I recently built a little device which triggers my camera whenever a laser beam is broken – It’s 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 isn't - 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

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

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

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

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

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

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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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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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, 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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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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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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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's a lot of cameras to choose from out there - In this article, I've 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's 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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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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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.

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Someone posted a really cool optical illusion on Reddit today, and one of the commenters was wondering how it is done.

As it turns out, it’s really quite easy, so I decided to tap out a quick little tutorial. Here is how:

Start with the original image:

Arizona 2003 by Photocritic on Flickr

Upping the saturation will help your image seem more, er, saturated (clicky for bigger)

Inverse it in an image editing package like Photoshop or the Gimp (in Photoshop: Image → Adjustments → Invert).

Next, increase the saturation a little bit (this will help with the colour perception – in Photoshop, Image → Adjustments → Hue & Saturation).

Finally, blur the photo a little. This will ensure that you concentrate on colour, rather than the texture. In Photoshop, I used Filter → Blur → Gaussian Blur, with a setting of 2px, but experiment to see what looks best.

That’s your first picture:

For the second picture, simply desaturate your original photo. If you want, you can up the contrast a little bit, or even sharpen it further.

The final result? Check out the video below. To see the effect, simply start the video and stare at the horizon. After 20 seconds, the image will change, and you’ll be able to see the optical illusion:

The effect isn’t very strong in this particular photo, but that’s because it’s such a gradient and vibrant photo to begin with. You may find that man-made, simpler structures (buildings etc) have a stronger effect. Experiment away, and if you make a particularly awesome one, why not post it in the comments?

Cheerio!

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To me, one of the most fascinating things about photos is that there are absolutely no rules. There are two hard limits on photography: Your fantasy, and the laws of physics – beyond that, you’re free to do whatever you want to do. We can’t do much about the laws of physics (although, with the recent spate of ISO 100,000 cameras, both Canon and Nikon are giving it their best shot), but there are lots of interesting ways you can try to give your creativity a boost.

In 10 ways to break photographer’s block, I explored a few ways you can shake your creative rut – but to me personally, I think that introducing artificial constraints on my work (as discussed in my Dogma Photography article) is a great way to get creatively juiced up. Recently, I have been spending a lot of time on Flickr, and what strikes me, is that people do some truly in(s)ane stuff – which I, of course, am a complete sucker for.

So, without any further faff, I offer you… A series completely bonkers photo projects, and why they’re worth taking a closer look at…

Stick Figures in Peril

"Please don't climb on this railing", by Leo Reynolds

I have no idea where Peril is or why you would want to go there, but this quite active Flickr group has a collection of mad, funny, thought-provoking and downright bizarre warning sign involving, well, stick figures in some sort of danger.

What can you learn? This project is so great because it stands as a reminder that there are photographs and photographic projects all around us. Have you thought about how many times you see warning signs with stick figures around you? It’s like yellow cars or pregnant women – if you start looking for them, they’re suddenly absolutely everywhere. And it’s the same way with photography opportunities. Once you start looking…

Electric Wheelchairs

Drive-By by Nige

Someone sent me a link to Nige’s Electric Wheelchairs moblog a while ago, and I’ve been scratching my head over it ever since. It’s street photography, but with a twist; the people in the photos are all on electric wheelchairs of some sort.

Of all the projects here, this is the one that makes me go why more emphatically than any of the others, and still… The photos are good, and I quite like the surrealism of it as well.

What can you learn? There’s a lot to be said for empowering and destigmatizing people, and photography is one way of doing that. As Nige says, “Electric wheelchairs are fanatstic, it’s a shame that only less mobile pensioners or those with disabilities get to have them, we want to zoom around too!”

Tea and Coffee making facilities

essentials by Vixgirl

If you’ve got a job where you spend a lot of time on the road and in hotels, you know the feeling: You wander into your room, tired after a long day’s hard work (or waiting around for meetings to begin, which is not as tiring but the frustration alone will make you pine for the nearest pub), and you’re met with a crappy little television, a shower with rubbish water pressure, and the neighbours either having a loud party or making the beast with two backs, smacking the bed against your wall.

Take solace in the one thing which is consistently fabulous about hotel-rooms: the tea and coffee making facilities. This Flickr group is inspired by one of the extras on Bill Bailey’s DVD Part Troll, and does what it says on the tin: Photos of kettles and its accouterments, essentially.

What can you learn? That there is never any excuse for not taking photos – even if the weather is rubbish and you’ve spent every shred of your inspiration account, just look around you, and snap away.

Hotel Door Hangers

hanger 45, by Michael Lebowitz

Michael Lebowitz, of Big Spaceship fame, posted a collection which is rather quite fascinating. “When my grandfather passed away last year, my family gathered to go through his belongings.”, Michael writes. “He had been in the foreign service and he had filled a whole wall of his study with hotel door hangers from all his travels throughout the world.” Of course, like a good netizen, Mike decided to photograph them all and post them for everybody to see – it’s glorious to see such a span in styles, languages, and time collected.

What can you learn? There are a lot of awesome things which can be collected and digitized – do you have friends or family members with odd collections? Do you? It’s an exercise in product photography, and you might get some additional ideas in the process!

Locks on Toilets

Redchurch bar, east London

I’ve written about this one before… It’s an odd little project, which I came up with when I was hideously drunk one night – like all great ideas, in other words, and I just sort of continued doing it. Of course, it’s a lot more fun if it’s a collaborative project, and that bit seemed to work quite well – The Locks on Toilets pool on Flickr currently has nearly 300 photos in it – that’s 300 slices of rarely-photographed architecture from all over the world.

Daft? For sure. Funny? Well, I think so. Want to know more? Check out this post, then!

What can you learn? Obviously, if even I can come up with a naff photography project, then anyone can. Go on, give it a shot!

The Number 29

The number 29

What happens when you one day take a photo which has the number 29 in it, and then decide to find out what would happen if you were to take a photo of that same number whenever you saw it? You get the awesome Number 29 project.

It has photos. Containing the number 29. In lots of different styles, places, and ways. Um, yeah, that’s really all there’s to it, but do go take a look, it’s pretty nifty.

What can you learn? Nothing, really, and I’m sort of regretting adding a ‘What can you learn’ bit to each of these, because what this post really should have been is a simple list of ‘Hey, look at these awesome projects’, and now, instead of working on my day job, I’m sitting here coming up with contrived ideas for things you can learn from silly projects. Feh.

The Squared Circle

Screen shot of the Squared Circle Flickr pool

It’s a very simple concept: Take a round object, place it inside a square photograph, and see what happens. If you think it sounds a bit too simple, then I have to admit that I agree with you, but 85,601 contributions to the Flickr Photo Pool can’t possibly be wrong: this is one of the longest-standing and most popular Flickr photography projects. It shows some incredible creativity, a lot of variety for such a constrained topic, and no small amount of humour, as well.

What can you learn? I guess round pegs do fit quite neatly into square holes – and I’m very fascinated by how people still seem to be able to come up with new takes on what now is a battered old photographic meme.

What are your favourites?

Scroll about 3 inches down this screen, past the advert which nobody actually sees or ever clicks on anyway, and you’ll find a comment field. If you know of a wicked project I’ve missed, go on, share it!

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I have one friend – Daniela – who is a n00b at this whole photography things. Some of the questions she asks, and some of the comments she makes, sound like stupidity in my ears. ‘Of course not’, I want to burst out… And yet… that’s a learning moment for me. What is ‘obvious’ to me isn’t necessarily obvious to others – especially if you’re just trying to come to terms with photography and how it all fits together.

Anyway, Daniela was recently in Belgium, and had a go at some street photography. I’ve written about Street Photography many times before: A shot at Street photography, Katie Cooke’s The return of Street Photography, Brad’s Street Photography and the Law, Street Photography in Montreal, Prime Lenses, and why you need one, Oi You! no Pictures! and it’s also mentioned in my article about insuring your photography gear.

What I had never stopped to think, however, is how a beginning photographer looks at street photography. Daniela offered some insights…

Flute Player at Picadilly Circus (click image for large version)

When I was Belgium I had a go at some street photography. I wasn’t entirely happy with what I produced, but it doesn’t mean to say that I won’t try again. In fact, I think I’m rather looking forward to having another go. These are some thoughts on the experience, from someone who is not nearly as talented – technically or artistically – as the Photocritic. I’m not sure if my ramblings are of any help to you, but they might be….

Aside from the obvious, being a camera, what you need most for street photography is confidence. That’s not confidence in your photographic abilities, it’s confidence to walk around holding however many pound’s-worth of camera equipment it is that you own and to take photos. If you don’t have the confidence to point and shoot, you won’t get the pictures that you want. The more photos that you take, the better you’ll become. That’s obvious. So don’t be put off by your attempts not working. They can only work if you actually try it.

Sometimes you catch the most amazing sights on the streets - like this guy with his 1970s ghetto-blaster (click image for bigger)

Make sure that you know the rights and wrongs of taking people’s photographs in public places. If someone stops you, you need to be able to respond confidently and accurately about what you’re doing. Even if you don’t know what you are doing, be confident and act as if you do. It goes without saying that being polite and respectful is something you should be doing, and be careful taking photos of kids.

As much as I know you are anti-automatic settings on DSLR cameras, when you start out it can be helpful to use the automatic setting. Until you are accustomed to it, it’s easier to let your camera do the hard bit whilst you’re getting to grips with the concept of street photography. When you’re more experienced and more comfortable with what you’re doing, you’ll want more control over what you’re shooting and you’ll have a better feel for what you need to do. Don’t overwhelm yourself initially with the technical aspects, concentrate on getting a shot.

Daniela first wrote for Photocritic with her Teaching Photography to a 5-year-old article.

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If you would like me to critique your photographs, here’s how to get on the list…

Follow these steps

1) Get a Flickr account (you should probably do this anyway, it’s free, and Flickr is awesome)

2) Upload 3 photos you’d like me to critique It’s important that you choose three photos, because it’s difficult to give systemic advice on a single photograph. Also, it may be worth not necessarily taking your 3 best photos, but do pick photos that you are proud of, but which you feel might be improved – and yet you don’t know how. NOTE: Nudity and similar themes is perfectly OK, but remember to mark your links with (NSFW) – I don’t want to get my readers in trouble at work or with kids just because they clicked on a wrong link

3) Check your Flickr settings Please ensure that you allow notes on your photos, as these make critiquing much easier for me. Also, the photos have to be of a reasonable size – I can’t critique thumbnails :) If you haven’t turned on notes, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do a critique.

4) Add a comment to this post where the URL leads to your Flickr stream. In the comment itself, please tell add a link to the 3 photos you’d like critiqued on Flickr

5) Pay to skip the queue (optional). You may have spotted that there’s a pretty long wait on these now – I simply don’t have the time to do them all as quickly as I like. If you would like to skip to the top of the queue, and receive your critique within a week – guaranteed – make a donation of $50 via PayPal.

What happens next?

As far as possible, I will follow the structure I’ve outlined in my Doing a Photo Critique article – it’s worth a read if you haven’t yet.

Finally, remember what I said in my ‘dealing with negative photo critiques‘ article – you may not like everything I have to say, but my intention is to help you become a better photographer. If you only want to hear that your photography work is ‘OMG AWESOME LOL’, then you’re not in the right place :)

Also, it’s worth nothing that despite of persistant rumours of the contrary, I’m only human, and I will only do critiques when I feel I can actually make a useful impact – sometimes I may do 3 people in an evening, other times I won’t do any for a while. Partially, it’s because I’m crazy busy with work some times, but sometimes, I’m just plain lazy – do forgive. If you’re desperate for me to critique you immediately, check out step 5 above to find out how you can skip to the top of the queue.

The boring bits

By following the steps above, you give me a non-exclusive license to use your 3 photos as illustration images to a photo critique, if your particular critique somehow works well as a separate article on Photocritic. I will not use your photos in any other circumstance without conferring with you first.

I will pick and choose which photographers to critique first – it’s not meant as an insult if yours sits there for a while while I pick off newer entries first – it may just be that I haven’t got much useful to say about your photos because they already are perfect, or perhaps I’m struggling to vocalise what I like / what I would improve about your particular photos. Don’t take it personally!

Photo: Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Photocritic.org on Flickr  

Photo Critiques Competed so far

You don’t have to submit your own photographs for critique, of course, it’s entirely possible to learn huge amounts about photography by reading good critiques of other photographer’s work, so here, I’ve collected the criticisms and praise I’ve done on Flickr so far:

Oct 8 ‘09: solofotones - Man with Paper, Street performer and Juntos
Oct 8 ‘09: MondoUNC – Sweater Weather, The Virgins and Cupcake.
Oct 1 ‘09: ooomidgetmanooo – Portrait 1 and Portrait 2
Oct 1 ‘09: HoneyJar – Autumn Leaves, Como Lake from Bellagio and Tulips
Jul 7 ‘09: HeraldK – Admiration, Shadows and Irish Coastal Road
May 25 ‘09: Jacob Wighton – Ants!, Flight of the Birds and Sneaking!
May 1 ‘09: Jack Makio – Ugandan Mother and Child, Dasiy and Plazma light
May 1 ‘09: Jeff – The Remarkables and Milford Road
Apr 28 ‘09: Jack Fussel – Speckled, Bar Bar Bana and Stunning.
Apr 27 ‘09: MrSimbol – Manila by the bay, Business as Usual and High and Dry
Apr 26 ‘09: Per – Heavy Lifting, Bench and Martin Luther King Memorial.
Apr 26 ‘09: Ilan – (Final) Rest, Man and Together and Alone II
Apr 26 ‘09: Mark – Holy Trinity Silhouette, The Long Drive Home and Autumn
Apr 25 ‘09: Adricv – Jean-Claude, de Haiti, Puppet Shop and Moving Sculpture
Apr 25 ‘09: Gary Kurtz – Photo 1, Photo 2 and Photo 3

There is also a hyper-exclusive invite-only Flickr group where you can see some of the photos I’ve critiqued, called, imaginatively, Critiqued by Photocritic.

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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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

When I finally got in the taxi on my way back, I decided to clean out all the photos I knew I wasn’t going to use from the memory card, using the camera itself, so I could spend less time downloading and sorting, and more time just fixing it, so we could drop in the images and get the magazine to print.

I selected a batch of photos. “keep that one, lose that one, keep, keep, lose, keep, that’ll do, Format. Yes, of course I want to format. Yes. Confirm.”. I sat back in the cab, mentally going through what I had to do when I made it back to the office. Then it suddenly hit me.. ‘Format?’ Shit! No! Surely not… NOOOO!!!!

Here’s what to do if you are as big a plum as I am…

The first rule of data recovery

If you fear something Bad might have happened, take your memory card out of the camera immediately, and stop using it.

It has happened many of us: that ‘oh, no…’ feeling that occurs when you realise that you have just lost your pictures on your memory card. The good thing is that all is not lost and there are some ways to get that data back. We are going on a mission called ’saving our asses’ and here is what we will need to make this a successful mission.

Once you have lost data on a memory card you need to quarantine that card and stop using it immediately.

I know I wrote that in bold, but let’s repeat it, because it’s the single most important thing you’ll learn from this article:

If you lose data on a memory card, take it out of your camera, and do not use it for anything else.

You may have to exhaust different options with that card to try to recover those photos so don’t keep adding pictures to it. Continuing to use the card can be detrimental to you actually recovering those photos.

How are images deleted from a card?

Image deletion operations – and, indeed, formatting a card – is normally not what most people think of as ‘proper’ deletion. Instead, you’re merely re-setting the file allocation table. Imagine your memory card as a chest of drawers which has 20 drawers, and can hold 20 photographs. When you take a photo, it’s put into one of the drawers, and you stick a little lable, like IMG_1234.RAW on the front of the drawer. It’s safe there. When you need it, you open the drawer, and you take the picture out.

When you delete a photo, something interesting happens: The photo isn’t removed from the drawer, all your camera does, is to peel the label off the front of the drawer. That means that this drawer is now ‘free space’, so if you had a full set of drawers, and ‘delete’ three photos, you now have 17 full drawers, and three ‘empty’ ones. When you take a new photo, your camera puts the photo into one of the free drawers, on top of the old photo.

Your old photo doesn’t disappear off the memory card until a new photo is put on top of the old one. Even if your card reads ‘empty’, all the old photos are still there, just not easily accessible.

Recovering data from your memory card

I was half-way around the world (Well, 1,400 miles into my motorbike tour of Europe) when I took this photo - while the picture itself isn't that unique, it represents a fond memory for me - I'd be gutted if I had lost it, but I was able to recover it off my memory card. Phew.

Lost data recovery operations happen with some type of third party software, in fact this is probably the method you are going to use to retrieve your data. There is a problem though, which software option should you purchase?

There are literally hundreds of options to choose from in this area, both paid and free choices. It would be close to impossible to tell you exactly which one is the best for you, because the focus of the programs can vary. Depending on how you lost your photos that could determine which product will be best suited to solve your problem. However before you go out and purchase a product make sure you take these steps:

Try a demo version first – Many programs (like the very popular Photo Rescue, which is available for both Mac and Windows) will allow you to use a trial version before you have to purchase a full version. It is strongly recommended that you test the trial version with your camera and with your specific problem: For these types of software, the trial software will usually show you which images could be recovered with the full version of the software.

Leaving it to the professionals

Some photos are less valuable than others - but if yours are a matter of life and death (say, you lost someone's wedding photos), then get professionals involved!

Professional data recovery is many orders of magnitude more expensive than doing it yourself, but it’s incredible what can be recovered…

And if your photos are truly invaluable (losing the photos as a wedding photographer, for example, could prove hideously expensive if you get sued by the couple as a result… Which has been known to happen, and this is why there is separate wedding photography insurance out there), you might have to find a local professional service (try googling for it).

If you have to go down this route, go to the corner shop and buy some beans and toast off the internet, because if you have to get someone to manually pick the card apart and read the chips inside your card directly, you’d not going to be able to afford to eat anything else anytime soon – I once helped someone find a data recovery service, and they paid over £3,500 to get a dead hard-drive resuscitated for long enough to copy it over to a fresh drive. On that note – when did you last back-up your photos?

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Jump ahead to the present day, a year later, and their exhibition is about to open. So how they get this far? How on earth do you go about organising this sort of thing from scratch? Anna Badley explains…

The Big idea

We hold regular photo meets and pub social meets in Oxford, and at one of these meets it turned out we’d missed the deadline for the annual Artweeks event that takes place locally – so we decided that we’d go it alone. We’re quite an active social group, there are probably 40 or so people who turn up to the meet ups so we thought it might be worth a go. That was about 12 months ago.

The first step was finding out where we might be able to stage the exhibition as that would determine the space, how many pictures people could hang and how much that might cost per person. We found a helpful bar/restaurant/gallery that suited our informal group better than a very formal space, and worked out that we could hang 30 fairly large pictures in the space they had – so, 30 exhibitors.

The next step was to find out who in the Group might be interested in exhibiting. There are around 1,500 members at the moment and we had no idea how many of those might be actually located in Oxford and interested in putting in a picture. We thought we’d get loads of people expressing an interest who would then drop out things really got going, but that didn’t happen. Also rather surprising was that quite a few of the final 30 had never been along to any of the meet ups and we had no idea who they were – we’d never met them. This did make us a little nervous at first; what if they didn’t pay up? What if they didn’t turn up with a picture?

The plan takes shape

The poster for the Flickr exhibit in Oxford (click on the image to see it full-size)

By the end of March this year we were pretty much set on what we were doing, we’d got our 30 exhibitors, and 5 organisers (not quite sure how they were elected, it just sort of happened).

We had a bit of a break in early Summer then got the money in from the majority of the exhibitors during July and August. That was far less of a hassle than we’d imagined it might be, but apart from putting the money down on the venue not a lot else happened over the Summer months.

The exhibitors had a theme to work to; we wanted to show a different side of Oxford to the one the tourists see when they visit. So we’d asked everyone to try and show their own perspective on the city, and tried to give them as much freedom as possible.

Oh my God it’s only 8 weeks away, how did that happen?

With only 2 months left before opening night, there was a sudden flurry of activity. A summit was held with the five organisers and a horribly large task list of things that needed checking, fixing, chasing, designing and printing – the whole lot.

By the time the summit had finished, we’d divided up the tasks; collecting the high res jpg files to put in the accompanying book, keeping in touch with the venue, writing the press release, designing the map for the photos to be placed on and setting up the email address were some of the more major ones. Somewhere along the line the exhibition also got a title – Made In Oxford – and suddenly we were almost ready to go!

One of the group also had a tame graphic designer who immediately set to work on making us a fantastic poster. It was definitely worth having someone professional do this because as soon as we saw how good it looked it was pretty clear none of us had the design skills to even get close to that.

Final tweaks

The Made in Oxford book is available to purchase via Photobox for £21

Finally, we arranged a meet up (mainly as we were really intrigued as to who our mystery exhibitors were) and had a frankly scary meet-up that felt more like a board meeting than a group of photographers! Thankfully we managed to fix that problem later in the evening with a few ales, once all the important information had been dished out.

The book was proof-read by three of us (not taking any chances there) and is now available to buy from Photobox!

When we first looked at all the pictures together it became apparent that the majority of photos had nobody, or just a lone figure, in them. Many were taken at night or very early in the morning. Even the usual tourist traps and colleges look deserted which is not something you ever see during the day. It was really exciting seeing a completely different side to the city and we were happy that the theme we’d chosen had actually been okay to work with.

So we’re currently four days before opening night. We’ve had plenty of local press interest and the posters are starting to appear round town. We have 29 pictures ready to go and the last one is almost there so it looks like everything is ready to roll.

Once all the pictures are safely hanging on the wall in the venue we’re intending to get the beers in and sit back to enjoy what’s been achieved, and maybe even start thinking about next year’s theme – well, maybe not quite yet.

The exhibition is open 7 days a week to the general public from 3rd-31st October 09, at the Jam Factory, Hollybush Row, Oxford, UK OX1 1HU (map).

Hang on a minute. What on earth is the Oxford Flickr Group?

We’re an offshoot of the online photo-sharing site, flickr.com. We love taking photos, finding interesting things to shoot here where we live and welcoming new people to our city. There is normally a degree of photographic geekery happening but it’s certainly not a pre-requisite for joining in; we don’t care if you use your iPhone, a dinky little point-and-shoot camera or a fancy-pants film SLR with all the lenses. We certainly don’t compare mega pixels (okay, most of us don’t do that).

There’s no charge for joining and we’re a friendly bunch so if you’re interested in saying hello, come and find us on Flickr!

Oh, and of course if you’re not in Oxford, UK, there are loads of other local Flickr groups all over the world. If there isn’t one where you are, nothing’s stopping you from starting your own – get busy!

This article was written by the inimitable Anna Badley (Flickr / website), who in the past has written the Beginning in Portraiture article here on Photocritic. If you would like to get involved and write a guest article, drop me an e-mail!

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“If your camera vanishes today, can you afford to buy a new one?”

If the answer’s yes, great, go look at amazing photography to spark your inspiration. If not, read on…

You’ve probably insured your house, the contents of your house, your health (if you’re unfortunate enough to live in a country where they don’t take care of you properly, that is), your car, and your pets.

Why do we insure all these things? It’s simple – because if you don’t, the life you’ve spent so much time and money building up is only one minor disaster away from slipping away from you. Yeah, that is probably the most emo thing I’ve ever written on my blog. So sue me (I’ve got indemnity insurance!).

I know for a fact that people reading this blog do all sorts of different things with their camera equipment. Some of you work as professional photographers, some of you don’t know which way is up on a camera – but most of you do own cameras which you use a lot.

Insurance as part of your home policy

Truth is, though, that photography is one of those hobbies where you, by its very nature, take your equipment out on the road with you: there’s only so much you can do in your living room or kitchen, after all. If your camera stuff is at home, it’s probably covered by your home insurance (but not always…) – but what happens when you venture into the world to capture slices of time on your film or imaging chips?

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Insurance is really only about one thing: peace of mind. It is the type of product you buy and hope you never have to use because, well, it means something bad has happened. When it comes to photography insurance, there are a few ways you can go about insuring your equipment. Some provide more protection than others but you need to decide what will work best for you.

If you do a lot of street photography, you may wish to take out extra camera insurance, because the risk of your camera getting damaged or stolen is much higher. Photo by Photocritic on Flickr

When considering your options the first determining factor is the way you use your camera. If you are a professional user and are getting paid for your services then you need to consider a commercial policy. If photography is your hobby then a homeowners or rental policy may be enough but there are some limitations there. When you add photography equipment to a homeowners / contents insurance policy it will typically cover if the equipment is stolen or there is a fire in your home. Coverage outside of the home may or may not be included so you need to check your policy to be sure of the coverage you have. Also if you drop your camera or damage it yourself then this type of policy may not be all that useful.

For a higher level of peace you can add a ‘floater’ (an especially insured item as part of the main policy) to your homeowners / content insurance policy. Floaters range in price but are relatively inexpensive and will generally protect your equipment against all types of calamities, both fire and theft – and sometimes even accidental damage you may cause to the camera.

Dedicated camera insurance

It doesn't bear thinking about, but it's better to consider insurance before you might need it than after...

There’s a lot of disagreement among photographers whether this type of insurance is worth it – Insurance especially for your camera equipment is usually quite expensive, and often assumes that you are a professional photographer – or at least that you are making money with your photographic equipment.

Some argue that it is not worth it, yet other photographers will say it is highly necessary. What side of the argument you fall on really depends on you and the value of the equipment you have, how often you replace your equipment anyway, and how high-risk your photographic behaviour is: If you do a lot of street photography in the evening, you’re at high risk; if your camera rarely leaves your studio, then perhaps you’re less likely to get mugged (but nothing stops you from being butter-fingered, of course)

Using equipment that doesn't look as expensive (like a smaller 50mm prime, instead of a big L-series zoom lens) can help you stay out of trouble

If you decide to go this route then your goal should be to choose the limits that fit your specific needs. Also make sure you identify all of the types of things the policy covers, especially things like liquid or water damage. Ask about what other things you need to be insured. For example if you do any type of underwater photography, it may invalidate your insurance, or you may have to pay a higher premium for your insurance to apply. Again knowing your needs and how you plan to use your camera will go a long way in to determining if this is the right option for you.

Camera policies are not entirely dissimilar to car policies; At first, it’ll be very expensive, but the cover drops in price after a few renewals, as you get a no-claims bonus – some companies offer up to a 80% bonus built up over 5 years, but of course building up a bonus can take quite a long time, and if you think you’re at very low risk of anything happening to your camera, then perhaps you don’t need a policy in the first place.

When looking for companies to purchase from like most people you can search online and find a variety of options. If you belong to any photography organizations, clubs or groups you can always see if they provide any type of group discounts that you may be able to capitalise on – also check the back of photography magazines, there’s always some good offers in there!

But…

Here’s to sincerely hoping that whether or not you have your camera covered, that you never end up in a situation where you have to use – or wish you had – your insurance cover.

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Two thirds of the world is covered by water, and while much of it is quite boring and un-photogenic, there are still vast opportunities to capture what is happening beneath the surface. There is a combination of equipment and tecnique required to make this type of photography work for you, include choosing the right camera, making sure it stays safe from water, and finding some way of lighting it all.

Picking a camera

When searching for cameras, knowing your budget and the types of photos you want to take will go a long way in determining the right option for you.

Photo, right: Vivitar underwater camera by Anetz on Flickr. This photo also shows the ’sports finder’, which is much more useful than a viewfinder once you’re underwater

Your options will change depending on whether you want this to be a vacation hobby or you want to become a gadget-tastic underwater photographer with all the bells, whistles, and a bathysphere with an espresso machine in the corner. Don’t get me wrong, underwater photography can become very expensive, very quickly so it is imperative that you identify what your goal is.

Image, left: Underwater Nikon Nikonos-V with 35/2.5 by Mikesub on Flickr

If you just want to dip your toe in, you could actually use a cheap, single-use disposable underwater camera… It won’t give you the greatest quality images but it gives you some photos to show friends, family, and Flickr-admirers back home.

In selecting the right camera there are a billion options to choose from. More or less. Probably less. Both digital and film cameras can each perform well underwater however the major disadvantage for film cameras is that you can only shoot one roll of film at a time. Having to swim back up to change the roll of film is infuriating, to say the least, so stick with the megapixels for photography zen.

Naked Lady by Arno Gourdol on Flickr

If you are a beginner than a point and shoot may be a good place to start. Try to get a cameras with a nicely sized LCD screen which will simplify your picture taking experience – don’t plan to be able to look through your viewfinder much, because between your diving equipment and your (hopefully) water-proof enclosure, it’s not going to be much use. Whatever you decide make sure the camera matches what you are trying to accomplish.

Also, be aware that some cameras marketed as ‘water proof’ may work when they are wet but they may not be designed to withstand the high water pressure in underwater photography – as with most things, you generally get what you pay for, so a £99 waterproof digital camera probably isn’t. Water-proof, that is.

Keeping it dry

Miss Underwater by Kal.LKL on Flickr

To prepare your camera for underwater use you will need housing. Housing provides a waterproof encasement for your camera to dwell in making it able to function underwater. As there are a variety of cameras you will find a wide load of different housing options available ranging in price from $100 for one to cover your pocket-sized compact jobbie, to going in to the thousands of dollars for more professional units.

Many of today’s cameras come with manufacturer-designed housing units, however they may not be as reliable as speciality third party options. Make sure the housing you decide to use will support the water pressure at the depths you want to take your pictures.

When considering housing you should consider the controls on your camera. Some housing will limit access to (some of) the controls on your camera, so look for models that will support all of the functions you want to use on your camera when taking your pictures.

Lights, camera…

One of the biggest challenges in underwater photography is lighting. As a beginner venturing into this new world you may want to start taking pictures using just the built in flash on your camera.

Photo, right: Underwater by Sagicel, on Flickr

Once you become comfortable taking pictures underwater then it is highly recommended that you purchase an external strobe light. Strobes give you more control over the way you bring light to the subject you are shooting.

With the improved light you can highlight various qualities and details that you want to bring out of your subject. You also can angle light toward or away from the subject. By angling away you can help keep backscatter, which are reflected particles in the water, from cluttering your shot.

Dive right in

Underwater in the Pool by Brian Marshall on Flickr

As you can see the options are great when it comes to underwater photography from cameras, housing and lighting, not to mention other accessories we didn’t even mention. Walking into this blindly can be an expensive proposition so start slowly and build your way up but most importantly know what you want to accomplish. Since it is both a scuba diving and photography activity rolled into one, make sure you include the time and cost of scuba diving lessons into your learning curve and your budget.

Some scuba schools also hold photography classes for beginners and might rent / loan you some equipment to get started, so that’s worth a look before you splash the kids’ college fund on something you might not enjoy as much as you thought!

Lastly, have fun and enjoy the underwater world waiting for you.

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For the purpose of this article, let’s shelve any reservations you might have about the ethics of photoshopping the hell out of a portrait or fashion image (you’ve all seen this video, right?), and have a look at how it can be done. As a wise old man once told me, only if you have the skills to do something do you have the skills to choose not to do it…

Maxwell graciously accepted the challenge to talk us through how he edits his portraits, and is using a photo of himself to go through the process… Take it away Max!

Step one – process the raw

My first step with every photograph, including this one, is to adjust the raw file to an exposure and look that I like. Normally it’s a little more contrasted and artistic than this one, but since we are going for a simple beauty shot (or as close as we can get with me!) I want an image that is pretty balanced and a little flat.

When doing this retouching process, my last step is always to photoshop the image as I would normally (i.e. change contrast, colour, detail, blur, etc.) and because every step I do that loses information in the image I highly recommend waiting ’till the end for any artistic choices.

Once I have that, it’s on the manipulation!

Step two – the healing brush and the spot healing brush.

At this point I like to get rid of all of the really obvious blemishes. I don’t get too nit picky, seeing as I do all the fine tuning later on, but make sure to get all the big ones (pimples, moles, unwanted facial hair, lines under eyes).

To do this I jump back and forth between the healing brush and the spot healing brush, the difference – the spot healing brush tool samples for you, whereas the healing brush tool you select the sample area.

I find that usually I have to play around a bit determining which one to use for specific things. In my experience the spot healing brush works great for smaller blemishes, such as pimples and moles, and the healing brush works better for thing like wrinkles.

Usually I use the spot healing brush until it stops working and then switch in order to have more control.

Step three – eliminating the double chin.

Seeing as I was teaching myself as I went along, this was probably the hardest part for me. I tried a bunch of things before realizing that transform was the easiest option. I use transform a lot for the whole process actually.

I made a selection from just below my mouth to about halfway down my neck. I used transform to stretch the selection upwards to have the double chin line align with my actual jawline. I then created a layer mask and used a very soft edged brush to paint my chin back in and to get rid of harsh lines around my selection.

Effectively this step is pulling up the double chin to hide it behind the first one.

Step four – manipulating all my facial features.

Here comes the fun. I made five or six different layers in this step, one for each facial feature we want to change. For me (and most other people, I suppose) we are going to want to change them all. I made a layer for my mouth (and surrounding area), my nose (and surrounding area), one for each eye (and surrounding… you get it) and a layer for each side of my face.

This step is very similar to the previous, in that it is all transform and masks. I made my eyes larger and changed the placement, made my nose longer and thinner, and made my mouth larger and moved down a bit. I also changed the shapes of these features a little, using the warp transform option. (cmd + T = transform and ctrl-clicking or right-clicking gives you the transform options).

The warp option is very useful when you want to pinch in just part of your selection or change one side, etc. I used the warp option to pull in the sides of my face, in order to make them appear even and slim my face a little. I then used masks to paint in the original image around the edges of the selections, once again to get rid of lines. I then used all these tools to tweak what was left of my face (stronger jaw thinner neck, etc).

Step five – skin.

I know there are a lot of ways to smooth skin, and I alternate between a lot of them. For this image I combined a bunch. First, I merged all my layers into a new one (shift+ opt+ cmnd+ e), duplicated it and applied a surface blur to the duplicate layer. I don’t remember my surface blur settings, but it’s really a personal taste thing (I like to still be able to see pores). I also paint out the facial features in a layer mask when I use surface blur, because I don’t want it to touch the sharpness of the eyes and mouth. I then created three new blank layers, one for darks, one for mid tones, and one for light areas.

I used the eyedropper tool to select a good colour to represent the dark tones and painted very subtly (maybe 5-10% opacity) over the shadowed areas of my face. I did this for mid tones and lights also. The reason I made three different layers is because I wanted to be able to adjust the opacity of each tone separately. The image here looked too fake for me, but had nicely smoothed out all of my skin. I wanted to bring some of the highlights and shadows back, so I copied the layer underneath the surface blur layer to the top of my palette.

I changed the layer blend mode to luminosity and dropped the layer opacity down to 38%. Again this would be a personal aesthetic moment, but 38% looked good to me.

Step six – adding depth.

At this point the image looked too flat for me so I selected my highlights (cmnd-click a channel) and created a curves layer set to screen @ %40 to bring out the highlights more and give more depth.

Then comes the dodging and burning. The way I do that is not with the dodge and burn tool; I create an overlay layer and use a really faint (<10% opacity) soft brush to dodge burn.

Black for darkening, white for lightening. I always do this on two different layers so that I may go back and change the opacity of them afterwards.

I also use this method to get rid of any remaining overly dark or light areas.

Step seven – cleaning up the edges.

There are many ways to do this. I jumped back and forth between the healing brush and just using a soft paintbrush to create and sculpt the outline of my hair.

Step eight – colour.

Again, everyone has their methods.

When adjusting skin tones I use a hue/saturation layer to adjust the saturation of the yellow and red tones until I get something I like.

Also to smooth out the colour I use the eyedropper to select the skin colour I want, create a solid layer of that colour and change the blend mode to colour.

Turn down the opacity or paint in the layer mask to change the strength and affected area.

Step nine – finishing touches and artistic processing.

I used the same transform and mask technique to apply some finished touches at this point. I elongated my neck and thinned it more as well as changed the size and shape of my mouth a little.

I did some more dodging and burning using some curves layers set to screen and multiply (I alter my dodge and burn layer using the blend if slider in the layer menu when you double click a layer), in order to only have it apply to the high- or low- lights of the image.

The final step was to merge it all together on a new layer and unsharp mask it a little. And there you have it, a beautified me!

See a higher-resolution version of this image here (or, y’know, click on the image)

About Maxwell

Maxwell Lander is a queer photo-based digital artist and emerging graphic and website designer currently living in Toronto, Canada. Maxwell has been immersed in artistic photography for many years and is constantly seeking out new ways to express a passion for contemporary creativity, including and engulfing fascination with the abilities of the digital photograph and the control/choices it provides photographers.

As one of Canada’s leading emerging artists, Maxwell has exhibited works across Ontario and is continuously developing new photographic series. With a string of awards and accreditations – most recently Runner-Up in the emerging talent category of the 2008-2009 Nikon Photo Contest International and a publication in Photolife Magazine’s emerging artist special issue (September 2009) – Maxwell participates in the political and social sphere of the Toronto artistic community, contributing to the ever-changing art world.

Maxwell’s photography is intended to draw a thin line between beauty and vulgarity, restriction and hedonism, decency and decadence – to expose them all as interconnected and subjective experiences.

In addition to focusing on personal photographic art, Maxwell is available for commercial hire as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer. To learn more, visit maxwellander.ca, check him out on Flickr, or follow @maxwellander on Twitter!

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What photographer(s) inspires you to create images?

There are a lot of photographers out there who really do it for me. I’m particularly fond of Philip of Lithium Picnic fame, and Ilyssa (isky on dA) also has a beautiful portfolio of photos. I love collecting my fave photos on Flickr (as you can see in the side-bar of this post).

To be honest, I take inspiration from lots of different photographers. The ‘best of’ or ‘most popular’ images on Flickr and DeviantArt are always a good place to star the flow of creative juices. Of course, Earthshots is also a great starting point…

How did you get your photography business started?

I got quite lucky, actually. What happened was that I just went and picked up a lot of free and paid-for local magazines in the city where I lived, and I started calling them and sending e-mails. One of them needed a photographer soon after, and suddenly I had a regular flow of income. After that, I continued adding more clients, and finally ended up with a thriving freelance photography business.

In the end, my business failed because I got a little bit too sure of myself, took my eyes off the ball, and lost a couple of clients to no fault but my own (I lost some important photos once, which put me on rocky ground, and I completely failed to show up to a big photoshoot another time – both completely unforgivable sins as a photographer, and ones I’ve learned a lot from). Personally, I blame being scatterbrained, but in real terms, if you know that’s one of your weaknesses, you just have to find a system to deal with it: Carry an alarm clock with you, send yourself e-mails, or be better about diary-keeping. And suchlike :)

What type of equipment do you use?

I’ve used Canon equipment since I started as a photographer – more by chance than by design: My dad’s Canon A1 is still going strong, and I just sort of stuck with it. Throughout the years, I’ve had a EOS D60, an EOS 10D, an EOS 20D, an EOS 30D, and EOS 40D. I used a 300D and a 350D back-up cameras for a while, and shot with a Canon EOS 1N HS when I was still shooting with film. These day,

I’ve had a whole series of different lenses as well, but the Canon EF 50/1.4 lenses remains one of my favourites (check out some photos I’ve taken with that lens, if you need convincing :) – if you haven’t tried a prime lens, you really should. But then, I could ramble on about that for ages (in fact, I already have…). I’ve also got a 70-200mm f/2.8 which I’m incredibly fond of, especially for concerts (you can see some of my concert shots on flickr, and I did an article about how I shoot them, too), and a couple of wide-angle lenses. Apart from these, I frequently rent lenses such as tilt-shift and specialist macro lenses: Owning them myself is just too bloody expensive.

Having said all of that, I don’t believe that the equipment you own is all that important – it’s what you do with it, and as long as you’re comfortable with your equipment, you’re on your way. It’s been said before, but it can’t harm to repeat it: A photographer with vision and a disposable camera can come back with better result that someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but carry the latest bells-and-whistles D-SLR…

What type of lighting situations do you enjoy most?

I really love working with natural lighting, but studio work can be a lot of fun as well – it all depends on what you’re trying to do. It’s important to experiment with different types of lighting.

The most important part is that, through experimentation, I’ve come up with a style that I’m comfortable with, but I also notice that my tastes and whims change a lot. I used to do a lot of landscapes, but haven’t taken a landscape photo for a long time. I had a phase of doing macro photography (which resulted in my book), but I have barely looked at a macro photograph since. Recently, I’ve had an interest in doing more portraiture work – a genre where I feel I still have a lot to learn – so perhaps that’ll be my next experiment into lighting: some studio lighting might well be my next investment!

What background do you have in photography?

I’m entirely self-taught, but I’ve done a lot of reading and experimenting to get the technical and creative skills that I feel I need. I was like that in school as well, however: Having a teacher drone on at me drove me bonkers, but if they somehow managed to spark an interest, I’d be on the internet or in the library, researching the topic well beyond I was supposed to.

I don’t really see any harm in being self-taught, as long as you’re creative, inquisitive and thorough.

If you could pick another career than photography, what would it be and why?

Heeh, interestingly, I haven’t worked as a photographer full-time for years. The past few years, I’ve worked in publishing as an editor, I worked in television for a while, but I’m now back to life as self-employed, working as a writer. I’m currently working another book about photography (here’s my first one)

So I guess, to answer your question, I do have another career, and I like running for Photocritic, of course, but it seems I haven’t quite got enough time to do all it takes to keep the hamster wheel spinning ’round here – nonetheless, it’s good fun!

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So, in an epic effort of internet crowd-sourcing, I want to be the first curator in the entire world who creates a truly international art exhibition: The International Exhibition, or TIE for short.

To participate in TIE, it’s really easy, go on Flickr, find a photograph you love (if you’re struggling, you haven’t been looking hard enough, but there are some suggestions below), print it out (or, even better, have it printed out using a service like Photobox in the UK or AdoramaPix in the US (thanks, @JohnMilleker) ), stick it on your wall, and take a photo of it. Then stick the photo on Flickr, with the tag ‘TheInternationalExhibition’. Then, if you want, stick a comment on this post :)

XAO by Håkan Dahlström, for TIE

Struggling to find a photo which would fit on your wall? Flickr’s Explore is usually full of wall-worthy photographs, or you can go look at the photos of all of your friends (or all of my friends, for that matter), or if you really want to enlarge my already unnecessarily buoyant ego, one of my own photos.

Let’s see what a big group of awesome photographers can come up with together, but I sense it might be pretty awesome.

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Well, good news! You are in the right place place to learn how to simply, cheaply, and quickly clean your DSLR and get back to the important part; taking photos.

Your goal is to remove dust (and possibly moisture) off the sensor. You want to do this as carefully and easily as you can. There are myriad people who are delighted to take your money off you to help you do this, so let’s start by picking some of the best:

Sensor Swab

‘Sensor Swab‘ is the preferred method and for a very good reason; it’s a mighty fine product which is recommended by quite a few of the camera manufacturers to boot. Sensor Swab is a wet solution which is applied to the sensor by a, well, swab.

For around $25 you can get yourself a kit and that will remove both wet and dry dust. It is 99.9% effective when done properly and even offers a guarantee in case of damage to the sensor – which is handy, because replacing a damaged sensor is filthy expensive. The downside is that it can’t be shipped by air and is illegal in some countries (due to containing methanol). If you’ve got a decent camera shop nearby, however, they probably stock some – go talk to your friendly neighbourhood lenspeddler to find out.

Brush

Here is the old fashion method. Offering multiple uses and a straight forward method the brush definitely has some advantages. Brushes generally use a method that utilizes static allowing the brush fibers to remove stubborn dust. A brush is also very transportable.

Down sides include the fact that the brush cannot be cleaned and can’t remove wet dust or moisture. A standard brush will cost about $25 while the ‘Brush Off‘ brand (which is more effective) will set you back about $50.

Blower

Using an air blower – like the Giottos Air Rocket – is what your manual will recommend, the reason for this is there is no contact required with the sensor, which reduces the risk of anything going wrong. Unfortunately the downside is that the blower is not that effective, and doesn’t actually remove the dust from the inside of your camera; it merely shuffles it about a bit. In addition, it will struggle to remove dust with a static charge and anything with moisture.

Despite its downsides, using an air blower is often the easiest thing to do when you’re in the field – it’s easy to transport, relatively cheap, and gets rid of the worst dust in a quick and capable way.

Time for a spring clean!

Every once and again, you need to clean your sensor properly; depends on how much you use your camera, but for me, it’s approximately every 2-3 months or so, a process which involves several of the products above. Here’s how to do it:

Charge the Battery – If your battery dies at any point this can be very bad news and step 2 explains why.

Open Shutter – This is different for all cameras but most have a ’sensor cleaning mode’ which will open the shutter and move the mirror aside so you can access the sensor for cleaning. If the battery dies during this phase will close and possible take the swab with it which will probably cause damage to the inside of your camera.

Blow out excess dust – Look for a dust free environment and begin blowing, this removes the big particles of dust. Never use compressed air in a ’spray can’ for this (it leaves a residue) – get one of the bellow-style blowers like the Giottos Air Rocket described earlier in this article. This is extremely important because if this isn’t done at a later stage you can be dragging particles around with the swab, causing scratches and more problems than you had before. (NOTE: Some people will suggest using a foot pump because your hands are free, DO NOT DO THIS. Reason being a foot pump has too much power and sits on the floor drawing in dust and dirt)

Take a look – Use a small torch/flashlight (the little single-LED torches are great for this) to spot exactly where there are dust particles on your sensor

Swab – Use as little swabbing liquid as you can while swabbing and apply with the pressure of the pen. Use one side of the swab for the liquid solution, and the other to wipe when complete – whatever you do, don’t touch the swab itself.

Do some test shots – the easiest way to do this is to take a photo of a blue sky or similar even, bright surface, and look at your image at 100% magnification on your computer. If you still see problems, it’s back to point 1 for a second try.

Now comes the trickiest bit; going back out there and taking shots so awesome that they’re worthy of your freshly cleaned imaging sensor. Good luck and have fun!

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All good and dandy, but recently something funny has happened – people seem to simply not need faster computers anymore. This is relevant to photographers, because there’s a parallel between computing and photography: Just like you eventually don’t need more megapixels in a camera (one group has gone as far as saying that 6mpx is all you need, and – with a few notable exceptions, I think I am inclined to agree), you eventually have all the speed you need from a computer.

This one became clear to me when I started looking into replacing my now-3-year-old MacBook. It’s a black one, with a dual-core 2Ghz processor. It started its life as a 1GB/120GB configuration, but I since upgraded it to 4GB/250GB (an upgrade you can do today for about £70/$100). You know what’s odd? If you look at the current-spec 13-inch unibody MacBook Pro, it’s got essentially the same spec: 2.26 Ghz / 2GB / 160GB… I think Apple have realised what the rest of the world realised, too: Computers are finally Good Enough.

Sure, there are always groups of people who will perennially have an insatiable hunger for more processor cores, more memory, and more storage space; serious gamers, video editors, and scientists spring to mind – but even for the power-users (I do count myself as one), we’re starting to hit a plateau where it’s perfectly okay to own a 3-year-old computer. Which just messes with my brain; when I first started getting into computers, the second you bought one, it was out of date. I remember the first time I plonked down a serious amount of money on a new computer (before then, I’d always had hand-me-downs or I’d bought second-hand computers) – it was a Dell, which had a Pentium III, 600 Mhz. I’m telling you, it was the cream-of-the-crop, one of the fastest computers you could buy. It had a whopping 1GB of memory, too, which was insanely expensive, and made it incredibly fast indeed. Six months later, I found myself upgrading several of its components, and six months after that, again. And again. And again.

So I’m no longer a serious gamer (or indeed, a gamer at all – I moved to the place where I live now, about four months ago, and my poor Xbox has never been out of its box), but I am a pretty serious photographer. I run the CS3 suite by Adobe, and I take all my photographs in RAW format. It’s not that long ago that editing RAW photos was a huge chore which would take bloody ages, but with 4GB of memory (which is a trivial upgrade, both in DIY-skills and in monetary investment) is of huge help.

The thing that dawned on me the other day is that no, you no longer need the cutting edge of computer equipment to play with the big boys: while I love the design of the new MacBook Pros, i’d be spending the best part of a grand without actually upgrading my kit all that much: I’d still have to buy extra RAM and harddrive space to make the computer faster than the one I’ve got now.

So what do you recommend

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re in a very good place for photographers when it comes to computers: You don’t need a new, or even a fast computer to be able to edit your photos at a professional level – and the longer this plateau stays around, the cheaper computers are going to get. Which, again, is good news.

Of course, the real reason I wrote this rambly-rant of a blog post is so I have something to point people to when they ask what kind of computer they need to buy to be able to edit their photos properly; my answer is simple: Even the cheapest Dell computer will do the trick: Right now, you can pick up a Dell Inspiron with a 2.6 GHz dual-core processor, 3GB of memory, a 20-inch widescreen monitor, 320 Gb harddrive, optical mouse and built-in card-readers for under 375 quid. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a lot of computer for not-a-lot of money.

Specifically, however, I’d recommend you make sure you have enough memory (2GB should be enough, 4GB is plenty), and a screen which you like to work on – bigger is better, I’d recommend 19-inch or bigger. An optical mouse makes precision-work a little easier (I know a lot of photographers who buy expensive gaming mice for increased precision, but I think that’s probably a bit overkill), and beyond that, a copy of Photoshop (which will cost about the same as the computer outlined above, but is a must-have for anyone who is serious about photography), and you’re done.

So Haje, what is your set-up, then?

Thought you’d never ask. I use a MacBook 2Ghz / 4GB / 250GB hooked up to a Samsung 23-inch monitor and a Logitech LX710 wireless keyboard and mouse. Not technically part of the computer set-up is a set of nice studio monitor speakers and a Pioneer amp to play tunes – but I can’t work without music (right this very second, for example, I’m listening to a spot of Gatas Parlament, a Norwegian hip-hop group – if you want to take your aural stalking to a higher level, look me up on Last.fm), so the music bit of all of this is completely essential.

But ultimately, personally, I’d be perfectly happy with any laptop with an Apple logo on it, manufactured in the past 3-4 years or so.

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One of my long-time readers, Brigitte, told me her approach to nude photography; She doesn’t share her photos with anyone, but decided to take them for her own sake. It made me think; I know that my blog is quite strongly in favour in sharing all your photos with the whole world, but perhaps that misses a little bit of the point; Who are we, in fact taking photos for? Anyway – that’s a topic for another post… Today, it’s Brigitte’s turn…

Nude in front of (and behind) the lens

A few days ago I was reading articles on nude photography… and these took me down memory lane. When I was pregnant for the second time, I used to take a thorough look at myself everyday in the mirror and marvel at the way my body had changed. There is an immense softness in a pregnant woman’s curves which I find very appealing, and I knew from my first pregnancy that once the baby is born, it’s easy to forget the way you looked before.

This time, I very much wanted to be able to remember my whole life the way my body was right before I gave birth. Of course, I had lots of pictures taken by my family and friends, but it felt like cheating, by hiding some of the curves while emphasizing others. Most were not very becoming, either… these pictures were taken on the fly, showing me in whatever position I had deemed comfortable at the time, and I felt it was really unfair. To be totally honest, I’m pretty sure I’ve torn and thrown away the vast majority of these!

Trusting others vs trusting yourself

I know lots of people can undress in front of a photographer they trust (Demi Moore, to name but one!), but I simply felt I could never do that, underwear or not, nine months pregnant or not. I did not trust anybody else’s look but mine on my body to take these pictures, not even my husband’s (OK, he’s a poor photographer anyway!), and I realized I would have to be both the photographer and the model.

I selected a plain white wall with a wooden door as the background for my pictures, no direct sunlight but no artificial light either, and set-up my Canon EOS 20D on a tripod. I made the necessary adjustments in terms of sensibility and focus, selected the B&W mode, and used the self-timer to take the pictures. Between each shot I practiced in front of a full length mirror… I wanted to be able to share these pictures with my children when they grow up, so I was determined to be as beautiful as possible (of course!), and if sensuality was permitted, I did not want these pictures to turn out erotic.

And that’s the best part. I know I may sound like a control freak, but I was the one who wanted these pictures, and I greatly appreciate the fact that I got to do them myself, without being subjected to anyone’s influence. In the end, all the decisions were mine, and if I had not liked the result, I could just have discarded all the pictures without any hesitations, regrets, or fear to offend the photographer.

Find out more!

Brigitte is a 34-year-old French lady who works as a translator and editor. You can find Brigitte’s blog on tequilas-secrets.com, with her photos in the, er, photos category. If you’re of the Twittering kind, she can be found on @Brigitte_Ba, as well.

The photos in this post are from iStockPhoto

Copyright Information

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

There’s a lot of things that go into creating your own book (I should know, I’ve helped friends and clients self-publish things in the past, and I’ve been published with my own stuff) – but the interesting thing is that a lot of the things that take time aren’t the things you’d think…

I managed to talk Randy into writing a guest article for me here on Photocritic, explaining how his book came about, and what you should do if you want your photos to end up as a coffee-table book yourself.

The beginning

I was in a rut. No, that’s too cliche. I was between myself… yeah, that’s pretty accurate. My creative needs were being stifled by day-to-day work as a software engineer. On top of that, I was doing more of the same freelancing and, I have to tell you, there’s only so much left brain activity I can take. My right brain was screaming “There must be something more!” and there was. Is? Whatever.

Dave Browne, a friend of mine, former co-worker and fellow photographer, recently came back from an 18 month trip around the world. Upon his return we started having coffee once a week when schedules permitted. It would be melodramatic to say this changed my life, but it definitely put things in perspective. Call it a shove in the right direction.

Discussing photography with him is always enlightening, more for me than he, I think. He told me he was working on a book that he was going to publish himself. I had been playing with the very same idea for months but never found the time nor motivation, until he brought his book the next time we met.

It was gorgeous! The photos were taken on his trip with a Diana (that’s a plastic camera you pay real camera prices for through Lomo). The paper and finish were top notch, the design and layout were complimentary and it truly equalled traditionally published books.

Cylinder Head by Randy Kruzan on Flickr

That was enough motivation, on the way home that night I decided to stop stalling. First I had to wrap up open freelance projects and stop taking more. Then I could get to work on my book. A couple of weeks later I was free(er).

After seeing Dave’s book, I realized mine could be better than I had been thinking about. Knowing I would never be good enough for myself (too critical), I asked him if he would help out with my book. He agreed and now I had an editor as well as someone to handle design and guide me through layout.

The middle

My theme was to be loss and abandonment, things left behind. I had several dozen photos fitting this theme taken over the last 4 years. Some black and white, some color and taken with two different cameras. Geographically they were split between Washington State and Illinois. Overall a nice smattering of styles, composition and colors.

I wanted a landscape oriented book with full bleed, so I cleared out any photos in portrait orientation. Next to go were any with focus or other technical problems. Eventually it filtered down to 32 photos. Now I could send them to Dave and get the editing and layout process underway. This is where it really pays to have someone you can collaborate with. Another eye, unbiased and critical, is invaluable.

We whittled those 32 photos down further. Some were just too bland, too flat. Others were great pictures but against the bulk of the remaining lot, didn’t fit anymore. Here I learned another lesson, to be flexible, to change direction if that’s where the photos are leading you.

In my case, the theme of abandonment and loss had transformed into something a little different. The majority of photos I started out with were structures that were either abandoned or left to fall apart, but this didn’t stand out right away until we started cutting shots. The stack I was left with wasn’t saying loss any longer, it was saying something about persistence in the face of ruin. Yeah, these things were left alone or abandoned or simply neglected, but looking at them I could see that they were also surviving.

Mill Series #6 by Randy Kruzan on Flickr

By the end of a few rounds of this, I was down to less than 14 pictures. With a revised theme in mind and to add more bulk (you’ll see why that’s funny later), I set out to shoot some new photos, and reshoot some I had liked originally but rejected for technical reasons. While I did this, Dave began working on my layout and design. Out of another 50 or so new pics, 12 made my first cut. 7 were finally selected and sent to Dave, who approved. My count was now up to 21 and he had picked one for the cover. It wasn’t the one I had picked but after the title was added, I capitulated. It looked right. Dave is always right, ask him.

The end

All that was left was for me to write up the copy for my title and copyright page and an introduction, then it was up to him to tie it all together. We were almost done.

Almost. (Since you’ve already been reading this in a little voice in your head, go ahead and insert snickering laughter here)

In the last few weeks before we finished, I waffled on the title. Nothing I was coming up with fit, and every change meant a revision to part of the intro. If that wasn’t bad enough, I had second thoughts about some of the images. I wanted to pull some, add others. I realized I was still fighting for the old theme and kept trying to find ways to work that in somehow. That realization (and Dave telling me to leave it alone) was enough to get me over the last little hurdle and just give in to it. The final book is about things at the end of their useful lives, their defiance in the face of decomposition and neglect. I chose “finis” which is the temporal end. I subtitled it “Exploring the end”, revised my into copy and we were done.

He delivered, unintentionally, the final assets on my birthday and two days later my book was in manufacture. I used the same company he did, Viovio, since I had already seen the quality first hand. Nine days later I had the first print in my hands, and I have to say, I love it. With 21 images and the copy pages, it only comes to 12 paper pages! I laughed out loud when I opened the box and saw that. It didn’t occur to me during production that I was only going to have a 12 page book. It doesn’t matter. Dave did a great job, I am really happy with the pics and I think it’s a neat little book. Literally.

That’s my story about how a fool with a camera became a fool with a book.

How to self-publish

Now let’s talk about self publishing. What it is, why you should do it and what you stand to gain.

The road to publication

We’re photographers. As photographers we speak to the world through images we share. It’s natural to want to share those with as wide an audience as we can, and often dream of having our work recognized. The road to recognition for most of us is long, and unfortunately, sparsely populated. Oh, and, that road ends in a cul-de-sac, which is really just a fancy dead end, albeit one with a turn around. For those of us on this road, our turn around is self publishing.

Mill Series #5 by Randy Kruzan on Flickr

First, a little clarification. When I say self publish, I am not talking about the photo books you can have made at Shutterfly and similar services. For those, you pick a template, add pics and captions, pick your binding, and you’re done. Those are fine for keepsakes, and I’ve made them for birthdays and such, but they’re not the same caliber as an honest-to-goodness book.

What we’re talking about here is a product that when you’re done you can be proud of and looks professional.

So… What is self publishing?

Put simply, self publishing is paying to have your work published.

Traditionally, a publisher pays you to write or put together a book of your work. You get some portion of sales from the book and they handle the rest. Maybe it works out and you get another book deal and repeat the process.

When you publish your own work, you get to have all the fun. You pick the content. You come up with the design and layout, and edit it yourself. Promotions? Marketing? All you, baby! It can be a lot of work, and often is. Maybe it even SHOULD be! The sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of finally getting your first copy in hand after all of that work is worth it.

Will it make me famous?

Hmm. Stranger things have happened! Look at that guy Jared from the Subway commercials. At the very least, it can allow more people to enjoy your work and who knows what that can lead to.

Fine. Will it make me rich?

Probably not. I know that’s not what you want to hear, and I don’t want to crush any hopes you might have, it’s just not very likely. Like any other adventure, you’ll get out of it what you put in. You might make some money. For me, if I sell one copy more than I bought, I’ll be stoked. If I make enough money from self publishing books to buy a new prime or two, man, I’ll be on cloud nine.

Then why self publish?

Unless you already have a book deal, or are pursuing one and are extraordinarily lucky, incredibly persistent or some combination of those things, self publishing is the perfect way to share your work with the public NOW. Indeed, it may be the only way you’d ever get a book published, but that’s fine! You don’t need to be famous and your work doesn’t have to be well known to publish yourself. You might be a virtual nobody (case in point, myself), but a nobody with a book (dude, me again). If nothing else, it’s an exercise to see if you can do it.

Just remember… Always look on the bright side of life

I had this conversation with my friend and editor, Dave Browne, where I told him I didn’t have any illusions about doing this book. I don’t expect to become famous or land on some best seller’s list, but it would be nice to sell a few. He put it this way: “Buy two books. Keep one for yourself. If you sell two in a year, your demand will have outstripped supply!” Sure, it’s only two books, a minor detail, but your sales will have doubled in your first year.

Benefits of self-publishing

Do a little searching on the Internet for folks who self publish and you’ll find artists, authors, comic book artists and a whole host of others who have either had publishing contracts in the past or were pursuing them and were unhappy about how little control they had as new authors.

SP is a different world: yours.

You have complete creative control. What’s on the cover, how the book is laid out, what images and text go where, it’s all under your control.

You market or promote as much or as little as you want. Self publishing is perfect for photographers who run their own websites or blogs or have an online presence where they can advertise and promote their books.

You don’t have to hold inventory. Because self publishing is typically print on-demand, nobody actually holds your book in inventory.

You only pay manufacture on the copies you want to buy. If you want one copy of your book or twenty, you only pay manufacture on those copies. When someone else buys your book, they pay manufacture as part of the total cost.

You don’t have to handle sales and fulfillment. Unless you’re buying copies to hold onto and sell yourself, the printing company you’re using will handle taking money and shipping the books out to people who buy it.

You can make money on sales. Blurb is one company that allows you to set your own prices on your books at no extra charge. For companies that allow you to do this, there is a base rate (the price of manufacture) and you set your sale price, the difference between the two is yours.

You hold all the rights. The rights to your work are yours alone. Unless the company you’re dealing with has some clause to the contrary, you are the sole rights holder. If you find that’s not the case when shopping around, find someone else.

How to self publish

Or: ‘How I made self publishing made for you, without any guarantees that the same will work for you, but you could do a lot worse than starting here anyway’

Do you really want to do this? It might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s the first question you should ask yourself. There will be at least some monetary expense and of course the cost of your time. If you get a friend to help like I did, you should consider their time as well. Are they up for it? Start here. If you can’t commit, don’t start. Wait until you’re ready.

What’s it about? Do you want to tell a story with your photos like a photo essay? Or is it many stories? Is it just a portfolio? Is there a common theme it should have? Is it mixed photo and text, for example, like a guide book? You can always change this as the project progresses, but you should start out with a solid idea and build on it.

Know your choices, know the requirements – Shop around the service you’re going to use (or for that matter, shop around FOR services if you haven’t yet, see below). Do they have a product that matches your ideal book size and layout? What, if any, are the minimum page count requirements? Do you have images big enough for that size book? (I’ve included a link to a pixel to print size calculator at the end)

If you’re not using a service-provided tool (Blurb has an excellent book builder) then chances are high your final work will need to be a PDF, and any fonts you use will need to be embedded in the PDF. Check their publishing guidelines and know what you need to conform to in your final layout.

Will it bleed? – This is another point to consider before you actually start gathering up your prospects. If you’re going to do a full bleed book, where the image runs to the edges of the page without a border, then it’s probably best to choose photos that are all of the same orientation. No-bleed pages, or even multiple images per page, is less restrictive.

Gather, review, cull, repeat – Find all of the photos you think might work for your book. Digital is the way to go here, if your pics aren’t digitized already they’re going to have to be for printing, so really just do this now. If you have a favorite photo app with a workflow you’re used to, great- go with it. If not, the simplest thing to do is just copy (not move) all of the prospective images to a folder called “My Awesome Book”. For each round of review, make a new folder and only copy those images that make the cut into it. It’s draconian but when you have to dig up something from an earlier revision, you’ll know where it is.

Review your choices. Do they match what your book is about? Are there technical flaws you don’t like (and don’t want to or can’t fix)? Do some just not feel right? You’re never destroying pictures by excluding them, you should be as critical as you want here.

When you’re done reviewing and have made your choices for the next round, open them all up so you can view them in a batch. How does it look? Are you short of meeting the minimum page count? Add if you need to.

Repeat this process until you feel you’re at that point where they’re all good, then sleep on it and review again once more. If it’s still OK, then you have your final set.

Copy editing – Write all of your copy in a simple text editor. You’re not going to format your text until you’re in the layout stage, so simple text works well. It makes it easier to work with.

Regardless of how much text your book has, it’s a good idea to have it copy edited. Even if it’s simply asking your most grammatically advanced friend to review it, get a second set of eyes on it. Proof read. Spell check. Grammar check. Send me a check. Ahh, gotcha ;)

Cover yourself – You can’t judge a book by it’s cover… yeah, yeah, yeah, we do it anyway. Choose a legible font, no matter how cool the squiggly one you found looks. If your book is about puppies, don’t put a truck on it. Unless the puppies are stealing it. That would be awesome.

I prefer simple, but it’s your book. Choose a picture that represents the book.

Final touches – If the publishing service you went with doesn’t automatically build the copyright and title pages, spend a little time to see how those are laid out. I like to mirror the copy (font, placements and sizes) from the cover on the title page. Then the copy page, then the intro. Spend some time getting it right, good fit and finish is one of the things that sets a good self published book apart from the rest.

Layout and conversion – All of the SP services have different guides, sizes and requirements. This is why you should figure out ahead of time what the print guidelines are. Decent services will provide you templates to assist in the layout. In Design or similar publishing and layout software experience pays off here, my friends.

If you need to treat your copy in fancy ways, do it in this stage. Fonts, colors, leading, etc.

Most of the services I looked at all accept PDFs of at least the inner contents and a separate PDF for the cover. Fonts usually have to be embedded in the PDF. Viovio lets you do one PDF for the front cover and another for the back. If you’re not using tools (or using a SP service that doesn’t have tools) then PDF is the only way to go. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, follow their guidelines and requirements.

A simpler alternative – Layout can suck. It can be confusing and a pain. If it’s not your cup of tea, find a SP service that has a book builder tool. As of this writing, both Viovio and Blurb have such a tool available. These tools give you varying degrees of control over colors, styles, fonts, picture layouts and so on and so forth. If you’re going it alone and don’t have In Design skills, this may be your best bet. Don’t fear it. Embrace it.

And finally a word on rights – To nutshell it: If it’s not yours, don’t print it.

You must own or hold the rights to everything you publish in your book, or get written or other specified permission from the rights holder in order to use their materials. There are all kinds of details and legalities surrounding this, but that’s the high level and if you’re in doubt, don’t use it.

Not all publishers are equal

When you’re shopping for a publisher keep these things in mind: size, cost, quality and the ability sell your book.

Product types – Do they have a book that matches your desired size and layout (portrait, landscape or square)? It’s also a good idea to look at the minimum page requirements. For some products you simply might not meet the final page count.

Costs and fees – How much are they charging you for your book size? Is it comparable to other publishers? What about retailing fees- are there any? Viovio, for example, will only let you set your own price and collect money on sales of your book if you pay for a $35/year membership. Other companies might not charge a fee, but may be limiting in some other factor like available sizes.

Print and paper quality – Before you settle on a publisher, be sure to read reviews from people who have used them. Solicit opinions from friends and colleagues. It’s also a good idea, if you can afford it, to print a sample book from a company you’re considering. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the idea is just to get it in your hands where you can judge the print and paper quality yourself.

Retailing – If your goal is to market your book and make money from sales, you should also look for the ability to retail your book through the publisher unless you’re planning on buying inventory to hold and sell yourself.

Popular doesn’t always mean great – Read reviews from other SP authors on the services you’re considering using. How do people feel about the final result? Was their system easy to use and navigate? Were there gotchas along the way?

To ISBN or not to ISBN, that is the question…

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It’s a 10 or 13 digit code that uniquely identifies your book from every other book in the world. This is supposed to make cataloging easier or faster or some such thing.

Amazon’s CreateSpace is one of the SP services that will assign your book an ISBN if you don’t have one already, because your book will be sold through amazon.com.

Dead Lift by Randy Kruzan on Flickr (and also the cover of his book; ‘Finis’)

If you’re not planning on selling your SP book through a wholesaler, bookstore or other retailer, you probably don’t need an ISBN at this time. If you are contacted by a publisher who wants to publish and distribute your book, they will handle ISBN assignment at that point because part of the ISBN is the publisher code.

Get help, man – If you’re serious about self publishing your work and don’t have the skills (or the discipline) to manage the creation of your book, and don’t know someone who does, you’re in luck. Sort of. You just have to pay for it.

Some companies, like Blurb and BookSurge, offer professional help with editing, layout, design and/or final preflight. You can even buy a professional review for your book.

Making it better through collaboration – I honestly believe that my own book would not be half what it turned out to be if it weren’t for my friend who handled editing duties. Obviously if I felt he wasn’t up to the task I wouldn’t have asked him, so keep that in mind if you approach your friends or colleagues.

Once you’ve acquired help, figure out who is doing what. Better yet, you should have an idea of what you need help with before you go asking. If they’re only agreeing to do cover design, for example, you might not want to push book layout on them as well. If they’ve agreed to copy edit, let them. Don’t assign work and take it away.

Keep it fun, and be open to criticism and feedback. It is your book, but if you’re asking advice, at least hear it with an open mind.

Getting them to commit to your project is just as important as you making sure you respect their time and effort. You both have to be on the same page. (Booooooo, bad pun, I know)

Closing – The subject of self publishing could really be turned into a book itself, and I hope that I’ve been helpful here in this space sharing my own SP story and giving some information and advice.

Thanks very much to Haje for the invitation to guest write on Photocritic.org, it was a much needed break from the 140 character world of twitter.

About the author

Randy Kruzan is a photographer and author well disguised as a software engineer. He lives near Seabeck, Washington with his awesome family. Tweet him up @randykruzan on twitter or on the Internet at randykruzan.com

Randy Kruzan’s book can be purchased from Viovio

More resources

Publishing and print on-demand services

Blurb – blurb.com

Viovio – viovio.com

Other resources

Amazon’s self publish and print on demand – createspace.com

Amazon’s assisted publishing – booksurge.com

Pixel to print size calculator at ScanTips.com – scantips.com/calc.html

Copyright Information

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

It’s an odd little project, which I came up with when I was hideously drunk one night – like all great ideas, in other words, and I just sort of continued doing it. Of course, it’s a lot more fun if it’s a collaborative project, so I hereby invite you to join in the slightly odd fun…

So, what is this all about?

I could spin you a line about how the one thing that all humans have in common is the need to relieve themselves, and how that’s a beautiful thing. Of course, it’d be a complete load of shite (if you’ll forgive my contextually-appropriate french). Thing is, I don’t have any idea why I’m running this project – I just know I’m having fun doing something that’s so completely and utterly pointless that it becomes awesome.

Show me some examples!

Well of course I will:

Train

Boeing 777 somewhere over Russia

Locked with a padlock!

London Paddington

Portmellon, Cornwall

The no-lock lock in a pub in Bath

Puzzlewood in Forest of Dean

How can I get involved?

First off, you may wish to join the Locks on Toilets group on Flickr – there’s currently nearly 200 entries there, but there’s always space for more! In the group, look at some of the submissions, and submit your own if you fancy it. The group will accept any and all submissions, but it’s cool if you, in the title, add the name and place of the establishment, and it’s cooler than a penguin’s plums if you also geo-tag the photos, so I can eventually do a mash-up plotting all the photos on a map.

Now, I can totally understand if you can’t be bothered using your main pride-and-joy flickr account to do this – I don’t do that either. My main account on Flickr – Photocritic – I keep for stuff I’m actually proud of in some capacity, and I use my alternate account – isharq for stuff which I’m not too fussed about, including this account, so if you fancy it, you can set up a second account.

Alternatively, feel free to use my alternate account to upload your images – you can do that automatically by e-mailing photographs to lot@kamps.org (‘LOT’ of course being short for Locks on Toilets). What’ll happen when you send pictures there, is that they’ll be added to a queue for approval (just so you don’t end up posting any porn in my name – that’d be embarrassing), and every now and again I’ll sweep through to tag and publish them to the flickr stream and the LoT Flickr group. The way I do it is that I’ve got that e-mail address saved as a contact on my iPhone, and whenever I take a photo, I just e-mail it off right away.

Go on, it’s all just a bit of fun!

Tell me about your nutty projects

Have you got any crazy ideas / projects / things you do when you think photography is in danger of getting just a little bit too serious? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear about ‘em!

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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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

I still visit Earthshots frequently, and if you’re a photographer who hopes to improve your work and your eye for a good photo, you could do a whole lot worse than doing the same. Why? Well, I’ve 10 excellent reasons (or 10,000, if we are going to agree that each photo is worth a thousand words) for you right here… That’s right, out of the past 1,000 day’s worth of photos, we’ve picked the 1% we think are the most amazing, the funniest, and the ones we think will make you reach for your camera and go “Hells bells, time I took some photos this good”.

Oh, and before you scroll down, you might want to put a pillow on your desk, otherwise you might get injured when your jaw smacks open against it…

10 of the best from the first 1000 days

Descending Mt Rainier by Joel Schenk

Will says: I really love this image! It captures the spirit of adventure and the solitude of the climber. Looking out over the sea of beautiful white clouds, it is easy to imagine that heaven might look a little like this!

Haje says: There is something really awesome about photographs depicting an epic battle between man and natur – the clouds threatening to engulf them where they stand, plus the hint of colour along the horizon – a fantastic capture. Not so sure if it’s about solitude though; someone was there to take the photo after all :-)

Turtle by Thomas Vignaud »

Will says: This was one of the most popular Earth Shots winners ever and it is easy to see why; the jaunty angle, the expression of the turtle, the vibrant colours and the palm in the corner ñ all the elements come together to create a wonderfully engaging and striking animal portrait.

Haje says: Wow. Just wow. I have no idea if this is a HDR shot, if this is even a real turtle, or what in the world is going on here, but one thing’s for sure: it’s a stunning photograph. Such a truly fantastic detail and clarity, coupled with great colours and fantastic framing… An obvious winner

Salmon Netting by Fiona Halliday »

Will says: The composition of this image breaks all the rules… but that’s why I like it! With two thirds of the frame filled by tumultuous, black water, the viewer becomes totally immersed in this Scottish salmon farmer’s unforgiving world.

Haje says: This photograph is purely and exclusively about the action: The water streaming against him, the fish fighting in the net, the quick-flowing water. He’s wearing a hat, so it’s easy to understand it’s cold, and you can just see the wet, cold rawness on his hands – an ususual framing, that’s for sure, but I’m feeling the struggle, here. Great stuff.

In The Beginning by Stephen Oachs »

Will says: This is an incredibly atmospheric image, reminiscent of the dawn of time. The abstract shapes, blurred spewing water and wonderful dawn light all contribute to the primordial, otherworldly sense of place.

Haje says: I have no idea what is going on here – but it looks as if someone broke into China Mieville’s world, and took some photos while they were there. It happens quite rarely that you’re able to capture pure magic, but I think that might very well be what you’re looking at here, folks.

Fields of Gold by Allard Schager »

Will says: This is possibly the most vibrant photo ever to have appeared on Earth Shots! The strong colours and straight lines are very sticking and the people in the background give you a great appreciation for the scale of this incredible Dutch tulip field.

Haje says: I think the people in the background are what really make this photo – I’ve seen these tulip fields before, and they’re stunning, but notoriously difficult to photograph in such a way that you get a feeling for what you’re looking at – the people add a little bit of a break from the monotony of colour – and it’s bloody awesome to boot.

Highway to Heaven by Santi Banon »

Will says: This is another image that is reminiscent of heaven (assuming there are cars in heaven)! The warm light, flowing clouds and strong composition make this a beautiful and very unusual image.

Haje says: This is just fantastic – the light, the clouds, the mountains; the way the clouds seem to be welling up against the motorway without actually breaching across it in the foreground, while completely engulfing it in clouds and light towards the end. The title might be called ‘highway to heaven’, but if Tolkien had written Lord of the Rings set in the modern age, that’s what I envision the highway to Mordor to look like.

Taj Mahal by Thamer Al-Tassan »

Will says: As travel photos go, this is a pretty good one; we have all seen a million photographs of the Taj Mahal so it is quite an achievement to get a picture that makes you go wow! There are several elements that come together to make this image so good – the textures accentuated by the choice of black & white, the different shapes all mirroring each other and the lonely figure in the doorway.

Haje says: The Taj is a very, very stressful place to visit, and it happens incredibly rarely that you see it devoid of ten billion tourists; it’s easy to forget that it’s a spiritual place to many, and the person sitting here, seemingly meditating on its beauty is a gorgeous reminder of how that is still the case. I love the contrasts, the framing, and its subtlety.

Cold Morning by Kevin McNeal »

Will says: The expanse of ice, the blue tones and jagged mountains in the distance are so cold they almost make you want to shiver! However, it is the luminous ice-fissure in the foreground that makes this image so interesting and striking.

Haje says: This is such a contrast-rich photo that I scarcely know where to begin – it’s the peaceful skies vs the dramatic ice. The cold tones of the blues and whites at the bottom vs the warm reds and yellows and pinks of the sky. The rounded shapes of the ice vs the pointy mountains. Fab.

Bee-Eaters by Edri Shimon »

Will says: We see many bird images submitted to Earth Shots but this one really stands out from the crowd. It is not just that these bee-eaters are ridiculously colourful, it is their poses and expressions that make this photograph so engaging and comical!

Haje says:This photo would make for a great entry for a caption competition: The dude on the left saying something outrageous, whilst the fellow on the right goes ‘well, I don’t really know, my good man’. I love the diagonal composition, the strong colours, and the hazy background which contrasts so well with the action in the foreground. Great stuff.

Climbing During Sunset by Lukasz Warzecha »

Will says: I have saved one of my all time favourites for last… where do you even start with this image?! The sense of isolation, scale and drama – it really is jaw-dropping!

Haje says: … (what can I possibly add to this?)

Go on, you know you want to…

For more fantastic images of our planet, check out the current photo of the day or have a look through the EarthShots.org archive.

This post was co-written by Will Burrard-Lucas – checkout his blog or follow him on twitter.

All photographs are strictly © their respective owners, and are used here by permission of Earthshots.

Copyright Information

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209

Apart from making me super-famous (which is, believe it or not, not my chief objective with this project), getting into the rhythm of taking at least one self-portrait every week is great practice.

But why should you bother with self portraits, and why am I so strongly in favour of ‘em? Read on, fellow shutter-soldier, for my 10 tips to better self portraits, along with the whats, whens and wherefores of onanistic photography fun.

Why bother with self-portraits?

Inspiration hits at the strangest of times – sometimes, all it takes is to see the light fall in a special way, a reflection, or just the sudden, uncontrollable urge to hear that sweet, sweet mechanical noise of the shutter going “kerr-chunk” (or “…” if you’re one of those smug, whisper-quiet Leica rangefinder owners). There’s nothing quite as annoying as not having a willing accomplice around to help you fulfill your photographic ideas – so perhaps you should turn to the only model you’re guaranteed to have around at any time: yourself!

Self portraiture is a tried-and-tested tradition among snappers and MySpace-camwhores alike; but it’s actually an incredibly useful exercise for photographers: Directing models is difficult enough as it is (unless you’re working with particularly talented models, but that’s a different post altogether), and the only person who is guaranteed to be as patient as you when you’re fiddling with lighting is yourself.

So; why not make it a habit to force yourself to take a self-portrait at least every week? It’s an interesting and frequently illuminating thing to do; how often do you get a chance to think about how you would like to project yourself to the world, who you really are, and how you’d like the world to see you?

10 Top Tips for better self portraits

1 - If you’re taking photos in a studio, use a mannequin for light testing: Much easier than guesstimating!

2 - Think about your motivation and emotions: Blankly staring at the camera rarely gets good results. Be silly, don’t be afraid to over-act. The worst that can happen is that you fill up your memory card with useless photos; but you might also find yourself with a proper gold-nugget of a self portrait.

3 - If you’ve got a remote trigger, that’s usually a better and more controllable than trying to use the self-timer.

4 - If you can, hook up your camera directly to your computer (or, for extra-fancy bonus points, your TV) so you can see your pictures come up as you take ‘em. It’s a lot easier to iterate and to make gradual improvements to your photos that way.

5 - Use a tripod. Seriously. While it’s possible to get good photos while you’re hanging on to your camera at arms-length, it’s a lot easier if you’ve got the freedom to move around a bit.

6 - Focussing is easier if you use a smaller aperture; My favourite lens at the moment is the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, (hence the abundance of photos taken with it on Flickr, I suppose) but I’d probably not use it wide-open when taking self portraits; It’s tricky enough to get the focus right when you’re behind the camera – when you’re on the wrong side of the lens, having a slightly deeper DOF is a lot easier!

7 - Don’t be afraid to do a bit of photoshop jiggery pokery – you can do a lot of cool stuff by ensuring you’re in the photo multiple times, for example. Here’s how – and the Self-Kiss gallery on Trendhunter has some wicked ideas :)

8 - Use a mirror! It seems so obvious, but how to use mirrors is important, too – take it down from the wall, and experiment! Here’s a couple of examples to get you started: ValpoHB, Could it be a mirror on the floor?, Reflection of Myself, Alive and Her Reflection.

9 - Use props! Are you a dad and a rocker? Bring your kid and your guitar. Are you a photographer? Add camera gear. Painter? Paint. Poet? Words. Make-up artist? Guess… You get the idea.

10 - Have fun with it. Be sexy. Be yourself. Be awesome. Be different. Be creative. Whatever you do, have fun with it. That’s part of the point, after all.

BONUS TIP: Finally, a controversial tip which not everyone will agree with: If you set up the shot and you decide on the lighting and camera position and what you are doing, but get someone else to push the shutter, it’s still a self portrait (the other person is basically acting as your remote control) – so don’t be shy about asking for some help with your self-portraits. As Scott suggested: “I let my young daughter have the shutter release – means it stays random and I’m relaxed!” – brilliant idea!

(thanks to @rchristopher, @netlenka, @markbrosnan78, @scottmliddell and @LaPetiteMort for input and tips above)

Show it off!

The best thing to do with self-portraits is to get them out there – sure, they’re great for learning, and good fun to take ‘em, but as a side-effect, you get some bloody great photographs of yourself, so why not just flaunt it ‘cos you’ve got it?

Post your best self-portraits to Flickr (remember to tag them with ‘Self Portrait’ so people can find’em more easily), update your FaceBook profile picture, or post to your blog with the details of your photo.

Then, if you’re one of these Twitterati-type people, post a link to your photo on Twitter using the #selfportraitfriday hash-tag – this allows other Twitter users to easily find other self portraits; a great way to get to know the people you’re following better, and to get a load of inspiration for your next batch of self-portraits. Oh, and it’s sort of cool to be part of something like that, don’t you think?

It’s example-o-clock!

The past few days, I’ve been gathering a wide variety of really random examples of self-portraits. If you’re stuck for ideas… You could do a lot worse than trying to emulate some of these ;-)

Week Four by LPM on Flickr (@LaPetiteMort)

133 of 365 by Andy C on Flickr (@andyctwit).

Hatman By Roger the Dodger on Flickr (@rogermcnally)

Advent Calendar: Day 24 by The Giant Vermin on Flickr (the rest of his 356 set is also phenomenal – if not always SFW)

Untitled by kukkurovaca on Flickr (@kukkurovaca)

Selfportrait by netlenka on Flickr (@netlenka)

Just Me by HilaryQuinn on Flickr (@proximowebs)

Dual Umbrellas by Baggage494 on Flickr (@baggage494)

Film Noir 3 by Taurec on Flickr (@taurec)

We are Cats by CiaoChessa on Flickr (@CiaoChessa)

Geiranger, Norway, by Will Burrard-Lucas on Flickr (@willbl)

The Scotsman by Greg Easton on Flickr (@GregEaston)

The Teacher Needs Two Glasses of Wine by Jess on Flickr (@veraciousjess) – see also the rest of her 365 day favourites, there are some really good photos in there!

1st self portrait by Mark Brosnan on Flickr (@markbrosnan78)

120 / 356 by John on Flickr

And finally, a self-portrait by, well, me. With my lovely Kawasaki Versys motorcycle, half-way on my recent 3,500-mile motorbike trip around Scandinavia

Finally, there are a few photographers who’ve been running some pretty awesome projects dealing exclusively with self portraits – the Self By Christy Marie (@ChristyMarie
) website is an excellent example, but quite a few people are doing ‘364 projects’ as well – one photo a day for some, one self-portrait a day for others – a quick search for 365 on Flickr throws up loads of interesting results. Happy browsing!

Copyright Information

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. pcrss31283940 / 20100209