is a different picture than pic 1, but uses essentially the same settings, so should look very similar). See how dark the right side of HappyFace’s head is? In Picture 2, I fixed it by adding a flash, but you can be more economical with your flashes

Picture 11 – is exactly the same photo as Picture 10, except I’m holding a reflector (that’s a posh word for ‘a piece of A4 paper’) just out of the frame on the right side of the image. The light from the flash is reflected off the paper and back onto HappyFace, causing it to look much less dramatic.

From night to day with the flick of a switch

Picture 12 – is quite similar to Picture 1, but has been set up to contrast with picture 13… Also note how the light has been moved further towards the camera (i.e. further to the front of HappyFace). This is so you can tell the edge of the head better – instead of getting the effect like in picture 7, where you can barely tell where the side of his head ends and the wall begins, here you get a clearer definition of his head.

Picture 13 – The only difference between picture 12 and 13 is that in Picture 13, I have turned the flash lighting up the background off. Two completely different looks at the flick of a switch. It’s bloody magic, I’m telling you

Time to show off

Picture 14 – is just showing off, really, and combines a whole series of lessons: The background is beautifully lit with a 420EX, the right side of HappyHead’s face is lit with the familar strobe, but with a red gel on it.

Iin retrospect, I wish I had umbrella’ed that strobe, because it’d have gotten rid of that bright red specular highlight just at the edge of HappyHead’s mouth.

Good luck!

This is only a very quick’n'dirty introduction to lighting, but it seems as if most people who e-mail me are actually struggling at this level – I’ll pick up with a more advanced lesson in a couple of months, I think. For now, go on, play with your lights, and feel free to drop me an e-mail!

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Backing up your photos

Haje Jan Kamps — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:38:01 +0000

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.

There are a few important steps to creating a backup strategy.

Choose what to back up

This is the easiest bit. Think about this: What do you want to back up? The answer, here, is probably either ‘my photos’, or ‘my photos and lots of other stuff’.

I do both – but I go out of my way to take better, more frequent, and more redundant backups of my photos, because they’re more valuable and important to me.

Choose how to back it up

Automatic back-up at home – Personally, I’m using an Apple Time Capsule (usually available a smidge cheaper on Amazon.com / .co.uk) which has a huge benefit: It takes automatic back-ups every hour. Which means that every time I come within WiFi range of my house (which happens frequently, unsurprisingly), the computer automatically starts backing up my important files (i.e. all my photographs). I love this solution because it’s a no-brain approach to back-up: I don’t have to do or remember anything, it just does it for me.

Along the same trait is Automatic back-up over the internet – In addition to my Time Capsule, I use a service called Mozy, which is an online backup service (for more about why, see ’store the backup’ below). It’s pretty clever, actually, for about $5 per month you get unlimited storage, and it takes backups in the background, all over the internet. By having your back-ups off-site, your stuff is still safe even if someone steals everything in your house, there is a fire, or similar horribleness. I signed up for a 2-year subscription, set it up, and haven’t looked at it since (apart from checking if it’s still backing up every now and then. It is. I’m impressed.)

Fully redundant backups… – Finally (can you tell I’m slightly paranoid?) I have a hard disk RAID solution, also at home. This is a little box I can plug into my computer. The box contains two harddrives, which are ‘mirrored’. This means that both disks have the same content in them: If one of them fails, in theory all you have to do is to replace the broken disk. The other disk will copy all the information back onto the new disk, and you’re safe again. This is a pretty hard-core solution, but it works very well to ensure data integrity.

That's 50,000 photographs just waiting to be destroyed because someone opened the hard drive enclosure to take a photo...

… Over a network: RAID solutions can work in many different ways – you can do them over a network (Check out ‘Network Attached Storage’ on Amazon (.co.uk or .com)).

… Hooked up directly to your PC or Mac: As far as stand-alone RAID goes, you can buy ready-built solutions (Like the G-Tech G-Raid 3TB FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB solution available from Amazon.com, or the WD MyBook 2GB solution from Amazon.co.uk) – but there are loads of other options available, too.

If you’re feeling thrifty and a bit DIY-tastic, you can build your own RAID solution by getting two big harddisks. I’m rather fond of Western Digital Caviar Green drives; they are reliable, quiet, and cheap-tastic: Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com. In addition, you’ll need an enclosure. Look for Firewire 800 if your computer supports it – if not, USB2 or FireWire should do the trick.

Check your backup integrity

I was kicking myself when I thought I might have lost this photo - turns out that I did have a backup of it, despite deleting the folder by accident. Phew! Click for bigger version on Flickr

Remember that you have to be sure that what you are backing up is actually working: There’s no good in taking a backup of a corrupted file. Obviously, you can’t check every file for integrity every time, but what you can do is to ensure that you keep older backups, too.

Only recently, I discovered that I had deleted a folder of pictures by accident several months ago. If I had only kept a recent snapshot of my pictures folder (as it were, pun fully intended), I’d have been buggered. Luckily (or rather: due to having a sane backup strategy), I was able to dig out an older backup of my photos folder, which still contained the deleted folder, and I was able to restore my photos. Phew!

For important shoots, I immediately burn them to DVD – that way, I know I have a backup somewhere which isn’t being touched.

Think about where you store your backups

Okay, so perhaps this bank vault is a bit over-kill, but if your photos are valuable to you (say, if you're a commercial photographer, or if you can't stand the thought of losing them), you might want to consider renting a deposit box, and keep a backup of your photos on an external harddrive there. You only need a tiny bank box, so it shouldn't cost the world.

It’s important to think about how you are storing your backups. Remember that you’re backing up for all sorts of reasons: If your computer breaks, and external harddrive is handy. But what if someone breaks into your house? It’s no good having a full set of backups on external harddrives if the thieves can just take them with them, too. House fires, floods, etc – there are lots of reasons why keeping your backups in your house is a good idea (they’re easily available), but there are risks, too.

Personally, I keep my Time Capsule hidden away in the attic. That way, a casual thief is unlikely to run off with it, so even if my computer is stolen, I don’t lose my photos.

In addition, I keep a backup on an external drive which I leave at my parent’s house – it’s low-tech, and the backups are generally about 2 months old every time I swap the drive over, but it’s better than not having it handy.

In addition, I have the Mozy backups – although they would be a pain int he arse to restore: I’d have to download hundreds of GB of data. There’s an alternative way, too: ordering DVDs or an external harddrive with your data, but that, too, is a pain… In short, Mozy is my absolute last resort.

And finally… Try recovering the backup

The best thing that might happen to you is that you go your entire life without ever having to restore a back-up. Nonetheless, it is an extremely good idea to try it anyway.

If you’re unable to restore your backups (perhaps there’s a problem with the backups? Maybe the restore feature of your favourite backup package isn’t working?), you may as well not bother with the hassle of backups at all: they’re only useful if you can use them if the worst happens.

Couple of notes

The links to Mozy and Amazon in this article are affiliate links (more about those on the ‘Advertising on Photocritic‘ page, if you’re curious). That means that if you buy something, I get a small kick-back from the seller for sending you there. I am using all the equipment that I’m suggesting in this post, however, and would never recommend something purely because I could make a few pennies off it. Amazon is not always the cheapest retailer, so do shop around, you might be able to find the things you need cheaper elsewhere.

The bank vault and harddrive photos are from iStockPhoto.

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Darkening a room by adding light

Haje Jan Kamps — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:32:14 +0000

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…

It’s all about relative brightness

To take the lemon photograph, I used a pretty simple set-up: A couple of flashguns aimed at the lemon, from a very close distance. Because the flashes were so close to the subject (they are just out of frame, in fact), it adds a lot of light. If you’re curious why that is, check out the inverse-square law on Wikipedia.

Say 'bonjour' to the magical space-lemon. It's citrus powered, awesome, and magical. Oh, and it hovers in space, clearly. That's what makes it awesome. If you want to take a closer look, click on the photo!

The reason why the photo came out as it did, is because of the camera settings: The camera was set to ISO 100, with f/9.0 aperture and 1/200 second shutter time. If you can’t visualise what those settings would do in the circumstances described, I welcome you to try that right now. Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Set your camera to precisely those settings, and take a photo indoors, without using a flash.

If you can’t be bothered to do the experiment: Even in a relatively well-lit room, that will result in a very dark photo indeed.

So, as far as the camera is concerned, it is taking a horribly underexposed photo. Which is perfectly fine, because I want a dark background. It’s the foreground that is important, and that is where my flashes come in.

Let me get this straight, you’re taking photos that look like darkness in a well-lit room?

This portrait was also taken in a relatively well-lit room - but again, because of the high flash output and the fast shutter time (in this case, f/8.0 and 1/500 second at ISO 100), it looks like it's taken in pitch darkness. Groovy. Clicky for bigger.

Short answer: Yup.

Slightly longer answer: Yup. You can do this by settin your camera to manual, and use an exposure which results in a dark room (by choosing a fast shutter time). The next step is to use your flashes to light the subject.

Of course, this doesn’t work if the light from your flashguns spill onto the background (you’re trying to keep that as dark as possible, remember?) so it is a good idea to use a snoot or a honeycomb grid to ensure that the flash light isn’t accidentally re-lighting your background, because then you’re back to square one.

Can this be used for anything else?

Well of course. Always remember that it’s all about the contrast in lighting: If your flashes are more powerful than the light you are photographing in, then you can ‘darken the room’ with your camera settings, and use the flashes to light your scene.

Hell, if you’ve got enough flashes, you can turn even broad daylight into night. Don’t believe me? Check out this article on ganging flashes, and scroll down to “Turning Noon Into Night With High-Speed Sync”. Pretty impressive stuff, but there’s a pretty ridiculous amount of money in flash equipment being used right there.

You don’t have to go to those extremes, though – using flash outdoors on a shady day can give great effects, because when done well, your subjects look as if they are brighter than the surroundings. When done subtly, it can look bloody fantastic – your eyes are automatically and subconsciously drawn to the main subject – always a good sign in a photograph.

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No longer looking for n00bs (thanks!)

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:45:06 +0000

Edit: I’ll keep this post here for posterity, but I have all the help I need. Thank you all so much for your feedback and interest!

So, I’m a writer. I write books about photography. And I get a lot of e-mail from people, asking if I can recommend a good book for someone who knows absolutely nothing about photography. Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve found such a book quite yet.

The problem with photography books out there is that they are either too technical too early (I happen to find shutter times deeply fascinating, but it’s too hands-off for many people who want to get out there and take photos), or they are too tutorial-driven. Several of the most popular photography books for beginners are written in the form of ‘hey, see this photo? Isn’t it awesome? to take it, set your camera to X, Y and Z, and press the shutter’, without actually explaining why you need those settings, and what would happen if you changed them slightly.

Only today, a good friend of mine, Sally, asked me if I could recommend a book. that re-awakened the idea I had: Maybe the time has come that I write my own book for complete beginners.

Why do you need newbies?

Prime lens optional (but highly recommended)

There’s a problem with wanting to write a book for newbies: Sure, I am a photographer at heart, but I’m entirely self-taught. I’ve red hundreds of books about photography, I’ve experimented for a few decades, and I’ve been blogging my way through my first fledgling steps to my current state, as a halfway competent photographer.

Through my work career, I’ve learned some interesting tricks. Specifically, I used to work as a producer for a big TV station, and one of the things we did was focus on user-centred design, test-driven development, and the mantra of ‘test early, test often’, with the idea that it is much easier to adjust a process early on, then to try and fix something six months down the line.

So, my idea is to write a photography book “the wrong way around”: I want to know what my readers want to learn (this would be equal to the ‘tests’ in test-driven development), and then I want to find ways of teaching them. Then, after I’ve taught them about a topic of photography, I want feedback. What was easy to understand? What was tricky? Did the examples and analogies work? And – perhaps as important as anything else – is it still fun? Did you enjoy learning this piece of photography knowledge, and do you feel you know it well enough to build upon it to learn the next lesson?

I want to participate, what do you need from me?

Bunny knows sweet fuck-all about photography, but his feed-back style is too aggressive for my liking, so I sat him down and explained that no, I wouldn't need his help with this particular project. I think he will grow to accept this. Maybe. Eventually.

Well, you need a SLR camera. I would strongly prefer if you had a prime lens, but a simple kit-lens should be sufficient.

You need to be a keen beginner. Perhaps you’ve had your camera for a few months, but you don’t really know what to do with it. Maybe you have a vision for what you want to accomplish, but you haven’t really got the skills to pull it off.

The important thing is that a) you have no formal photographpy training and b) that you know as little as possible about photography. I’ll probably admit a few slightly more advanced learners to the group, but the difficult part – from my perspective – will be to get through to the rank beginners: the ones who want to learn, but who don’t have anything to build on.

I’ve got plenty of other book projects at the moment, so I think this is going to be a very gradual project.

I expect you to be able to commit a bit of photography time, and to comment on each of the lessons (roughly every second week or so, I imagine). I also expect you to keep any discussions that happen in the virtual lessons to yourself – after all, if this end up being a book, I don’t want the world to know everything until I’m ready to unleash it! :)

Finally, I’ll do a lot of the feedback in ‘public’ to the group. If you’re worried about that: don’t be; I imagine that many people will be making the same mistakes, and it merely saves me from having to type up the same feedback again and again. If you’re particularly sensitive to criticism, however, this probably won’t be the project for you.

How do I apply?

Sorry, you’re too late! – Within 24 hours, I received a lot more applications than I had dared hope for. I was expecting about twenty people interested or so, but instead I received well over a hundred e-mails! I’m going to kick the project off and see where it goes, but I think I’m okay for people for now.

Stay tuned to see where this is going, and how we’re going with the book. I’m sure there’ll be a post once I’m sure what’s actually going to happen. Here’s to having my fingers crossed to find a publisher who might be interested!

So, what’s the plan?

I’ve created a private group on Flickr, and I plan to post the lessons as articles / discussion topics. To get access to the group, I need to invite you, so when you send me the e-mail, I’ll take a look at your Flickr profile, and then invite you if I think you’re good for this project.

I’m hoping to kick off with the first lesson in the beginning of March, and then try and gauge for how frequently we need additional lessons to keep you busy. I’ll also do individual photo critiques of your photos after each lesson, and use these critiques as part of my feedback to the whole group.

Oh and you know what? We’re going to have a hell of a lot of fun. It may even be the first time ever that a book has been written using XP methodologies. I know that makes me a geek, but damn if that ain’t pretty exciting!

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Why I don’t need an expensive camera.

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:10:44 +0000

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?

Let me in on a secret: Even the cheapest d-SLR cameras on the market today are absolutely phenomenal pieces of equipment, and chances are that you don’t need to spend much money to take phenomenal photos.

What am I missing?

"Waves breaking Slowly" - a smoke photo. Taken with a Canon 450D (clicky for full size and details)

As some of you might have noticed, I occasionally dabble in concert photography, and this is where my 450D occasionally lets me down. And then, only in one very specific aspect of my photographic work: I want to take photos faster. I want to be able to take more photos in a shorter period of time. Some times, you realise you’re witnessing something awesome, and you just want to keep the shutter pressed until the awesome has gone away – and then keeping your fingers crossed that one of the six billion photos you’ve taken in the meantime is the shot you were hoping (and praying, if you’re a praying man. Which I’m not. I think I might have gotten better photos with a god on my side, but this is just not That Kind of Blog™) for.

Interestingly, that is the only situation where I’ve ever felt my 450D isn’t up to the job. With the appropriate lighting, my portraiture work comes out lovely. I’ve taken my camera to a load of different countries, and I’ve taken some rather splendid street photos in all of ‘em (if I may say so myself).

The other situation where you might find yourself stuck (although I haven’t had the experience myself, as I make a point of staying as far away from sports as I can) is, er, sports photography.

So, if the 450D is good enough… Is it all just a scam?

You'll often find that lighting is a much bigger factor in photography than the camera you're using. (shot with a Canon EOS 450D. Clickie for bigger)

Wait a minute, cowboy, I never said that. All I’m saying is that at my level (and, I wager to say, at the level of many other photographers), the 450D (and any equivalent low-level SLR cameras) are plenty good.

The problem with photography is that it’s simply too tempting to splash a lot of money for everything, and then end up bankrupting yourself on the wrong things. Sure, I would love to have some of the features offered by more expensive cameras, but I can work around them. For concert photos, I’ve learned to anticipate the movements of the artists, and then try to act on those. I have no doubt that I’ve missed some cracking shots along the way, but equally, I think the limitations of my photographic kit has made me a better photographer. Put differently: Put a 1Ds mk III in my hands now, and I think I’ll be able to take better photos with it than I could have before I learned the limitations of another camera.

The most important thing to remember, though, is that as far as a camera body goes, it doesn’t actually have all that much to do with the picture-taking process itself. Yeah, I know. Controversial. But I said it, and I meant it.

Portrait - taken with a 450D. (click for higher res & info)

Think about it: You are taking a photo of an antelope jumping across a savannah. The sunlight comes from high above, hits the antelope, flies through your lens, into your camera… and the only part of the camera which actually gets involved is the imaging sensor.

I’m not going to lie: I use expensive photographic equipment. I’ve recently splashed a few thousand dollars on lighting equipment. I have some extraordinarily delicious lenses – including my ludicrously fantastic Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM prime lens, a rather sexy 70-200mm f/2.8, etc etc etc. But this illustrates an important point: I’m spending the most money on the bits of kit that will actually impact my photos.

Truth be told, there isn’t that much difference between a 7-year-old Canon digital SLR camera like the 300D and a brand spanking new 550D. Sure, the latter has higher resolution and better toys, but most people simply don’t need the extra resolution. What you need is a shutter that works, a mirror that will move out of the way in time, and a sensor without too many dead pixels. From there on out, it’s all about the quality of your glass (i.e. your lenses), the quality of your light (i.e. sunlight / flash / natural light / diffusers / softboxes / light filters / etc) and… You.

With all the electronics, magnificent optics, and delicious equipment at your beck and call, the sad, scary, horrible truth is that the weakest link in everything I’ve just described is you. A competent photographer can take good photos with a single-use camera.

My advanced motorcycling club has a motto: “Upgrade your skills to match your machine”. In other words: Your motorcycle is probably better than you are, and you need to work smart (and hard) to not kill yourself. Granted, I’d be willing to accept that more people kill themselves with a set of handlebars between their hands than with a SLR, but the point stands: If you haven’t got the skills, there’s no point in blaming your tools.

What are the benefits of pricier cameras?

I quite like the fact that the Canon 450D looks unobtrusive: It makes street photography just that tiny bit easier.

As you go up the Canon and Nikon ranges, you get some very good benefits. If you’re working as a (semi-)professional photographer, the first thing you’ll notice is build quality. The budget cameras aren’t badly put together, but they’re made of plastic. Drop one, and there’s a pretty good chance it’s all just game over. The more pricey cameras are built of aluminium or magnesium, and can take significantly more abuse.

The higher-priced, higher-specced cameras also tend to have better screens, higher-resolution sensors, higher shooting and processing speed, and more gadgets to help you get the photos you desire. I’m not saying this is a bad thing: there’s a ‘right’ tool for every job. Very often, a more advanced tool can be used to do jobs that a cheaper tool could have completed, but not vice-versa.

I also note that ISO speed has come up in the comments a few times, and that had me wondering. I asked a good friend of mine who reviews camera equipment for a living. He explains that ‘budget’ SLR cameras are as good as their larger parents. It is possible to get better performance, of course, but that involves going full-frame, and then you’re suddenly well and truly out of budget-camera-territory, price-wise.

On the ISO front, you sometimes get an improvement with the latest high-end model but it very quickly filters down (see for example how fast the 550D got great high-ISO capabilities so soon after 7D).

Hey, aren’t you meant to be some hot-shot writer?

Again with the street photography! Don't I ever give up? Nope, of course not. (clicky for bigger)

Uhm… Yeah, I’d like to think of myself as one, anyway (and I’ve got the resume to back it up, if you’re particularly curious…), but the truth of the matter is that most of my writing is aimed at photographers who rank from ‘geez, which hole do I look into to see what I’m taking a photo of’ beginners, to ‘Hey, I do wonder what the comparative benefits of shooting in RAW is, compared to taking only JPEGs’ intermediate photographers. Truth is, more expensive cameras are objectively ‘better’.

… But the bottleneck is still the photographers. Take it from me: you’ll be much happier with a ‘cheap’ dSLR, a decent lens, and an oath to work hard on taking better photos, than by owning the hippest, coolest, and newest equipment on the market.

Concert photography is the only time where I'm feeling the 450D can occasionally let me down. But then again, I seem to have learned to work around its weaknesses, and still walk away with some pretty nifty photos... (clicky for bigger)

There’s nothing quite as embarrassing as a clueless newbie behind the wheel of a sportscar. My 450D is the all-rounder that lets me do everything I need to do with a camera.

And best of all? A 450D isn’t throw-away money, but if something horrible were to happen to my camera and I lost or destroyed it somehow, I could swear for 45 minutes straight, before walking into the nearest shop to buy myself another one. A Canon 1Ds mk III is small-family-hatchback territory; not the kind of money I can afford to lose.

The bottle-neck of good photography is often the photographer. This photo, I could have taken with a disposable camera (well, maybe. Certainly with a compact).

Finally, the 450D is more like the camera that my readers are likely to use. Truth of the matter is that people who own a much more expensive camera are more likely a) to no longer need my articles, b) to think they no longer need my articles, or c) to be so far ahead of the game that I haven’t got anything to offer them anymore.

Oh, and by the way… I sort of like the fact that the 450D is made of plastic. It’s much lighter to travel with, looks cheaper (and so is less likely to get stolen from me) and is less invasive when I’m working with my street photography projects…

Which doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally think about upgrading. My 450D has served me well, but the recent launch of the Canon 550D has made me wonder if it isn’t time to bring me back up to date… So Canon, if you’re reading this… ;-)

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In photography, rules aren’t laws.

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:04:21 +0000

The internet is absolutely full of guides about things you should and shouldn’t do to take ‘good photos’. Don’t over-expose. Remember the rule of thirds. Don’t cut people’s heads off. Watch your background. Use a shallow DOF in portraits to throw the backgrounds out of focus. 3-point lighting for portraiture, etc.

A lot of us just take all these rules for given, as if they are hard-and-fast rules that you have to stick to, because if you don’t, you’ll fail as a photographer. Break these rules, and you won’t take a good photo in your life. Your cat will die, your children will hate you, and your significant other will divorce you.

Truth, as you might expect, is slightly different. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time the ‘rules’ (which in any case should be seen as mere guidelines) make a lot of sense. Of course it looks silly if you cut people’s heads off. Of course your photos won’t look conventional if they are harshly over- or under-exposed.

Rules aren’t laws. You can break them unpunished

Grossly over-exposing a photo doesn't have to mean it won't look good. (click for bigger on Flickr)

Read the sentence above. That’s all I really wanted to say with this article. So if you’re in a rush, or you think I use too many words to say something simple, then read that sentence a few times, and go check out XKCD for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that while the guidelines are there to help you, there’s no point in following any rules or guidelines unless you fully understand (or grok, if you’re geeky and/or well-read enough to be familiar with that concept) why.

The best reason to understand why a rule is there, is to break it. Some times, you might find that your photos actually come out more interesting – better, even, perhaps – when you break the rules. Other times, you’ll try to take the same photo twice; once whilst following the rule, and once whilst breaking it, and you’ll realise why it’s a good idea.

Just remember: Never follow a rule just because you’ve read somewhere that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Follow it because you understand it, and because you know what happens when you don’t.

Break these rules

Contrary to popular belief, your foreground doesn't have to be in focus (clicky for bigger)

DPS’s 11 tips for beginner photographers.
DP Tutorial’s Photography tips for beginners.
The tips in my own How to win a photography competition
Buzzle’s basic digital photography tips.
Photography Tips and Tricks’ Tips for Beginners
Digital Photography Tips’ guides on The rule of thirds, Making a good crop, Change shooting angles for better photos and Focus on the details for better photos.
Every single one of Rick Sammon’s (@RickSammon) Top Ten Digital Photography Tips (YouTube Video)
These 100 tips from Cameras.co.uk (ignore the first 30 or so, they’re about 600 years old, and are related to taking photos by carving them into mountains)

A couple of examples

DO cut their heads off at the top if it makes for more interesting and intimate photos (click for bigger on Flickr)

The Carlsberg Express: Of course your horizon doesn't have to be straight, if a non-straight horizon gives you better results! (click for bigger on Flickr)

Sometimes, getting in closer makes a photo more intimate. Don't be afraid to crop into people's faces.

The horizontals aren't horizontal. The verticals aren't vertical. The background is a mess. How could this photo ever be any good? But it is... (click for bigger on Flickr)

White balance? Hah? I spit on your white balance. (click for bigger)

Some times, the background adds to a photo - don't throw it out of focus on principle just because you have a nice, fast lens.

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Building a laser trigger for your camera

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:17:37 +0000

There are loads of reasons for why you could want to trigger your camera remotely – to avoid camera shake, for example, or to be able to take a photograph of yourself without having to rely on a timer. If you want to build more ambitious projects, however, you may have to consider getting more exotic.

I recently built a little device which triggers my camera whenever a laser beam is broken. It is about as simple an electronics project as you can pull off, but it’s going to form the base of a couple of other cool projects I’ll be working on going forward (stay tuned…), so I figured I’d do a quick post explaining how I did this.

Talking to the camera

This looks a lot like a headphone jack, but it is not - headphone jacks are 3.5mm, this is 2.5mm.

Even though it isn’t strictly necessary, I decided to use my Arduino (check out Arduino.cc) as the base for this project.

I say ‘not necessary’ because you can build this project using just electronic components, which makes it all a lot simpler – however, what I really wanted to do is to build a base on which I can build further in the future. If you want to get more advanced, it becomes a lot easier to use a programmable micro-controller like the Arduino, so I figured I may as well start where I mean to continue.

I stripped the wires from the remote lead. Connecting green and red triggers the camera.

To interface with the camera, I decided to keep things as simple as possible, and I used the 2.5mm jack port on the side of my Canon EOS 450D. If your camera has a different remote control port, you should still be able to use the tips described in this post, but you’ll have to source the actual plug yourself.

Using the remote control port has several advantages, the biggest of which is that it’s really easy to trigger the camera this way. All you need to do is to make a connection between two wires! I bought a couple of cheap remote controls from China and used one of ‘em to interface with my camera, but you can go into your local electronics store to pick up a 2.5mm jack for next to no money…

Triggering the camera with the Arduino

This is the most important part of this mini-project: As soon as you can trigger the camera with the Arduino, only your imagination will stop you from coming up with ways of using this. Because the Arduino will accept input from any number of sources, you can program it to take photos in just about any circumstance imaginable. Just a few ideas:

Motion sensor (trigger the camera when it senses movement)
Heat sensor (take a picture when the)
Sound sensor (take a picture when the dog barks or the phone rings)
Telephone trigger (Hook up the arduino to a mobile phone. Call or SMS the mobile phone to take a picture)
Timelapse photography (Program the Arduino to take a photo every minute)

There are a few different ways you can use the Arduino to trigger the camera – I considered using a relay, but the problem is that even very fast relays are quite slow, so I decided to use a transistor instead:

You! At the back! no sniggering at my atroceous schematic drawing skills!

The Arduino sends a signal to the transistor, which connects the two leads leading to the camera, which triggers the camera.

Forgive the rubbish picture - I was prototyping, so it's less than clear what's going on here. The important bits are in the schematic above. Honest, it's piss easy.

Getting the laser trigger to work

I hooked up a LDR (Light-dependent resistor) with a pull-down resistor to ensure that it wouldn’t trigger randomly to the analog sensor pin 0 on the Arduino. The programme uploaded to the Arduino is as follows:

 int sensorPin = 0;
 int sensorValue = 0;
 int cameraTrigger =  13; 

 void setup() {
   pinMode (cameraTrigger, OUTPUT); }

 void loop() {
   sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
   if (sensorValue > 700) {
// trigger is quite low, might need to be higher in daylight
     digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, LOW);
   }
   else
   {
     digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, HIGH);
     delay(10);
     digitalWrite (cameraTrigger, LOW);
	 delay(1000); // Take max 1 pic per second
   }
 }

Pull-down resistor to ensure true readings, and a LDR to do the actual light measuring.

With the arduino all programmed, I just had to add the LDR.

Now, I rigged up a laser module aimed at the LDR, and I checked what the common sensor values were – turns out that it drops to about 200 when the laser beam wasn’t hitting the sensor, and goes up to about 900 or so when it is hitting the sensor. I set the sensor trigger to about 700 to give me some leeway.

In the above snippet of code, the interesting stuff happens in the loop: Basically, it checks if the sensor has gone ‘dark’. If it hasn’t, it simply checks again.

The bright pink bit in the photo here is the laser beam hitting the LDR.

If the Arduino detects that the sensor has gone ‘dark’, it triggers the camera for 10 milliseconds, then untriggers it. This is to ensure that the camera doesn’t continue taking photos for the duration of the beam being broken – I have my camera set to ‘one shot’ anyway, but by adding this line of code, it should still work if the camera is set to continuous shooting when the shutter button is held down.

When the Arduino detects a broken beam, it takes a photo, then waits for a second, before checking for a broken beam again. If it’s still broken, it’ll take another photo and then waits another second.

Does it even work?

Yup. But a video says more than a thousand words so check ‘er out:

(forgive the crummy video quality, but you get the idea)

So, er, what the hell can you use this for?

It’s all a little bit theoretical at this point, because I haven’t actually used the trigger for anything useful yet. For one thing, it’s not very portable yet, but I’m planning to take a version of this and solder it all together so it’s a bit more sturdy. At least I know it works, which was the purpose of the exercise.

I have a couple of fantastic ideas for how I can create some pretty cool projects where the camera can just stand there and take photos automatically. Think birds on a bird-feeder, people walking through a doorway, balls in flight, etc.

If you plan to use the kit to take people by surprise, you may have to hide the lasers away a bit better. In a cleanish room, the red laser is pretty much invisible anyway (although it shows up in specs of dust etc), but if you want the sensor to be completely invisible, you can just use an IR laser instead – it’ll make it invisible to the naked eye.

Disclaimer

I haven’t broken my own camera equipment doing any of this, but if you balls things up, there’s a good chance you might. Be careful, know what you’re doing, and don’t come running to me if you blow up your camera, please!

Copyright Information

Protecting your copyright in a digital world

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:39:34 +0000

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.

You’re not just going to rant, aren’t you?

Well yeah, pretty much. Sorry. But I’ve learned a lot from fighting copyright theft throughout the years, so if you want the actually useful advice, scroll down to the picture which reads ‘USEFUL ADVICE’ in a crazy blue hand-writing font. Scroll down. You can’t miss it. Crazily enough, that’s where the, er, useful advice starts.

What is copyright?

I know that there are a lot of people who are fiercely against copyright – who feel that music should be freely available, that all software should be downloadable, and that people protecting their copyright are devils. If you are among those people, you’re probably not going to like this post much, but stick with me – or at least read ‘How copyright infringement harms me’, below.

Copyright is really quite simple: Whenever you create something, copyright is also created. This happens completely automatically: you don’t have to register your copyright, you don’t have to stick the silly little © symbol on your work, and you don’t have to stand next to the master copy of your copyrighted work with a katana and a grim look on your face to make people understand that something is copyrighted. In fact, it’s usually more correct to assume that something is copyrighted.

Whilst most of the words I’m typing now are in the dictionary (unless I mispell them, in which case they wouldn’t be in the dictionary, but that’s a different point altogether), the order I choose to put them in is my ‘creation’. This creation is something that belongs to me: I have the right to decide who gets to use these words, for what, and under which conditions. I can decide that everyone who reads it would have to give me a cookie or a copy of Wired magazine, for example. Nobody would, of course, but that’s not the point: I get to decide.

I am creating something that is my property, and if someone decides to copy this and upload it elsewhere, my property is being ’stolen’.

There are ways of losing your copyright, but (in the UK, at least) all of them involve signing a piece of paper. Your work contract, if you are a journalist, might assign the work you produce to the copyright. Wiley Publishing published my first book, but I have a contract which stipulates what they are allowed and not allowed to do with the words I have written, and how much money they owe me if someone decides to make ‘Macro Photography: The Movie’. (No, seriously. Movie rights is part of my contract.)

If my good friend Maxwell Lander (link not always safe for work) asked me nicely if he could use one of my articles on his site, I can grant him permission (in effect, I would be extending a licence to his site), or deny his request. The copyright would still be mine, so if someone found my article on his site, and wanted to re-use it elsewhere, they would have to come back to the copyright holder (myself) to ask for permission before re-using it.

Copyright vs. other types of theft

The problem with copyright ‘theft’ is that it isn’t analogous to other types of thieving. If you were to steal my laptop, it is easy to understand why I would be upset: I don’t have a laptop anymore, and you have my laptop: You have clearly deprived me of something that used to be ‘mine’. Short of going all Proudhonesque, I think most people can agree that it’s ‘wrong’ to take something which belongs to somebody else. Copyright is often more difficult to understand for people.

If I have bought a copy of Mark Helprin’s Refiners Fire, and I’ve finished reading it, you might ask me to borrow it. I’ll lend it to you, of course, because I think everybody should read Refiners Fire. As far as Helprin is concerned, nothing bad has happened: I have bought the copy of the book, and I’m allowed to do whatever I want with it. I can set it on fire. I can read it every week for the next 15 years. I can give it away via BookMooch, sell it on eBay, or lend it to my friends, if I want. No problem here.

If I have bought a copy of The Decemberists’ Castaways and Cutaways, I could do much of the same: I can lend it to my housemate, sell it to a friend, or throw it away when I’m tired of it. I can even transfer it to another medium: At the moment, I’m listening to that very album on my laptop, where it lives in glorious, high-quality M4A format. The ‘loophole’ here is that I still have the CD: I can see it from here. If I were to sell the CD, however, I’d be in trouble: The CD is the ‘licence’ for me to listen to the music.

In both the above situations, I have made a physical purchase. If I were to photocopy the book for a friend (never mind that it would probably be more expensive to copy the book than to just order another copy from Amazon or something), I’ve made a transgression. If I were to give a copy of the CD, I’m in the wrong. It’s pretty easy to understand, too: When I make a copy of a CD or a book, I’m depriving the artist/writer of royalties. As a (struggling) writer myself, I can see how that is upsetting.

Where it gets more complicated, is how I routinely give away my content for free (you’re reading my blog now, aren’t you? Did you pay? Of course not, and I don’t expect you to), but still be upset when someone steals it? You can’t steal something that’s free, can you?

How copyright infringement harms me

I'm the guy on the left. That is my angry face. I don't make my angry face too often, but people nicking my content might see it...

There are many ways you could be in infringement of my copyrighted content: Turn it into a book and sell it under your own name, and chances of me finding out are very slim. Print out copies of an article for your photography club, and there’s no way I would ever know. And still, I wager that most people would agree that the former is worse than the latter. Why? Because now someone is making money off the back of my hard work. If it turns out that what I am writing here is worth money, then I should be the one benefiting from it, right?

Most of the time, infringements happen when someone takes one of my articles and posts it to their own website, either manually (by copying and pasting the text from my site) or automatically (by taking the RSS feed and showing it on their site in its entirety). This means that my articles show up on another site, which harms me in several different ways:

SEO – I have spent a fair bit of time (and some money) ensuring that Photocritic is designed and developed to best practice Search engine optimisation (SEO) rules, which, in turn means that I rank better in the search engines. There’s no big secret to how to do this – I wrote a separate article about making google love your photography site, in fact.

One of the things that influences your rankings is content duplication. In theory, when people take my content and put it elsewhere, it dilutes my chances of people finding my site. This means that I get less traffic to my site, which in turn reduces the benefits I get from posting my articles for free. The other sites probably don’t promote my book, they don’t give me their advertising money, and they don’t make me feel like a super-hero.

Cold hard cash – I don’t make a lot of money off this site. Most months, I only barely manage to pay for my hosting costs for my server, domain, etc.

Control and reputation – If it turns out that I write something that is incorrect, I am relatively likely to correct it. Imagine if I wrote something that was completely wrong, and might actually damage your camera – if that were to happen, I would immediately post a retraction, a correction, and make people aware of it over Twitter etc.

However, if someone has copied the article to elsewhere, those articles would remain out there – some times, with my name attached… and if someone follows that advice and breaks their camera, what would happen then? I would feel terrible, which is bad enough, but it also puts my reputation at risk.

Cross-marketing – There’s a picture of my books in the sidebar of my site. Every time you see my site, you see a picture of my book. You may not buy it. You may never even notice it. But the next time you’re in a book shop, you might spot it. You might remember it. You might buy it. And for every book I sell, I’m likely to be contacted by a publisher to be able to write another book.

Principle – Many of the people who steal my content don’t do it out of malice. Often, they just get really excited by something I have written, and want all their friends to see it, too. It’s flattering, in fact, but in the process they break the law and upset me. Often, a quick e-mail is enough to help them realise why it upsets me, and the content vanishes quickly. I even had someone send me a lovely box of chocolates and a post-card by way of apology once.

There is a second group of people who nick my content though: The ones who do it to make money. People who systematically steal other people’s content in order to try to get a little bit of traffic from search engines, which they then monetise in one way or another. Affiliate sites selling photo equipment, for example, or sites that simply want to run advertising on my content. Or even unscrupulous photographers who want extra traffic to their site to try and sell their photographic services.

This hurts me in two ways: not only am I competing against my own content in the search engines, but if someone clicks on their adverts instead of mine, this hurts me in the wallet, too: The $0.0001 per click that I would have gotten goes to someone who willfully breaks the law. It’s not about the money (I’m not poor enough to start a fight every time someone steals a fraction of a penny out of my pocket), but about the audacity of doing that, and thinking you can get away with it.

But you have an RSS feed! Isn’t that just begging for it?

Actually, never mind the previous picture. This is my real angry face.

For the longest time, I was running a truncated RSS feed: Basically, you see the first 100 words or so, and nothing else, you’d have to click on the link to come read the full article. Then, a while ago, I had a few people e-mailing me, asking me very nicely if I couldn’t please change it to the full RSS feed, because they preferred reading my site in the feed.

I looked into it, and decided to go for it, for several reasons: I could add advertising to the RSS feed, so in theory I wouldn’t be out of pocket (in addition, fewer readers on the site means, in theory, less bandwidth costs – but that’s moot: I’d rather pay the costs and have more people on my site). In addition, I’m a bit of a geek, and I love Google Reader – I want to be able to catch up with things that way, without incessantly loading up more pages.

A few people immediately started using my RSS feed, piping them into other sites, and essentially creating a clone of my site. They mistakenly thought ‘Hey! He’s got an RSS feed, so it’s okay to syndicate his content’. As we discussed above, in ‘what is copyright’, that’s not the case at all: I might leave a copy of my book on a photo copier machine, but that doesn’t mean I’ve agreed that people can copy it at will.

Think about the examples from the beginning of this article: Making a copy of a 500-page book is a lot of effort and costs a fair whack of money, so people are unlikely to do it. Making a copy of a CD is a lot easier. Scraping my site is even easier, and using my RSS feed to nick my content is easier still: but just because it is easy, doesn’t mean it’s legal.

My RSS feed has a copyright notice in it which currently reads:

Please note that all Photocritic content is © 2001-2010 Kamps Consulting Ltd. This RSS feed is provided for personal, non-commercial use only.

If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator or RSS reader, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. If you spot this anywhere, please contact legal@kamps.org so we can take legal action immediately.

As we said: As the copyright owner, I’m fully within my right to create all sorts of outlandish conditions of use of my own content. In this case, the only conditions are ‘personal use’ (so, don’t distribute it on- or off-line) and ‘non-commercial’, (so, don’t try to make money off my content).

From my perspective, I’m not all that fussed if people e-mail each other copies of my articles: As long as I am not competing against myself in Google et al, it’s not a fight I’m likely to find worth fighting. The great thing about most RSS readers is that they are ‘closed communities’ – Unless you are logged into Google Reader, you can’t see any feeds. This means that search engines don’t index RSS readers – as such, they are not in competition against me for search engine traffic. If someone re-publishes my content on their site, that’s a different matter altogether.

How can you deal with copyright infringement?

Okay, enough ranting. Time for some actually useful advice.

Finding infringing content

Unique strings of text – It turns out that most people who nick my content with malicious intent are doing so via the RSS feed. Probably because, in addition to being immoral, they are lazy. I decided to turn this to my advantage: I inserted a unique string and a date-stamp into my RSS feeds.

In theory, because this unique string only exists in my RSS feed, it should never show up in Bing, Yahoo, Google or, well, anywhere on the internet, really. If/when it does, I know someone is doing something they aren’t supposed to. Searching for this unique string should ideally result in zero search results. Invariably, however, it never does.

Copyright web services

Apart from inserting a unique string, you can use a service like Copyscape to scan for infringing content. Their Copyscape Premium service is fantastic: Point it at your site map, and for only $0.05 per page, it will take all your pages and compare them to the internet. They score your content against other content. High-scoring content obviously is likely to be plagiarised or infringing in one way or another, so you can take action.

Of course, Copyscape only works for textual content. For photographers wanting to track whether their images have been ‘borrowed’, there is Tineye, and their more hard-core PixID service.

Dealing with infringing sites: Start easy!

If you think that someone has used your content by accident, or out of ignorance, there’s no point in chucking the book of the law at them. A friendly e-mail (cc’d to yourself so you remember to follow it up in a week or so) is usually more than enough to get them to take the content down.

I have found that the number 1 reason for the ‘friendly e-mail’ approach failing is that there isn’t an easy way of contacting the owner of the site… I’m not being difficult, but if it takes me more than about 10 seconds to find the contact e-mail address (check the header, sidebar and footer for anything that reads ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, or similar) or a feedback form, they’ve already wasted enough of my time. On to step 2:

Finding contact details

One of the big problems with many websites is that it is difficult to find out how to contact people. If their ‘About Me’ page or ‘contact us’ pages are absent, broken, or just hopelessly convoluted to use, you have to get clever. I tend to use a site called Domain Whitepages, which will give you 3 pieces of information: Who registered the domain, Who is the domain registrar, and who hosts the domain.

The person who registered the domain is usually the person you want – but many people have made this information private, or it might be out of date.

Your next point of call is the web host. These are the people who own and run the physical server on which the website is running. Look up the host’s website, and do a search for ‘copyright’ and ‘dmca’. If you can’t find either, look for ‘abuse’ or ‘report an issue’. Most web hosts have a mechanism for contacting them with abuse-related e-mails. If you sent a DMCA notice (more about that below) to the host, they will generally respond extremely quickly – I often had responses within an hour – anything longer than 12 hours is quite rare.

If you really can’t figure out who is hosting the server, your last option is to go for the domain registrar: This is the people who have registered the internet domain (like ‘photocritic.org’ or ‘google.com’). If you have to serve a DMCA notice to them, things will take a little bit longer, but if they can’t contact the owner, they’ll pull the plug on the whole domain, which tends to get the owner’s attention really quickly.

Fighting back with the DMCA

After your e-mail, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – or DMCA – is going to be your second response to any issue of copyright. The DMCA is an US piece of legislation which doesn’t apply in any country except the USA, but I’ve sent DMCA notices to all sorts of countries (including, interestingly the UK, although the appropriate document in this country would be a ‘Notice and Take Down, or a NTD document), and while the legalese on the DMCA notice might be incorrect for, say, Germany, copyright law tends to be similar in most countries, and they’re not going to split hairs over receiving the wrong form: The important thing is that someone is breaking a law, somewhere.

To use a DMCA notice, you need the following: Your details, the details of the original and infringing content, and two particular snippets of legalese which swears on pain of death (ok, not quite – but nearly) that you’re convinced that you are in the right and they are in the wrong. Below is an example of the form letter I have been using.

Example DMCA notice

I have been using the following format for my DMCA notices to great effect:

[your address]
[today's date]

DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

Dear Sir or Madam: Upon a routine copyright check, I discovered that the example.com site infringes on my copyright.

The copyrighted work at issue is the text and images appearing on my site here:
- http://photocritic.org/nude-girlfriend-photography/

The URLs infringing on our copyrighted material include:
- http://example.com/nude-girlfriend

Please ensure that the infringing content is taken down within 48 hours.

You can reach me at [e-mail address] if you require further information or clarification.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

[my signature]

Mr [my name]

If the person you are sending the notice to demands the notice to be sent in by fax (surprisingly many do, actually), check out Interfax – they let you e-mail them a PDF document, and they fax it on for you. Fantastic, because, well, who even has a fax these days?

In the above, it is important to add your full mailing address near the top of the document. Create a list of all the article originals, and then the corresponding list of the articles on the infringing site.

First off, send this to the contact e-mail for the site. If that fails to get the content removed, send the same thing to the web host’s copyright or abuse team a week later. If that fails again, send the same thing to the domain registrar after another week. Do add a note to the letter stating whom and when you sent the notices to before, because the host might want to know before they decide to shut down a server.

But… Does it work?

Here, have a random photo I took this week-end. I'm quite proud of it. And this post is nearly 4,500 words long or so, so I figured you needed a break for a few seconds. Enjoy.

The DMCA form is incredibly effective. In the past year, I have sent out around 50 formal notices to people infringing on my copyrighted content, and all but two of these infringements have been taken down. One of them is in Vietnam (which doesn’t have any meaningful copyright legislation, so I’m out of luck, basically) and India (which does have legislation, but is notoriously lack at enforcing it, and the site owner is simply ignoring me. Particularly annoying because it looks like it might be a pretty high-profile site). I am still looking into how I might convince them to take the articles down, but I fear it might take more time than it is worth to me.

Out of the fifty or so, the hosts deleted the articles most of the time. Some times they placed a block on the pages (so the pages would result in a 403 forbidden page), some times they deleted it from the database (causing a 500 internal server error when trying to access the page), some times they shut down the whole site (showing a ‘if you own this site, please contact the host immediately’ message), and other times they found more elegant solutions.

In at least three cases, the site owner never contacted the host, and the whole site was taken down. In one case, the domain registrar decided to take the domain name offline, which means that while the domain itself is still available via its IP address, most of its users were unable to get to it.

What if the DMCA notification doesn’t work?

Excellent question. You could seek further legal help, but be warned: things often get complicated really quickly: The person infringing might be based in Romania, using a server in Russia on a Chinese domain name. If that happens, you’ve drawn the short straw: Where do you begin?

The best approach: If there is any aspect of the business which is operated out of the US (Say, they use Google Adsense, in which case, fill the AdSense DMCA complaint – the content will continue to exist, but at least you can send a message). Especially check the domain registrar – you’ll often find that even ‘foreign’ domains can be registered via an US registrar, and they should be susceptible to a sternly written DMCA notice.

From personal experience, I’d say that the DMCA approach is effective in well over 90% of cases, and I decided I didn’t have enough energy (or hours in the day!) to try to go beyond that.

What if there is a particularly rampant infringement?

In theory, you could start a lawsuit whenever someone steals a single piece of content from you. In practice, you’d me mad to do so, and honestly, it is a lot of hassle to go to court. Sometimes, however, you come across a case where you can’t see any other option.

I’ve had a couple of cases where the site in question wasn’t just copying my content, but went very, very far beyond that as well. One of them had ‘borrowed’ around 50 of my articles, the other one had systematically ‘borrowed’ every single one of my articles, all the way back to the start of Photocritic – yes, nearly 400 articles.

Let’s just say that I thought they were taking the proverbial piss. So, in addition to my standard DMCA letters, I included invoices for unauthorised use (number of articles multiplied by how much I would have charged to write those articles as a freelancer) with the letter and started talking to a solicitor. I can’t go into details about either of the cases, but suffice to say that both companies ended up paying significant amounts of money for their infringements.

Dragging people to court is not necessarily an approach I would recommend: litigation can be very expensive, but when things get just a little bit too silly, getting the legal system involved early on can ensure that people sit up and pay attention.

Disclaimer

I have rudimentary legal training in UK media law, but my training is several years old, and you’d be insane to take legal advice from some random bloke off the internet anyway. Nothing in this post is meant as actual legal advice – talk to your solicitor, that’s what they are there for!

Copyright Information

Photocritic by Email!

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:36:21 +0000

I know a lot of you are deeply gutted whenever you miss an article on Photocritic. Well, I’d love to think that anyway. But guess what, now there’s a new way of staying up to date – by the power of Email! Such technology! Such splendour! Such a lot of words to basically just make an announcement which could have been done on Twitter! Oh well.

What would MacGyver do? Subscribe to Photocritic via e-mail, of course!

So, yes. In the sidebar of all my article pages, you will now find a small form with the header ‘Get Notified’. (so, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, this probably doesn’t apply to you, because clearly you’ve already found a way to stay up to date, but if you want to see the sidebar, you could try clicking on the permalink to the article you’re now reading. Ooh! Articles linking to themselves! How incredibly ouroborosesque)

In summary, there are three ways of reading Photocritic:

Check back often (three times a day would be nice, and will do wonders for my statistics
Get the RSS feed
Subscribe via e-mail (see the sidebar)

That’s all, folks!

- Haje

Copyright Information

When RAW is not enough

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:28:34 +0000

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…

Becoming a better photographer

Holding a bunny to your face while wearing full Motorcycle protective gear is a great way to become a better photographer. Aw, c'mon, give me a break, what would YOU use to illustrate this article? (clicky for bigger)

RAW is great because it is lenient – you can over-expose a photo quite significantly, and still rescue the highlights, because you have significantly higher bit-depth (and more information) than you would do with JPGs.

This is a life-saver for press, event, and action photographers: The fact that you aren’t completely buggered even if you’ve screwed up the exposure a fraction is a godsent!

The problem is that I’ve recently talked to a lot of photographer of the ‘new garde’. People who have rarely – or never – shot on film, and are unaware of how often RAW is helping them out of a hole. There’s two ways of looking at this: Either, use the extra flexibility RAW gives you on a regular basis, and accept that we’re now in the digital age. Or shoot as if you’re still shooting on film, and use the extra flexibility as a safety buffer.

Bunny is sad because his compact camera doesn't take photos in RAW. (clicky for bigger)

I’m a strong believer in the latter: Ultimately, when you present your photos, you have to save them as 8-bit colour anyway, so you’re in fact re-compressing the image back into a lower bit depth. This isn’t a bad thing: the human eye can’t really cope with more than 8 bits anyway.

The problem is that it’s difficult to estimate how much of the photo is over-exposed when you’re relying on RAW to save you – and there will come a day where you are relying on it, and you’re off. There’s only so much recovery you can do of a photograph, and if you miscalculate, you don’t have a safety buffer anymore.

Personally, I’ve become a huge fan of trying to take perfect exposures out of the camera: Shoot as if the JPEG is your film. Get the white balance right. Get the exposure right. Sharpen the JPG in-camera. Set the saturation and contrast you like. In short; Make your JPEGs be as perfect straight out of the camera as possible. In addition to making you a much better and more conscious photographer, this has several benefits. To wit:

Better previews

Getting the white balance right on shots like this is challenging, but hellasatisfying. It's good to know you can fall back on RAW if you did make a hash of it after all (clicky for bigger)

RAW photos are unsharpened out of the camera. This is a blessing, because as we discussed in the article on how you can sharpen your photos, you should never sharpen your photos twice. Your JPGs are sharpened in-camera, which means that if you sharpen them on your computer, you’re not getting as high quality as you could. Not a good thing.

In situations where you're taking lots of photos (like when snapping gigs), it's a relief to have JPG preview - it saves you from opening hundreds (or even thousands) of RAW files to find out which ones turned out well.

The flopside of this, however, is that RAW photos can look flat and lack energy. The photos that really zing are the ones that are tack-sharp – and if you’re only looking at RAW photos, you may actually miss the photo that is sharpest, because it hasn’t been sharpened to its full potential.

When you shoot RAW+JPG and your JPEGs are perfectly exposed and whitebalanced, they are the ultimate previewing tool: Full resolution previews, beautifully sharp, which your computer can deal with very quickly. Even better, if you need to e-mail or upload previews of a shoot anywhere, it’s an order of magnitude faster to resize and compress JPGs than RAW files.

So, Shoot with JPG, keep them, and use them for previewing purposes. If you decide to edit any of ‘em, use the RAW files, but at least you’ll have a much better picture (har har) of the potential of your photos

Submitting photos to magazines

Enough with the useful captions already. Here's a picture of a guy in Vietnam with 10 (yes! Ten!) cases of beer on his motorbike. (clicky for bigger)

So you occasionally shoot paperazzi stuff? You do events? You shoot news? Honestly, you don’t want to piss off the picture editors: if you send them a photo they’ll have to do a lot of work on, you’ll need to have a damn fine explanation… And find yourself some other customers, because they won’t use you again.

They’re on extremely tight deadlines, and they prefer photos they can just drop into their page layouts without fiddling with them too much. Shoot perfect JPGs, and that’s usually good enough for magazine use.

Let them know that you have a RAW file if they need it, of course, but 99 times out of a hundred and twenty two, they won’t want it – they don’t need the hassle.

Workflow speed

My university professor stole a wise saying from someone else once: Work smarter, not harder. This saying really is eminently applicable here.

I don’t care how fast your computer is – RAW will slow you down in one way or another. If you organise your photos so you can preview the JPGs, you’re making your life a lot easier.

If the JPG looks out of focus, the RAW will be too – that’ll save you a few seconds opening the RAW file to check. Multiply that by 300 photos, and you’ve saved yourself 10 minutes. Presto!

There’s no reason not to

This model wants you to shoot RAW+JPG. Just look at how stern she looks. Would you dare not to? Thought so. Grab your camera right now and change your settings. (clicky for bigger)

Set your camera to RAW+JPG, and bring plenty of memory cards. They cost next to nothing these days, and if you do a shoot where you know you don’t need to keep the JPGs, you can always trash them after you’ve downloaded them – sort ‘em by size (the RAW files tend to be 3-4 times bigger than the JPGs) and delete half the smallest files. Or sort ‘em by type and delete all the JPGs. Whatever you prefer.

If you have enough memory cards (and you should. Really. If you don’t, head over to Amazon and be Amazed (groan) at how cheap they are), there really is no reason not to shoot in RAW+JPG.

Go on. Give it a shot. And let me know how much time you’re saving :-)

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365 project

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:52:54 +0000

For the longest time, I’ve thought that I wouldn’t have it in me to do a 356 project – i.e. a photo per day for a whole year. If I think about the past five years, for example, there has never been a whole year where I would have been consistently able to post a photo per day. I mean, hell, my whole Flickr stream dates back to August 2006 and only 728 photos in it. That’s an average of 0.6 photos per day or so.

I’m not even sure if I want to subject the world to a project like that. I don’t really like posting photos to Flickr that I’m not reasonably happy with (even though I, too, have a load of junk in my Flickr stream, of course)… Could I really get 365 photos together over the course of a year?

Then I started to think. I mean, I have a lot of respect for people who pull off ambitious projects, and I’ve seen shots from 365 projects that are creative, fun, moving, intense, moody, acrobatic, inspirational, retro-tastic, and ethereal.

How many days in 2010?

So, for 2010, I have decided to join the fray. And Randy made the silly suggestion of being my running mate, which gave me an idea… Perhaps more people fancy joining in.

Since there is no way in heaven or hell that I’ll be able to post a photo a day for a whole year, I can’t make that commitment. What I can do, however, is that I will post 365 photos to my Flickr stream in 2010. I’ll even make an attempt to post an average of 30 photos per month. I might even manage to do an average of 7 photos per week.

That sounds like a lot of mathematics…

One of my less hopeless self-portraits of 2009, taken in Vietnam (clicky for bigger)

… And how do I know whether I’m running behind or not? Well, of course, there had to be a geeky solution: I made a simple counter to keep me (and you, if you like) on track… So if my 365/2010 project has fewer photos in it than the counter would indicate, feel free to give me a firm kick up the jacksie to keep me going!

I need more running mates!

As mentioned, Randy offered to join the fray, but I’d like to keep track of more of you guys who are about to start a project for 365… Post a comment, send me an e-mail, poke me Twitter, send me some smoke signals, or organise a carrier pigeon to let me know!

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50 must-read photography books

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:40:22 +0000

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.

Of course, I’m slightly biased – I make my living writing books – but I do think that you could do a lot worse than study what others have done in the past. If Twitter is anything to go by (I’m never quite sure if the assorted Twitter masses are a good or a bad hivemind – but if nothing else, it’s a very enthusiastic one), then books are definitely not dead – I did three recent tweets (1, 2, 3), which easily generated the most response I’ve ever had to anything I’ve babbled on about in my twitter feed – ever.

Maybe books aren’t the death of trees, but the birth of knowledge… And here are some of the books people are most passionate about…

Finding these books on sale: I’ve added links to Amazon.com and Amazon UK behind all the listed books. These are affiliate links, so if you end up buying one of the books, I get a kickback (more about that here). If you’re outside the US or UK (which I know many of you are), the Amazon pages generally have an ISBN number on it – enter it into your favourite book shop, and you can see if it is available locally. Failing that, your local bookshop might be able to order it in for you if you give them the ISBN number .

Classics

Ansel Adams at 100, to me, is a stern reminder that someone was taking better photos than me 100 years ago.

Ansel Adams at 100 (US / UK) by Ansel Adams.The book marks the 100th anniversary of Ansel Adams and pays tribute to one of the most talented American landscape photographers whose portrayal of nature remains unsurpassable to this day Suggested by @Freeale

History of Photography by Josef Maria Eder (Amazon US / UK) offers comprehensive coverage on a collection of articles and rare photographs by pioneers in photography and contains materials for research into the history, technology and aesthetics of the medium. Suggested by @Wigwam

Lighting for Photography (Amazon US / Amazon UK) is is a classic book describing how Walter Nurnberg does a phenomenal job of using film studio lighting techniques in order to transform industrial photography after World War II. Suggested by @Wigwam

The Camera (US / UK) is one of Ansel Adams’s iconic technical books on photography, writted with the goal of teaching photographers the artistry of harnessing a camera to its fullest artistic potential. Suggested by @mrlizzard

The Negative (US / UK) by Ansel Adams is the second volume in Adams’ vital and celebrated series of technical books on photography, is geared towards enthusiastic photographers on how to use film and the film development process creatively. Suggested by @mrlizzard

The Print (US / UK) is the final book in Adams’ series of books on photographic techniques, deals with every possible detail like designing and furnishing a darkroom, advanced techniques like toning, bleaching, burning and dodging. Suggested by @mrlizzard

Practical Guides / text books

One of the biggest challenges as a photographer is to develop a photographic 'style' and 'language'. This book shows how one photographer pulled it off.

Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision (US / UK) by David CuChemin serves as a trip down the memory lane, the author creates vivid images of exotic destinations he visited to inspire photographers to express their vision through passionate and compelling photography. (on Twitter as @pixelatedimage). Suggested by @scuba_suzy

The Digital Photography Book (US / UK) by Scott Kelby is the ultimate resource in digital photography, this immensely popular book teaches the professionals and the amateurs the techniques of making any photo look more professional, sharper, clearer and dramatically gorgeous. Suggested by @bimal_tailor

The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos (US / UK) by Michael Freeman uses real life examples from photographic assignments. The book combines traditional techniques with the latest technological trends to educate photographers to explore the hidden potentials in shooting dynamic digital photographs. Suggested by @jkremers and @BBluesman

PhotoJojo: The Book (US / UK) by (@SuperAmit on Twitter) his merry band of pirates. With crystal clear DIY instructions, the book discusses how creativity, simple crafting skills and imagination can go a long way into transforming simple, plain photos into vibrant works of art. Suggested by @HeatherGill

Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace (US / UK) by Dan Margulis elaborates on the immense potential of Photoshop. The book reveals the simple, subtle tools and techniques to use, which can make plain images come to life, and is written in a way that is approachable by “real people”. Suggested by @rpajuaba

The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies (US / UK). Lee Varis is a master in his craft and widely acclaimed photographer. He provides step by step instructions on how to achieve accurate skin tones in men and women using digital photography in and outside the studio. Suggested by @rpajuaba

Getting exposure right is easily the most important part of photography - and yet, it's something many people are struggling with. Read this book, and struggle nevermore.

Understanding Exposure (US / UK) is easy to read and a great, straight-forward introduction to the dark art of getting the exposure on your photos right once and for all. The book, aided with plenty of illustrations offers the basics of aperture, lighting and shutter speed, photography’s basic triumvirate, to beginning and intermediate photographers.

The Moment it Clicks (US / UK) is a book about the 30 years of Joe McNally’s photographic career, some of the images he has created and stories behind the images and the lessons learned from life experiences. Suggested by @ssphillips

Coming into Focus: A Step-by-Step Guide to Alternative Photographic Printing Processes (US / UK) by John Barnier is geared towards educating amateur and professional photographers about the non-traditional processes of photography that can serve as alternatives to standard methods. Transforming seemingly obsolete processes to life like magic, Barnier has a gift of making processes exciting and interesting. Suggested by @ louislucci_com

Photography (US / UK) by Barbara London, Jim Stone and John Upton is a fundamental book written mainly for students. It provides comprehensive coverage on color, black and white, digital and all around background on photography by means of illustrations and examples. Suggested by @louislucci_com

The Art of Bird Photography (US / UK). Famous bird photographer Arthur Morris shares some of his hard-won experience, explains various techniques for getting great photographs of birds. Most of it is pitched at a level suitable for amateurs. Suggested by @davidbrennphoto

Light In The Landscape (US / UK) by Peter Watson is an awe-inspiring book for photographers specialising in landscape photography, that describes the brilliant techniques used to capture some of the most captivating images of landscape by the world famous photographer. Suggested by @Frankkster

Reefs Revealed (US / UK). Armed with expertise on reel life, coupled with immense knowledge on natural-light filter-photography, Alex Mustard presents the importance of saving nature’s invaluable treasures to protect the future of our planet. Suggested by @scuba_suzy

A Diver’s Guide to Underwater Photography (US / UK). The beauty of underwater photography in its entire splendor has been unraveled in this book. A & A Ferrari share a wealth of information on techniques and equipment to use – and show off some incredible results. Suggested by @scuba_suzy

Okay, so I might be a teensy bit biased (I did write the damn thing, after all), but I happen to think this is one of the best books for people who are keen to get into macro / up-close photography!

Water Light Time (US / UK). Combining his love for underwater life and expertise in photography, David Doubilet does a phenomenal job of putting together stunning and breathtaking images of life that abounds under the sea. Suggested by @scuba_suzy

The Underwater Photographer: Digital and Traditional Techniques (US / UK) by Martin Edge is for intermediate level photographers who have a passion for under-water photography – a must-read. Valuable techniques have been laid down methodically for execution of outstanding results. Suggested by @scuba_suzy

Macro Photograpy Workshop (US / UK) by Haje Jan Kamps serves as a learning experience for amateur people who will explore, experiment and discover the innumerable possibilities a camera has to offer in terms of its functionality once you get close enough… Suggested by @Photocritic ;)

Business guides

VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography (US / UK) by David DuChemin is an engaging fusion of the basic techniques of photography with commerce – and shows how a good sense of business can lead to a very rewarding and successful career in photography; the author shares his vision and offers a wealth of advice, tips, and tricks. Suggested by @prairielight

Best Business practices for Photographers (US / UK). A true entrepreneur in this field, John Harrington sheds light on methodologies and formalities that you need to keep in mind, should you desire to carve out a successful and rewarding career-path in photography. Suggested by @brianlarter

Art books

The Life of a Photograph (US / UK) by Sam Abell features exquisite images that can be captured only in our wildest imaginations, takes us on a journey of Abell’s work – A book witnessing how he pours his whole heart into his photographic endeavours. Suggested by @allisterfreeman

Beneath The Roses (US / UK) Renowned for his artistry, Gregory Crewdson’s works seem less like photographs, and more like moments captured from epic movies, seemingly dark and troubling, with a definitive sci-fi twist in them. Suggested by @MilesStorey

American Music (US / UK) by Annie Leibovitz’s is a well-curated collection of portraits of a wide range of musical Americana: nearly a century of musical creativity, condensed into a fantastic book. Suggested by @SvanBaaijen

The original full-size, full-cost version of Helmut Newton's Sumo cost nearly $20,000 - luckily, there's a more accessible version out there these days.

The Art of God (US / UK) by Ric Ergenbright might well be the most visually appealing book of its kind, this nature photography book artfully presents text matching each photo and combines to make the “heart leap and the soul rejoice”. Suggested by @Frankkster

Visual Poetry (US / UK) by Chris Orwig is an awe-inspiring book that can encourage people from any walk of life to use their passion and creativity to transform digital images to splendid works of art using natural light. Suggested by @MDDunnPhoto and @tabby2004

Come Again (US / UK) is a collection of photographs from Beirut taken by Robert Frank took after being commissioned to capture the aftermath of the Lebanese war – and Polaroids of the city and its environment. Suggested by @dantebusquets

Snaps (US / UK) by Elliot Erwitt is The book is essentially an effort at portraying and capturing Erwitt’s work of 500 images, consisting of a wide range of subjects, ranging from famous personalities to the very ordinary. Suggested by @zenrhino

For many of us, this will be the closest we'll get to a space shuttle - or, indeed, the moon. What a gorgeous way to travel, though!

Full Moon (US / UK) by Michael Light may be the only science photography book dedicated to capture stunning and absolutely breathtaking images of the voyage to the moon and the return to planet earth. Suggested by @brettbeyer

Sumo (US / UK) by Helmut Newton made headlines for its unique and gargantuan dimensions, is back in a more cost effective version (The original cost nearly $20,000). It and covers Newton’s outstanding career from all possible perspectives. Suggested by @maxwellander

Terryworld (US / UK) is about Terry Richardson, an American fashion photographer who took the fashion world by storm. The book also contains 70 new photographs not featured in the original edition. Terry RichardsonSuggested by @joostdeleij

American Prospects (US / UK) by Joel Sternfeld is an exploration of the landscape as reflected on the changing states of American society. The impact of this work continues to resonate through contemporary artistic, photographic practice. Suggested by @shanegodfrey

The valley (US / UK) by Larry Sultan is an exhibition of photographs by the famous artist. It uses home, work and suburbia as the backdrop and looks at the transformation of middle-class suburban homes into stage sets for adult films. Suggested by @shanegodfrey

American Surfaces (US / UK) is a book that depicts the road trips taken by Stephen Shore all across the United States, and uses hundreds of color photographs as the medium of expression. Suggested by @shanegodfrey

The Americans (US / UK) is a monumental work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank. The book was first published in the U.S. and dramatically altered how photographers looked through their viewfinders – and the way Americans saw themselves. Suggested by @shanegodfrey

The Photon Detector Section

The lovely @photondetector went a bit mental with his suggestions for books, and provided a significant stream of fantastic ideas. It’d be rude to not give him his own mini section in this guide as a result (and you should follow him, too; he’s got a consistently awesome Twitter feed!)

Self Portrait With Cows Going Home (US / UK) by Sylvia Plachy is a powerful personal memoir about the author’s beginnings in communist Hungary, her emigration to Austria, New York with her parents and her repeated journeys back to Hungary.

Fashion Magazine (US / UK) by Lise Sarfati explores territories of childhood, adolescence and adult womanhood, and seeks to record possible becomings. Explorations of identity are encouraged by the clothing, which is both incidental and essential.

In High Fashion – The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937 (US / UK) by Edward Steich is an extensive collection of the fashion photographer Steichen who remains unparalleled in his work on Vogue till date. He truly has become an icon of fashion photography.

Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (US / UK) is an unmissable book about making art. It draws from personal experience, and provides an incisive view into the world of art as it is experienced by art makers themselves.

If you ever thought the Polaroid camera was a toy, then here's your chance to change your mind... Forever.

The Polaroid Book: Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography (US / UK) is an unique selection of 400 works from the Polaroid Collection and is a treasure trove of photography. Barbara Hitchcock provides an engaging essay on the history which underpins it.

Deep South (US / UK) by Sally Mann is a much-anticipated collection of Mann’s exquisite, ethereal landscape photographs, taken in the years since she rose to international fame.

In The Garden (Website) by Beth Dow is filled with photos taken in formal English and Italian gardens, which naturally attract photographers in their offering of glimpses of the rich traditions of garden making.

Suspended In Time (Photondetector’s Review) by Matthew Larkin is a collection of stunning Ambrotypes whose unique photographs are made on black glass. Larkin’s pictures capture arresting moments of individuals engaged in the modern practice of suspension.

Your turn!

Turns out that a lot of people are deeply passionate about photography books – ways to learn, tips to improve, and the ever-evolving landscape of arts books. Did I miss any? If so, leave a comment below – If you write it in the same style as the bits above, I’ll add it to the article, too!

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Learning by example

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:23 +0000

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.

Learning by example, then, is the act of starting at the other end of the learning process: Find a photograph you like, or come up with a crazy idea, and then start stepping backwards: What do I need to do to create the photograph I have seen / imagined / come up with.

What’s the point?

Boats on Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. Taken with a Canon Digital IXUS at ISO 200, f/8 and 1/30 second exposure, at widest possible zoom

The interesting thing of learning by example is that there’s a pretty good chance you miss whole fields of photography. If ISO or lens length isn’t relevant to the shots you’re taking, you’ll never have to learn them… It’s kind of like mathematics: I could never wrap my head around calculus. Not because I don’t have the brain capacity (or, at least, I would like to think), but because I never saw the point. Just like I never saw the point of geometry, until someone managed to bring it to life by explaining how I could apply it to my life – suddenly, I had a need for a bit of knowledge, so I went out to acquire the necessary information and understanding, and was able to do the calculations I needed.

I’m a strong believer in doing the same thing with photography: If you don’t think you need something, well, you probably don’t. You’ll eventually find out that the techniques you’re using at the moment are limiting you – or making the things you’re trying to achieve more difficult – but that’ll be new motivation to learn something new again.

So, how do you do it?

My sister in Vietnam. Taken at ISO 100 with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens stopped wide open, aperture mode. Shutter time was whatever the camera suggested. Slightly desaturated the RAW file to get a more timeless 'feel'

Well, it’s easy: Find a source of inspiration. Personally, I use all sorts of sources: Magazines are a great starting point (especially amateur photography magazines like Digital Camera Magazine or similar – also check out PhotoRadar). Flickr, of course, is a marvellous source as well. The problem with on-line, however, is the nature of computer screens. Call me old-fashioned, but I really prefer the high-resolution way of looking at photography: Prints, books, magazines, etc.

The other problem is that, even on Flickr, not that many photographers take you through their way of thinking, or their technique for getting the shot (I love the idea of the How I Took It group, but so far, only 22 photos have been posted, which seems like a huge shame). Luckily, you can often ask questions, and many are good enough to help you along, but that’s still not an ideal way of getting tucked in. (Of course, I’m also guilty of this, but if you find any photos in my photo stream which you’d like explained and deconstructed, I’d be more than happy to – leave a comment and I’ll dig out the info!)

Using books for inspiration

Photos that Inspire is one of the few books I'm aware of that goes into detail about the individual photos, with how, why, where and when they were taken - perfect to start learning

There are a lot of fantastic photography books out there, but many of them are by a single photographer – the problem with that is that they have only a limited number of styles, and most of them say nothing about how the photos were taken – you’re expected to enjoy them as art, rather than as part of a learning experience. As you get better, this is a sensible approach, but when you’re starting out, it can be mighty frustrating.

The best one I’ve found that does things a little differently is Photos that Inspire (Amazon US / Amazon UK) is in the same series as my macro book – the Photo Workshop series published by Wiley – and it’s a peach.

For one thing, it has a couple of my photos in there (which obviously makes it a much better book already) but the important bit is that it contains tons of photographs taken by professional photographers – who explain why and how the shots were taken. It’s like a small art gallery with a personal guide by each of the individual photographers – and a fantastic place to start learning, of course.

How do you learn?

So, that’s my take on it – How do you prefer to learn about photography? Where do you get your inspiration? There’s a comment box down there somewhere…

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The case for Pentax

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:30:59 +0000

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:

Canon, Nikon. Nikon, Canon. When most people think of buying a dSLR, that is often the debate that they wage with themselves. Of course, with the Sony purchase of Minolta, they may even now start to think of Sony in that debate. There is, however, another player on the market, a player that has been around for a very long time. In fact, they were once synonymous with SLR photography: Pentax.

Pentax is the first Japanese company to release a 35mm SLR in 1952 and, for quite a while, were the defacto standard for 35mm photography. The M42 screw mount, while not a Pentax invention, was made so prevalent by Pentax that it became known as the Pentax mount. In a sense, Pentax ushered in the age of SLR photography producing more cameras than all other manufacturers combined. So, what happened to them? They didn’t fall off the 35mm radar, even as they lost ground to names like Nikon and Canon, Pentax continued to innovate, but they were the last to move from the limited capability of the M42 mount and, to some degree, that probably hurt them the most.

However, Pentax didn’t go away. They continued to produce excellent cameras, including the classic K1000, first created in 1976 as a basic SLR, it managed to outlive all of its brethren and almost all successors because of its elegance and simplicity, finally hitting end of life in 1997. In 2003, Pentax entered the digital age and didn’t stop their innovation. By this time, however, the Canon/Nikon duopoly was pretty complete. A tough nut to crack, no?

Pentax is trying to crack that nut, so I’m going to talk about Pentax as it started getting serious about dSLR photography with the arrival of the K100D, K110D, and the K10D. The first two were the entry level dSLRs and the last was aimed at the prosumer. As with all of their cameras, Pentax focussed on certain key areas: backwards compatibility and the photographic experience. These are factors that continue to be key to Pentax since the introduction of these cameras, so let’s talk about them.

Backwards compatibility is a funny statement with digital, but it is applicable because it means that over 50 years of high grade optics are still available to you. Many of us Pentaxians have in our kits lenses that the modern dSLR owner wouldn’t even think of, wouldn’t even be aware of. We don’t have these lenses because there aren’t modern options for Pentax, because we have those too, but because they present optical quality as good as any current lens and at a price that you can’t hope to beat brand new. To give you an example, I own a Vivitar Series 1 100mm f/2.8 Macro manufactured by Kiron. This lens is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, macro lens ever produced and it’s nearly 40 years old. I paid $160 (Canadian) for it. To compare, a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens currently retails for $730 or $1249 with image stabilization.

Another backwards compatibility feature, which makes my last comment even more interesting, is Pentax image stabilization (or anti-shake) is in the body of the camera. There are certainly advantages to IS on the lens, such as IS in the viewfinder, but the single biggest advantage to it on the body is that every single lens I attach to my Pentax, regardless of age, can be stabilized. Of the major dSLR manufacturers, only Sony can say that, and they don’t have the lens history of Pentax. There’s another advantage: price. You can see that above, IS adds $500 to the price for what is otherwise the same lens.

For your first step into the world of digital photography, look beyond the two big brands for some creative features and competitive pricing!

Now, of course, Pentax isn’t just leaving us in the world of historical lenses, scouring eBay and Craigslist so that we can take pictures. They do have a very good line-up of modern lenses with zooms and primes, wide to telephoto including what many, such as DP Review, call highly desirable limited lenses. It isn’t just Pentax, we also have Sigma, Tamron, and others producing good optics for a good price. So, with Pentax, you can pull from the old (even ancient, M42 can be adapted to the modern bayonet mount) and the new. Heck, with an adapter, you can even put a monstrous medium format lens on it! I know a local photographer that uses his Pentax 67 lenses on his K20D all the time.

Alright, I think I’ve established that Pentax is good at keeping the old available to the new, but I also mentioned the photographic experience. Most modern dSRLs offer what I would call point-and-shoot features and, to some degree, that is a wise choice. Pentax took a different approach, aiming their line at people looking to have the pleasure of the 35mm film experience in a digital package. So, instead of scene modes on the dial, they added things like hyper-program (a way to quickly switch between aperture and shutter priority modes), sensitivity priority (control ISO with the rear dial), and shutter/aperture priority (camera sets ISO based on shutter and aperture). Other ideas, such as the “green” button near the shutter release that quickly resets the exposure, even in manual, giving you a good starting point for creative adjustment. They also have the RAW+jpeg button that will easily give you both formats for the next shot, a feature that just made it to Canon now.

So, where is Pentax today? Well, they have a line up modern dSLRs that have continuously received top reviews time and again. In the entry market, we have the K200D, K-m and the K-x cameras. The K-x is the newest and is something worth talking about, so much so that Photography blog gave it a rare “essential” rating. At the higher end, we have the K20D and the K7, both very highly regarded. The K7 was recently compared to the latest Canon prosumer (the 7D) on DP Review and came out very close, but also costs quite a bit less. I’m not going to go into detailed features for them, this is widely covered on the Internet, but I will note that the prosumer versions of the Pentax line offer a number of features that are usually only seen in substantially more expensive cameras. Where Pentax lacks is at the truly pro end of the spectrum, something they hope to rectify with a medium format digital in the new year. Mind you, that’s probably more than most of us would wish to handle if we’re not doing commercial photography.

In any case, I’m not writing to convince you to buy Pentax (it means more great lenses for me on Craigslist if you don’t), but to consider it. Canon, Nikon, and Sony all produce excellent cameras as well. I don’t think you, as the consumer, are going to be left feeling cheated with any of them. My only advice would be to get your hands on to the cameras and try them, all of them. The feel, the weight, and the placement of the controls are all going to be factors that should influence you as much as anything and that you can only get by putting it into your hands with a decent lens. If you do that, in a good photography store that lets you, then I think you’ll find that Pentax is as good as any of them and perhaps, now, the debate you wage won’t just be Canon, Nikon or Nikon, Canon.

About John

John is a software architect that just happens to be an avid amateur photographer. He did a lot of 35mm film (used Yashica and Pentax) in college as the editor of the newspaper, but then kind of let it slide for years after that because he could never be bothered to develop the film. Ultimately, he got back into photography with the Pentax K10D and then it just went from there. Check out his website, too!

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Book: Put another dime in the jukebox

Haje Jan Kamps — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:46:26 +0000

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.

Everything you never really cared to know about concert photography, neatly collected in one useful place!

It has a lot of pages (46, to be precise), a metric tonne of gorgeously high-resolution photographs (around 100, actually), and is riddled with tips, advice, ideas, and examples of how you can take the best possible music photos.

So, who is this book for?

Well, it’s part coffee-table book – full of glorious music photos. If you have no intention whatsoever to ever take a single concert photo, it might still be worth picking up a copy: this thing is hellapretty.

The book really comes to its own for people who want to try concert photography though: 100 photos offers plenty of inspiration, and the book offers info about the photos were taken… It’s got sections on equipment, how to gain access to the press pit, how to convert your photos to black and white, how to deal with poor lighting, and all that loveliness.

Sounds amazing, where can I get a copy?

Lucy Styles on stage on Flickr

I’ve created the book via Blurb, which means that it’s printed on demand – order a copy, and they’ll print it up and send it out to you.

The quality of the book is truly outstanding: printing quality is so good that you’d never know you hadn’t ordered it from Amazon (as you can still do with my book on macro photography – Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), or from your local book shop.

To get your eager little paws on Put Another Dime in the Jukebox, reach for your credit card with one hand, and clicky here with the other (you ambidextrous wünderkind, you)… Enjoy!

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Choosing your first dSLR

Haje Jan Kamps — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:38:03 +0000

It is 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 is a lot of choice out there, and whether you are buying your first camera, or whether you are 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…

Once you’ve decided to start looking for a dSLR, you might have some reason in mind already. Perhaps you feel as if you’re outgrowing your compact camera, whether that’s creatively or technically. Maybe you’re not really feeling as if you’re challenging yourself enough as a photographer. Either way, you’ve decided to go play with the big boys – welcome aboard!

There are a lot of cameras to choose from out there. In this article, I have done my best to help you make a sensible choice.

The first and most important thing you need to know is that there aren’t any really bad digital SLR cameras out there.

In fact I would argue that there aren’t actually any bad digital cameras on the market anymore in general – stick to a respected camera brand, and you’re home free. If we’re looking at compact cameras, you can buy a respectible camera for under $100 – the Nikon Coolpix L20 wil set you back $99 or thereabouts, and is a lot of camera for your hard-earned dollars.

Anyway, we were talking about dSLR cameras. Here are a few things you should be looking at..

Things to think about

Do you already own a SLR camera? If you have already bought into a particular brand of camera, take a good, hard look at your lenses. If you’ve bought a lot of high-end lenses and flashguns etc, swapping from one brand to another might have a lot of hidden costs in them. On the other hand, if you have a lot of old, tattered equipment with scratched lenses, see it as an opportunity: eBay off the lot, and start afresh.

Canon or Nikon? This is a perennial question which I’m not going to go anywhere near. I defy anybody to be able to tell the difference between a camera taken with a Canon or with a Nikon camera. Or a Sony. Or a Panasonic. Or a Sigma. Things have moved on hugely since the raging Canon-Nikon debates of the early 1980s (and they scarcely made all that much sense then). Whichever camera system you buy into, you’re going to live with for a while (probably), so do think about it. You – not your camera equipment – is going to be the bottleneck, so don’t worry too much about what you might have heard form the old graybeards…

Buying into a system? You know best what kind of a photographer you are. If you’re likely to start buying high-end lenses (or ‘fast glass’, as it’s frequently called among seasoned photographers), then you have two choices: Canon or Nikon. There are a lot of other people out there building great DSLR cameras, but once you start talking seriously high-end equipment, it’s one of the two big ones, I’m afraid. On the other hand, if you are a semi-serious hobbyist, don’t discard other camera brands out of hand: Sony, Olympus and Panasonic are building some very capable cameras indeed – with some serious money-saving opportunities, too!

Body or glass? If you have to choose between buying an expensive body and cheap glass or a cheap body and expensive glass, then go for the posh lenses. Every time. Personally, I am still using lenses that I bought nearly 10 years ago, even though I’ve changed my camera bodies half a dozen times since: You can take fantastic photos with an entry-level body and expensive lenses. Putting bargain lenses on a top-level body is, frankly, a complete waste of money. Even better: Buy yourself a nice prime lens, and be amazed at what your camera body can do.

If you still think that Megapixels are important, consider this shot. It was taken on my iPhone, which has 2mpx and a rubbish lens. (clicky for bigger)

Megapixels? In general, don’t worry about megapixels – most dSLR cameras come with 10 megapixels or more, and that’s enough. Hell, there’s even a prominent group arguing that more pixels aren’t necessarily better, and that 6mpx is all you need, really. I’m inclined to agree – you very rarely use them at full resolution anyway. What I’m trying to say is that Megapixels should be the last thing you look for in a digital camera in general – and a dSLR especially.

So, to summarise:

Don’t worry too much about the brand of your camera body
Buy Canon or Nikon if you anticipate dropping a lot of money on lenses in the long run
Spend your money on lenses, not camera bodies

3 great bargains

So, you’ve decided to leap into the pool of DSLRs, but you want to spend as little money as possible? These three cameras are your best options:

Sony Alpha 230

The Sony Alpha 230 is an oft-overlooked bargain entry into the dSLR world

The Sony Alpha 230 is an absolute bargain, and a great entry into the world of SLR. You get 10 mpx (more than enough), RAW image format (which is a must), and an incredibly nifty little feature: In-camera optical ‘SteadyShot’ image stabilisation! This means that any lens you connect to the Sony Alpha camera will be image stabilised – this is a feature you pay tons of money for in the lenses of other camera manufacturers!

The Sony Alpha lenses are compatible with Minolta AF and Konica lenses, so you get a reasonably good choice of glass, and the camera has a pretty wide shutter speed range of 30 seconds to 1/4000th of a second.

On top of all this, the Sony can be picked up with a fabulous kit lens – sure, it’s not the best glass you can buy, but who cares when you’re eager to get started. You can always chuck away (or eBay) the kit lens later, and upgrade to something better, once you know what kind of photos you’re likely to be taking!

You can get the Sony Alpha 230 with a kit lens from Amazon.com for about $500 and Amazon.co.uk for about £350.

Canon EOS 1000D / Canon Rebel XS

The Canon 1000D is the first step on the ladder for ambitious photographers

The world of digital cameras has come a very long way indeed. I remember buying my first DSLR in the mid-to-late 1990s, and, well, you’d pay a small fortune for something that wasn’t all that amazing.

These days, though, you’re not needing to spend that much money to pick up a big-brand SLR camera. Obviously, Canon felt Sony and the other budget-DSLR manufacturers breathe down their neck, and they had to respond. And boy, did they respond: The 1000D is one heck of a camera. Sure, so they’ve cut a few corners here and there, but, frankly, I don’t give a damn.

Personally, if I were to buy a SLR today, I’d buy one of two cameras: A Canon EOS 5D (which costs a small fortune), or a 1000D. Why? Because the imaging sensor is brilliant, and you can start saving up to buy lenses that will be with you and your camera system for a decade or more. When you finally out-grow the D1000, eBay it and buy a mid-range camera (like the Canon 500D), or start looking at spending serious money for a serious camera (Canon 5D if you want full-frame coverage, 7D if you don’t) – but none of the money you spent on lenses was a waste: It’ll all still be there, ready for you to snap away.

Of the bargain-snappers, only the 1000D has a CMOS sensor – which makes a surprising difference in image quality: Not necessarily better, but for some reason the grain on a CMOS sensor at higher ISO is a lot more similar to film than CCD sensors pushed to the limit… All of which means that the 1000D photos ‘feel’ more natural when you look at them.

You can get the Canon XS from Amazon.com for about $490 or the Canon 1000D from Amazon.co.uk for about £370 – both with a Canon EF-S 18-55 kit lens.

Nikon D3000

With a slightly better screen than the others, the Nikon is an attractive choice in the bargain-SLR category

Nikon’s baby camera is the D3000 – and it’s another bloody strong contender to the bargain crown. It comes with a super-advanced light meter – the 3D Matrix metering system borrowed from far more expensive Nikon cameras, which means that the Nikon is definitely the most capable in terms of getting the light measurements right.

The other thing the D3000 gets right is that it has a fabulous 3-inch LCD screen on the back of the camera (the Sony and Canon have 2.7 and 2.5 inch screens respectively), which makes a huge difference when you’re checking your photos in the field, to ensure you get it all right.

Just like the Canon camera, the Nikon is an opportunity to start climbing the ladder – Buy the most expensive lenses you can afford, get some tasty flashguns, and they’ll be with you for a long time indeed.

I have to admit that I’m a Canon man at heart (I’ve used Canon cameras since I stole my dad’s Canon A1 out of the cupboard when I could barely walk. I didn’t break it, luckily), but it’s starting to seem as if Nikon currently have a nicer progression through the cameras – the D3000 is a peach, and the D5000 – which is the next step up without being that much more expensive – is a deceptively simple, yet very serious, camera, for serious photographers.

You can pick up a D3000 (body only) from Amazon.com for about $430 and from Amazon.co.uk for £390 or so.

So… What should I choose?

If you want to take the step from compact cameras to SLRs, but foresee that you’ll continue being a casual amateur, go for the Sony. It’s a great little camera, a fantastic bargain, and the lenses available are not bad at all.

If you are ambitious in your photography, grab a dice. Throw it. Even numbers are Canon. Odd numbers are Nikon. They’re both absolutely brilliant cameras, and – considering what you get for your money – bargains. The Canon has a slightly better imaging sensor (but you wouldn’t be able to tell until you’re at higher ISO speeds) and the Nikon has a marginally better light meter (which doesn’t make that much difference in real life) and a better screen (which does). Seriously, if you’re having trouble making up your mind, throw the dice. It’ll save you a lot of headache.

What if I want to spend a bit more?

Spend more. Simple.

For the Nikon, going from D3000 to D5000 gets you a ton of extra goodies: higher resolution (12mpx instead of 10), a more powerful internal flash (although if that’s a dealbreaker for you, spend the extra cash on an external flashgun instead), and a funky (but smaller) tilt-and-swivel LCD screen which helps if you take photos while holding the camera high above your head or low to the ground. The D5000 also enables you to shoot high-def movie clips. The D5000 costs $600 from Amazon.com and £470 or so from Amazon.co.uk.

Canon: Upgrade from the 1000D to the 500D (T1i in the US) to get higher resolution (15mpx instead of 10mpx), better ISO speed (up to 12800 instead of up to 1600), slightly faster continuous drive (3.4fps vs 3.0fps), and a much, much better LCD screen (3 inch with far superior resolution to the 2.5-inch LCD screen on the 1000D). The 500D also has a sexy little movie mode which’ll shoot true 1080P high-definition video! The T1i will set you back $650 from Amazon.com and the 500D is about £520 from Amazon.co.uk

Any final tips?

Buy a cheap camera body, then invest in some lovely lenses. You know it makes sense...

I know I’ve repeated this several times in this article, but if you’re new to SLRs, I would advise to buy the entry-level model from a manufacturer. Start taking photos – you won’t out-grow your camera body for a while, trust me on that, but you might out-grow your lenses. Start by buying a ‘Nifty Fifty‘ (a 50mm prime lens). Most manufacturers have a f/1.8 which is good and a f/1.4 which is great…

Once you have one of those, start thinking about the type of photography you do. If you want to start shooting macro, you’ll need to start looking into a macro lens. If you want to photograph gigs or wildlife, you’ll want a fast tele-zoom (I can’t recommend Sigma’s 70-200mm f/2.8 DSM lens highly enough – it’s a bargain for what you’re getting). If you’re more into in-door or landscape photography, you want to go wider – but only you know exactly what you want.

To get good concert photos, you need a long, fast tele-zoom. This was taken at the long end of a 70-200mm lens - a lens which easily costs twice what my camera body did. (clicky for bigger)

Buying cheap lenses is false economy – unless you don’t really know what you want to take photos of. If you’re just experimenting, flailing around a little (as we all are, at first), stick with your prime and your kit lens for a while. If you find yourself at the wide end of your kit lens most of the time, perhaps it’s a sign you need to spend a bit of cash on a wider lens. If you’re constantly at full zoom… well, you figure it out.

If you’re worried about spending hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars (or pounds, should you be on my side of the pond) on glass, go ahead and rent the lens you’re considering for a few weeks. Does it do everything you want it to? Is it too heavy? Does it feel right? Is it fast enough? If you’re not happy, rent a different lens, and keep searching. When you find the right lens(es) for you, you’ll know it – and that’s the right time to start shelling out the big bucks.

Seriously: Buy glass first. Worry about camera bodies later. By the time you have bought some serious lenses, you’ll know what you need from a camera (wide angle? Full-frame sensor. Sports? Fast, high-frames-per-second camera. Walking a lot? Buy a capable, but light-weight camera body… Etc)… But it’s a supremely silly thing to do to spend a lot of money on a camera body until you know what you really want/need.

So, Haje, what do you use?

I love my Canon 450D. It is cheap as chips, but does the trick!

I’ve had a lot of cool cameras in my time – I worked as a freelance photographer for a while, and bought all the cool gear. At one point, I drove around in a £1,300 car with £49,000 worth of camera equipment in the boot. I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m a gadget nut, and a camera aficionado to boot.

… Which is why it might surprise you that my main camera is a Canon EOS 450D. It’s not the newest camera on the market anymore. It never was the best. But it does everything I need from a camera: It’s plastic, so it’s reasonably light weight. It’s relatively sturdy. It uses SD cards (which plug straight into my MacBook Pro – it’s a small thing, but I like it).

The four-fifty takes all my lenses (I have loads, but the ones I’ve used in the past 6 months are a Sigma 17-35mm f/2.8-4.0, a Canon 50mm f/1.4, a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8, and my Lensbaby G3 lens), and it doesn’t look too conspicuous. It’s also cheap enough that I’m not too crazy worried about it getting stolen or dropping it. All in all: Perfect for my uses. And (when I bought it), the cheapest camera you could buy with a Canon badge on it.

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How to hand-colour your photos

Haje Jan Kamps — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:42:55 +0000

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…

Why bother with hand-colouring?

'Brown Creeper' - 11x14 hand-painted photo. This was shot of a Brown Creeper near its nest in the forest outside my home in Oregon.

From the beginning of the 20th century, right up through the 1950s or so, commercial hand colouring was relatively common. Today, there are a few photographers who keep the spirit alive.

“I’m old enough to have grown up with some old hand coloured photos around the house when I was a kid in Alabama.”, says Bob. “There was a beautiful hand coloured portrait of my grandfather, a genuine Southern rogue, in our family album. One of my early baby pictures was hand coloured as well.”

Equipment

'Superstitions' - 16x20 hand-painted photo. Taken in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. (click for bigger)

The easiest way to get started in hand colouring photos is to use coloured pencils and an oily solvent, which can be anything from mineral spirits to cooking oil. Materials aren’t everything, of course: “Use the pencils to colour in areas on the print and then dab a little of the solvent onto a clean cotton ball to blend the pencil work. It’s amazingly easy to get good results with coloured pencil”, explains Bob. The only catch is that whatever you use for colouring, you really need to work on a photo printed on old-fashioned fibre-based paper.

Traditional-looking hand coloured photographs were done with special oil paints that are similar to artist oil paints but have a much higher pigment load. The company that made them is still around so you can still buy Marshall’s photo oils. If you use these paints, you end up with a palette that looks very much like old-fashioned hand colour photography. Why? Simple – it’s the palette the photographers of times gone by used.

'Fern in Rain' - 11x14 hand-painted photo. In the forest of western Oregon. (click for bigger)

Continuing the tradition wasn’t good enough for Bob, however – he decided to evolve the techniques to create his own creative look: “I soon started using regular artist oil paints for my work, giving me a broader colour palette to choose from.”

“In the last few years I’ve switched almost entirely to artist’s acrylics”, Bob admits. “They’re much less toxic than oil paints and they dry quicker. I also believe they are less likely to degrade photo paper, in the long haul, than oil paints, though those early 20th century hand-coloured photos have stood up pretty well”. Of course, using acrylics brings in a brand new challenge, too: “Acrylics are harder to use well”, Bob says, “in part because of that quick drying time.”

Refining the process

'Heceta' - 11x14 hand-painted photo. Oregon coast. (click for bigger)

Of course, there are a lot of books out there which might help you to get started. They can only get you so far, however: “After reading my way through most of the currently published books on hand coloured photography, all of which seem to deal mostly with dreamy boudoir photographs on one hand, and bright, over-saturated pictures of cars on the other”, Bob recalls, “I spent some time serving a self-imposed apprenticeship in hand-colouring that taught me more than any book ever will”.

As with so many other things, the quickest way to masterdom is practice, practice, practice. Oh and did I mention practice? “I pulled out a stack of one hundred of my own photographs, rejects one and all, and sat down to hand colour them all as quickly as possible”, Bob smiles, “The only rule was not to be self-critical of anything, no matter what. I coloured that first hundred, and then coloured a hundred more.”

'Fern' - 11x14 hand-painted photo. In Oregon. (click for bigger)

“I still have them all”, he says, and gestures vaguely towards a set of drawers in the corner of the room. “They’re mostly awful. Truly, unabashedly awful”, he laughs, “But some of them were a little bit good, and the steady practice of painting day after day after day taught me a huge amount about what I wanted to do.”

Most art photographers have made transition from taking photos to making photos – Bob has simply taken that adage another step forward. “What fascinates me about hand colouring”, Bob reflects, “is the subtle interplay between the cool, modern, machine-age precision of photography and the softer, more expressive and deeply primal art of painting.”

Top tips

'Oregon Forest' - 11x14 hand-painted photo. In the Oregon forest one foggy morning.

Less is more. Some of my best hand coloured photographs look at first glance like they might be pure black and white, but they’re a kind of black-and-white you’ve never seen.

Don’t be literal. This is not a time to colour within the lines. It’s also good to add in a few impossible colours here and there to keep the eye interested.

Break the mould. The usual stuffy criteria applied by camera club photographers don’t apply. Sharp focus is unnecessary. Zone system exposure isn’t needed. Perfect darkroom technique is also an extravagance. An interesting print that’s deeply flawed in technical terms may be much more interesting as a hand coloured photo than a technically perfect print of the same image would be. I never throw out my darkroom mistakes.

Go back to basics. The best way for photographers to improve their photography is to stop spending money on the latest camera gear and, instead, get solid training in the basics of art: Take a community college class in drawing, and then another one in colour theory, and finally one in basic design. Your pictures will become immeasurably better as a result.

How to hand colour your photographs

Now that you know the what and why, Bob kindly agreed to show you, step by step, how he does a hand-coloured photograph, from start to finished. Prepare to be astonished… Take it away, Bob!

This 8×10-inch black and white photo of summer leaves was shot on Tri-X and developed in Rodinal, a good combination for hand coloring, and printed on Luminos Charcoal paper, which, sadly, is no longer available. Here it’s taped to a work table to be colored.

I use regular artist acrylic paints and brushes for my work.

After quickly sealing the surface of the photo with clear matte acrylic medium and letting it dry, I begin by painting areas of transparent yellow acrylic on the leaves….

..Then I start mixing darker olive green into some of the other leaves.

At this point the image looks a little ragged.

I pick up a wash of ultramarine blue and clear medium on a brush; the color is an excellent one for darkening and deepening shadow areas.

At this point I’m just incrementally adding color, drying the paint, stepping back, taking a look, and adding some more.

Here I’ve just painted in some burnt sienna, a good warm reddish color, in some of the leafs. This really adds some subtle sparkle.

I sign my work on the front, in paint.

The final product.

About Bob Keefer

Bob has a degree in the study of religion from Harvard University. He’s been a newspaper writer for 30 years and now writes about art for The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon. In 2006 he was a fellow at National Endowment for the Arts workshop on theater and musical theatre. He crafts fine hand-colored photographs the old-fashioned way, using film. He uses a chemical darkroom, fiber-based paper and artist’s paints, without using Photoshop or any such new-fangled technology. No PhotoShop involved. Each resulting print is a unique work of art.

Check out Bob’s website for more examples of his work – and it’s well worth adding his blog to your RSS reader, as well.

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The quest for perfect droplets

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:53:12 +0000

One of the strengths of photography has always been its ability to freeze time. Before the advent of photography, it was impossible to see how a hummingbird moves its wings, how a tennis ball deforms as it is served, or what it looks like when a bullet hits an apple at the speed of sound.

In the microcosmos explored by macro photographers, there are hundreds of similar quick-moving phenomena that lay unexplored. I have a fascination with falling water and the way matches flare up as you strike them, so I decided to take a closer look.

Falling droplets

Edgerton nearly drove himself to despair trying to capture this one photograph

There are photographers out there who have driven themselves to the brink of insanity trying to capture the perfect droplet photo. Harold Edgerton, for example, worked several years of his life in the mid-1950s the hope of one day capturing the perfect corona—the splash impact of a droplet in a layer of liquid transforming into a perfect crown of droplets thrown back from the liquid. Eventually, through years of trial and error, he managed to capture his droplet.

Today, photographers have the advantage of being able to share experience online. Because most photographers work with digital cameras, the experimentation time also decreases drastically. Imagine the poor people who had to wait for an hour for their film to develop properly, just so they could see if they had finally captured the perfect corona!

This photo, by Mattheu Collomp, shows an alternative way of photographing droplets - click the image for a bigger version!

Despite the fact that the technical side of capturing droplets is a lot easier, it is still a labor- and time-intensive mission on which to embark. There is something unique about seeing liquids and their motion frozen in time, however, and as a macro photography project, it is excellent.

I have tried capturing droplets on impact on many occasions throughout my photography lifetime, and every time, I did it a little differently. On the first few attempts, I tried it with an old flash unit connected to a Kodak DC4800 with a PC lead (the same type of connection that connects cameras to studio flashes). The results were not terrible, but the limitations of a digital compact camera turned out to be prohibitive of capturing the photos I wanted. The second time I gave it a shot, I had graduated from digital compacts and was using my first dSLR—one of the first Canon EOS D60s, bought on the very day it was released. The result wasn’t too bad — but it wasn’t great either.

My first attempts at photographing droplets weren't, exactly, what you'd call successful (click on image for larger version on Flickr)

With my shiny new dSLR, I was trapped indoors in a typical miserable rainy day. What could I do other than try to capture some more droplets? This time, I decided to give continuous lighting a try, and I lined up a pair of 600w work lights. Although the light was blindingly bright, in retrospect, there still wasn’t enough light: Even the best of my shots that day had a slight tinge of motion blur on them. Although I did get some spectacular photographs, the blur meant that they weren’t as perfect as I would have liked.

Throughout my experimentation, however, I did discover one thing: The translucency of water makes it difficult to capture the true dynamic of the fluid. If only there was a purely coloured, perfectly opaque liquid I could use—and paint would have created such a mess. My esteemed photography assistant Katherine came up with the idea of using milk, which turned out to be a terrible idea. The hot lamps made the milk turn sour within half an hour, and the smell in my make-shift photo studio stayed for weeks. I’ve since discovered the perfect liquid: long-life coffee creamer! This liquid is slightly thicker than water, doesn’t go bad as easily as milk, and makes a wonderful splash, too!

It took hundreds and hundreds of attempts before I started getting images I started to be happy with. This wasn't one of 'em.

When I started writing my macro book (from which this article is a small extract), I decided it was time to revisit the droplet experiment. Armed with a few containers of coffee creamer and using a 28-135mm macro lens with a 25mm extension tube and the Canon Twin Lite macro flash, I started experimenting again.

There are many ways to capture droplets, all depending on your taste. It’s possible to create tranquil photos, like the one Matthieu Collump shot above, but personally, I prefer the drama of liquid hitting liquid.

For my droplet shots, I used a large, flat surface with a very thin layer of coffee creamer in the bottom. I then used an eyedropper to let droplets of creamer fall into the film of creamer. (If you don’t have an eyedropper, you should be able to buy one inexpensively at a photography store or pharmacy.)

After a few photos, I started getting the knack of the timing, so that I took the photo a fraction of a second after the droplet impacted. From then on, it was four hours of patience, changing the batteries in the flash and camera, and refilling the eyedropper.

A nearly perfect corona. But only nearly.

It is the kind of activity that makes your family and friends question your sanity, no doubt about it, but in the end, I was left with about half a dozen photos I’m very fond of, including the photo above, which is nearly a perfect corona.

But only nearly…

Learn more about macro photography

My book!

This is an extract from chapter 4: The Macro in Everyday Objects, published by Wiley Publishing, and written by yours truly.

Obviously, I’m biased, but I highly recommend you get hold of a copy of my book, because it’s awesome. You can get it from Amazon in the US and in the UK, and most other good bookstores around the world.

It’s also available in Polish, Czech and Chinese, so if you prefer reading one of those languages, nip along to your local bookstore or book-peddling interwebsiteshop.