Pixiq

Facebook: Photo sharing and premium accounts

hajejan@kamps.org — Sat, 26 May 2012 22:41:00 +0000

The IPO is only one of the many things that are changing rapidly on Facebook. People are starting to point out that there's a huge problem at the very core of Facebook: It's an ad-driven site. And like all ad-driven sites, it has an enormous problem: People are so ridiculously blind to online advertising, that even with the incredible possibilities of putting your adverts right in front of the people who would, in theory, be interested in them, you're barking up the wrong tree. Online advertising, quite simply, is working less and less, and eventually the advertisers are going to realise this, and take their advertising spend and using it differently.

Facebook knows this. They are run by clever people, and post-IPO Facebook has plenty of money to hire more clever people. They've seen this one coming for a long time. And they're nearly ready with their response.

Premium accounts & photo sharing

In parallel with the bottom falling out of the advertising market, there are a few sites that are positively thriving; and many of them are photo- and video related. Vimeo, Flickr and 500px have all gone the free-then-premium-account route, and are making quite a lot of money in the process.

So, premium memberships are one of the potentially incredibly lucrative things that Facebook could offer - but what can they offer, that people haven't yet been used to getting for free?

The core service of Facebook will always remain free: Status updates, events and invitations, and the ever-embarrassing stream of breakups and social drama will continue as it has.

Making sense of Instagram

The big shift is what has been starting to show up on Facebook in other avenues: That change will be premium accounts, and it's going to happen within the end of the year.

The brand new Facebook Camera and the recent Instagram acquisition simply don't make any sense in the larger context of Facebook... Unless there is also another change coming.

Instagram, especially, is one of the apps that has attracted a very large user base of mostly casual photographers. Not only that; but casual photographers who are willing to spend money. A perfect place to start building the brand new service, in other words.

Facebook, with only minor changes to their platform, will be a huge competitor to the Vimeo, Flickr and 500px platforms of the worlds; perhaps not for high-end photographers, but certainly for serious amateurs and semi-professionals who want a solid platform to show off their photography.

The benefit is obvious: When Facebook makes this leap, photographers and video-makers no longer have to invite their audiences to a separate site to view their work: You could simply invite your friends directly, from within the familiar walled garden that is Facebook.

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My first adventure in timelapse photography

hajejan@kamps.org — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:52:00 +0000

I love experimenting with photography, but I've never really had much of a chance to play with timelapses until I started working with the Triggertrap.

So, in the process of testing it all, I did a load of timelapses, and I figured that (since we've now finally launched our iPhone version) it was time to show off some of my experiments as well.

This one is a work in progress, as I haven't quite finished all the balancing, and some of the cuts aren't quite where I'd like them... I also need to fix some of the flicker... But I'm rather proud of it as a first attempt!

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Choosing your first dSLR camera

hajejan@kamps.org — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 01:50:00 +0000

Whenever a new excuse for buying stuff (Christmas? Birthdays?) rolls around, the retailers are rubbing their money-grabbing little paws in glee, in anticipation of making a killing over the holiday seasons. Be that as it may, fact remains that there is a lot of choice out there, and whether you are buying your first camera, or whether you are out shopping for a friend of family member, you might need a hand.

Welcome to the 7th edition (!) of my in-depth guide to choosing an entry-level dSLR camera: What should you be looking for, what should you be buying, and why? It’s all in our handy shopping guide, right here…

Where should you even begin?

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!

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 Canon Powershot A2200, for example 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 consider before making your choice

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.

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.

The above photo was taken with... an iPhone. Proving that any camera can take a good photo.

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
Oh. and also consider looking into EVIL cameras - they're smaller and lighter than SLR cameras, but you keep the ability to swap lenses, and they can take great-quality photos! (loads more info about EVIL photography here)

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 A390

The Sony Alpha 390 is an absolute bargain, and a great entry into the world of SLR. You get 14.2 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 390 with a kit lens from Amazon.com for about $449 and from Amazon.co.uk for about £349.

Canon EOS 1100D / Canon Rebel T3

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 EOS 1100D / Rebel T3 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 mk III (which costs a small fortune), or a 1100D / T3. 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 1100D, eBay it and buy a mid-range camera (like the Canon 600D), or start looking at spending serious money for a serious camera (Canon 5D mk III 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 1100D / T3 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 1100D photos ‘feel’ more natural when you look at them.

You can get the Rebel T3 from Amazon.com for about $490 or the Canon 1100D from Amazon.co.uk for about £400 – both with a Canon EF-S 18-55 kit lens.

Nikon D3100

Nikon’s baby camera is the D3100 – 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 D3100 gets right is that it has a fabulous 3-inch LCD screen on the back of the camera, which makes a huge difference when you’re checking your photos in the field, to ensure you've captured what you're looking for 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 D3100 is a peach, and the D5000 or D5100 – 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 D3100 from Amazon.com for about $640 and from Amazon.co.uk for £440 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.

Any final tips?

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.

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. (If you want to learn more about lenses, I've got everything you could possibly want to know right here...) 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’ve had a lot of cool cameras in my time – I worked as a freelance photographer for a while, and bought all the top-shelf 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 currently, my main camera is... a Canon EOS 550D. 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 five-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 it's one cheapest camera you can buy with a Canon badge on it.

This article was first published in 2007, but has been updated with the most relevant information every year since. It was most recently updated in April 2012.

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This self-portrait was taken by a stranger on the Internet

hajejan@kamps.org — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:14:00 +0000

Today's post is brought to you by the how-bloody-meta-is-this department...

So, I've been playing with different concepts of automating the taking of photos, by using the Triggertrap universal camera trigger I invented.

As part of the upcoming Triggertrap website (it's launching on Monday!), I was working on the updated Newsletter sign-ups, and I had an idea: Wouldn't it be cool if someone signing up for a newsletter triggered the camera?

So that's what I did - Now, whenever someone signs up for the Triggertrap newsletter, it automatically takes a photo of me, sitting at my desk, slaving away. Okay, so it isn't a very interesting photograph, but that isn't the point - it's kind of awesome that my camera is taking photos whenever someone else does something.

If you want to find out how it's done (and if you, too, want to take a photo of me)... Sign up for the newsletter; the explanation is on the sign-up confirmation page. (Pretty sneaky, eh?)

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The Avengers and Adventures in Terrible Headaches

hajejan@kamps.org — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Avengers is one of those movies that makes you wish your cinema seat had a seat belt - it's a no-holds-barred thrillride cocktail of two parts great casting, one part witty script, a large splash of VFX, blended with copious amounts of visual gags, a squeeze of explosions, and garnished with the odd, completely unneccessary yet utterly delicious shots of rather astonishing-looking eyecandy; Cobie Smulders and that other chick they cast.

Superhero movies have been a mixed bag; so I'll keep this review very short indeed by saying: This is not a mixed bag. This is a sack, filled to the brim with finely selected awesome. Go see it.

It's well-paced, has more laugh-out-loud moments than I remember in any other recent film, the acting's good, the VFX is epic, and the music... Well, not always what I would have chosen, but it doesn't directly get in the way of the fun.

The horror of 3D

Of course, I'm currently in Buenos Aires, which means I have two choices for this film: Watch it in English with Spanish subtitles, in 3D. Or, watch it dubbed to Spanish, in 2D.

So, since my Castellano is still lacking at best, we opted for the 3D version.

Honestly? I don't get it. You spend all this money on making a stunning movie - a feast of explosions, colours, and superfluous shots of Scarlett Johansson's finely shaped bum squeezed in very tight trousers, and you ruin it by halving the brightness, slashing the colour saturation, and giving your audience headaches with poorly implemented 3D?

Don't get me wrong - I used to be in the industry of gadgetry and tech (I edited a website about it for a while), and I understand the appeal of 3D. Well-executed 3D is... A beautiful thing. It's 'realistic' (well, as realistic as staring at a 2D screen and see 3D things pop out at you). But the technology simply isn't there yet - or, if it is - it's not affordable enough that small screens in countries that gets violently abused by the government every time you try to import anything with a value of more than a packet of chewing gum.

So; what I'm trying to say is this: Avengers would be a straight-up 10 out of 10 if it managed to restrict itself to a mere traditionalist two dimensions. In three dimensions, it just falls a bit flat.

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Eased Timelapses: Adding some acceleration to Timelapse videos

hajejan@kamps.org — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:56:00 +0000

So I've been playing with timelapses a fair bit recently, and I've learned a lot of magical and mysterious things... For example, have you ever considered how it's pretty awesome to be able to speed up time by taking a photo every 2 seconds, and then playing it at 30 fps? When doing it like that, a 1 hour timespan only takes up a minute of video - perfect for sunsets, sunrises, etc. Using this technique, you can create some truly astonishing stuff.

However... That got me thinking. Why have we decided to only have linear intervals? Why stick to a photo every 2 seconds? Why not change the gaps between each photo?

By starting to take photos very quickly at first, and then slowing it down, for example, it would look as if the video was accelerating. Start slowly and speed up, and it looks as if the video is speeding up.

Eased Timelapse Videos

The next logical step was even more awesome: What if we could use the algorithms used by animators, and actually apply mathematics to the acceleration of each video? So, that's what we decided to do.

Known as Tweened Timelapse, or Eased Timelapse videos, we took a leaf out of the animation playbook. So far, I can only share two quick video experiments with you:

The acceleration and decelleration in this video isn't done in post-production: It's done in camera, by varying the intervals between each photograph taken in this timelapse set. Awesome, eh?

If you want to stay posted on how my experiments progress, or if you want additional information, remember to sign up to the Friends of Triggertrap mailing list!

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Free Photography School

hajejan@kamps.org — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:06:00 +0000

You're just starting out in photography, but you can't quite seem to get the hang of things? Or perhaps you've been taking photos for a while, and you're itching to get some inspiration to develop? Or maybe you've always been a person who learns best when they get a little bit of a push in the right direction?

Well, I've got some good news for you; I'm starting a photography school.

Well, a virtual one, anyway.

The first ever course starts on May 1st, so if you sign up before then, you'll be part of the very first course - but don't worry; we're starting additional courses after that, too.

It's completely free, it'll be a lot of fun, and you'll learn a load about photography in the process. How awesome is that?

For more information and to enroll, check out the Photocritic Photography School website.

Enjoy!

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Carving out an online identity

hajejan@kamps.org — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Have you ever thought about how important an online 'brand' is, even when you're a person, rather than a brand? It's something that sprung to mind recently, when I was looking through my Twitter followers. Some of them have great, very easy-to-recognise icons - and others, not so much.

Colin is a great example of someone who is doing it right; He has this icon on a lot of his digital life:

Between the blue sky, the red hair, and the welding goggles, it is instantly recognisable, no matter what size the photo is shown. That, and it's a bloody awesome photo to begin with, which is a huge bonus.

Myself, I've been using another photo for quite a while:

But, despite being quite recognisable as me, I never really liked it all that much. Having said that, I never really found a better photo to replace it with, so it's been my online identity for, oh, the best part of two years now. It doesn't help that it's part of a mugshot taken for our The Girl is Mime project, of course:

So, when I was futzing with some stuff at my desk this evening, I was idly staring into nothingness, as the sun was going down. A beautiful golden light struck the wall, and because of some trees outside, it created an awesome pattern, too. I reached for the first camera I could find - my iPhone 4 - stuck my head into the photo, and snapped.

One photo, that was all I had time for; the sun only illuminated my wall for a minute or so... But that was also all I wanted. The original shot may not have been anything to write home about:

... But it definitely had some potential. I loaded it into Snapseed; my favourite iPhone photo editing tool, and played with it for a bit...

... Much better. But there was something raw, something dirty in there; the digital noise from the iPhone's sensor, combined with the play of light and dark; That had to be amplified a little, so I added some grunge filters to make it stand out even further...

... And that's what I decided would be my new online identity for the foreseeable future: It has everything I need from one: It reflects photography, it's creative, and it is (sort of) recogniseable as me. It works at all sizes from the tiniest icon (as seen on Twitter and Flickr), via medium sizes (Google Plus) and in larger sizes, too - like the banner across my user page here on Pixiq.

And, because I'm using the same photo everywhere (more or less...) it's instantly recognisable to anyone who's visited any of my other online presences. Spiffing.

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Can you fix the focus on a blurry photo after the fact?

hajejan@kamps.org — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:07:00 +0000

I seem to be on a roll this week, with finding incredibly interesting topics to write about over on Quora. In this case, the question was as simple as it was interesting: "Is it possible to focus an unfocused image with a computer program?".

Answer...

There are many technical challenges with focusing an image after the fact, and it depends heavily on how out-of-focus the original image is. It is possible to do some sharpening that gives the illusion of a photo being in better focus, but actually re-focusing the photo? Not so much.

Here's why...

Take an image like this for example (see the photo on my Flickr stream for a larger version):

The bird in the foreground is in focus (well, more or less), but the plants in the background are not. Now, blurring this photo would be relatively trivial, because you are discarding information.

If your goal was to 're-focus' the photograph so the trees in the background were in focus, however, you're looking at a completely different problem, at least if your photo is taken with a conventional camera (Light-field cameras like the Lytro work differently)... The problem is that you're trying to re-generate information that simply isn't there.

Another example

Let's take another example. This photo, for example (see Flickr for a larger version):

In this photo, you have an extreme macro shot of a fly. You can see the individual facet eyes of the fly, and count the hairs on its back. However, it has very shallow depth of field, and if you look at the legs in the background of the photo, they are just blurry stalks. Now, the technology you are looking for, would somehow magically be able to find out the size, direction, and shape of each of the hairs on the fly's legs that are out of focus in the background.

It stands to reason that this information simply doesn't exist. I took the photo, and I have no idea what colour the hairs were, how many there were, and how evenly they were spaced. This photo is a pretty good document of the fly, of course, but it is physically impossible to recreate information that isn't there - unless you have a data source to base this information on.

On the other hand, Adobe is doing some really interesting stuff with their 'deblur' technology. This isn't the same as focus blur, however; the idea of Adobe's deblurring is to take a photo that was sharp to begin with, but suffers from motion blur. This means that, in theory, a lot of additional information exists in the image, it is just spread over an even surface. As such, it is possible to 'unblur' the image by throwing clever algorithms and a lot of computing power at the problem. Sadly, this is only possible in very limited cases. It's not possible to re-focus an image, but it is possible to evaluate the photo to remove certain image artefacts, much like noise reduction filters etc.

For further reading, check out the vaguely related concepts of Focus stacking (which uses focusing at several focus depths, and calculates an image with deeper depth of field), HDR (which does a similar thing, but for images with various exposures) and, of course, the Lytro camera, which is able to focus after the fact, but struggles with its own problems (including much lower final resolution than we are used to from our digital images).

TL;DR: No, you can't focus an image after the fact.

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Should you do a photography degree?

hajejan@kamps.org — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:06:00 +0000

I was browsing Quora the other day, and found an awesome question: What's the benefit of studying photography? At first, I just answered 'Not much'... But then I erased those two words, and let things get a little bit out of hand. Enjoy:

Let's take the first things first: Having a degree in photography doesn't make you a photographer. Taking photos makes you a photographer.

With that out of the way, let me start by answering with an anecdote: I studied Journalism in university, as an undergrad. I have to say, it was the biggest waste of time of my life.

On the flipside, it did give me an 'excuse' to spend a lot of time on other projects. Since I was a 'student', nothing was expected of me - other than being a student- and the three years I spent in Uni were incredibly productive - just not in terms of university work.

After University, I was utterly demoralised, and decided I would never work in journalism again, so I set up as a photographer. I was able to snare a few early client, and ended up doing quite a lot of work as a photographer - some fashion work, some architectural stuff, etc. I also started blogging about photography.

You learn best when you're curious...

As a photographer, I am completely self-taught. As a journalist / writer; well, I do technically have a degree in Journalism, but I wouldn't say that it was useful in any way, shape or form. The academic parts of my degree were interesting from an academic standpoint, but they were completely useless to my career as a journalist. The practical aspects of my degree were so far removed from the real life of a journalist, that they were completely useless.

I think I can very safely say that everything I know about writing and photography, I've learned outside of formal learning - and I guess, given that I currently write about photography for a living, I must have done pretty well at both of them.

Mark Twain said: I never let school get in the way of my education. I think that's a pretty healthy path to take.

By all means; if you're interested in having 'MA' behind your name, do it. If you think you are interested in the academic side, and want to study photography from a historical, or a social point of view, knock yourself out.

If you want to be a photographer? I wouldn't bother with a degree.

You learn to be a photographer by taking photos. Be the best photographer you can be: Start by emulating others. Find your favourite photos on Flickr, and recreate them. Then, add your own slant. Make them better. Make the style yours. Combine, create, develop. Work on the artistic side of your photography (the ideas). Work on the technical side of your photography (turning your ideas into photographs). Work on both at the same time. Keep challenging and pushing yourself.

Once you know how to take good photos, you need connections to be able to do anything with the photos. Whether you want to have fine art exhibition, you want to start selling your pictures to magazines or agencies, etc etc etc, it's all about the connections you're able to make.

Making connections is hard, but it's a skill that's completely unrelated to the photography side of things; so whatever you do, don't do a degree just to make connections. Drop an e-mail to your favourite photography blogger. Go to a local Flickr meetup. Go to small photo gallery openings locally, and start talking to people. Show off your work to anyone who'll take a look, and get some feedback. Talk to people, submit your photos to magazines, get your local pub to hang a couple of your photos on the wall, create a website, get active on DeviantArt, Flickr, etc... Get involved.

Success as a photographer doesn't happen overnight. Hell, it doesn't happen over many nights. I know many extremely talented photographers who never got a break - but to be honest, I also know many mediocre photographers, who believe they should have had their break a long time ago. I don't have the heart to tell them that they've got a long way to go before their work is where it needs to be, in order to break through in an incredibly competitive market.

This is where being self-critical and being able to critique your own work comes in: It's not easy, but it'll be one of the most powerful tools you have available to you.

So... Doing a degree or not? I wouldn't.

But whatever you do... never give up.

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