This Saturday is the inaugural World Cyanotype Day. Cyanotype is a simple printing process, originally developed to copy engineering drawings (blueprints) that also made its way into the photography world. You can find out a bit more about Cyanotype from Wiki. It is possible, and by the looks of things fairly easy, to produce a…
The theme for last week on my 52 Week challenge was Double Exposure. This is an interesting topic as there are many ways to create a double exposure – either in-camera, by illusion or in post processing so I thought it warranted a separate post rather than the usual entry as shot of the week. So,…
Usually, for my shot of the week, I focus on the shot I’ve taken for my 52 Week project, but I’m changing that this week for two reasons. Firstly, the theme for the week was Double Exposure which is a topic in itself so I’ll be blogging about that in a separate post in a…
A prime way to improve your photography is to practice. Taking pictures every day, or at least several times per week, will help you to better understand how your camera performs. You will get used to the best settings for different situations and learn to change your camera settings quickly almost without thinking. This ability…
We’ve touched a little bit on kit already, and I’ve mentioned quite a few times the Panasonic Lumix TZ60 that I have with me most of the time, so I thought I’d talk a bit about why I like this camera. And just to clarify, I am not being paid anything for this review. The…
The theme for this week’s 52 Week challenge was Beauty in Everyday Items. As you can see from the link there is a great variety of submissions. Perfect for a LIGHT snack. Sadly my effort falls a bit outside the theme – not so much beauty as amusement in everyday items. Still, the themes are…
There are all manner of different ways to learn photography and learn about photography. I bought a polystyrene head to practice lighting head shots for example. One of the ways that I enjoy most is the podcast. I subscribe to a number of audio and video podcasts that roll out episodes every week (sometimes more…
People who go by a single name tend to be legends in their field – Pele, Madonna, Prince, Sting, Moliere, Twiggy, Lenin, Caravaggio the list goes on. In the UK we have the incredible fashion photographer Rankin. But the guy I want to talk about today is known by many as The Strobist, real name…
The theme for the week in my Flickr 52 Weeks the 2015 Edition group was backlit. I was hoping to get something nice and natural with sunlight behind but we had almost a whole week of rain, clouds and overcast skies so it was looking unlikely until Tuesday morning I spotted something as I parked…
Negatives have, for a long time, been part of photography parlance but the negative I want to talk about today is Negative Space, as this was the topic last week on Flickr 52 Weeks the 2015 Edition. It’s not a concept that is common to beginners but once you get to know about it and…
Following on from the previous post about 4 stage of learning to be a photographer, we come to stage 3; Semi-Pro Is someone who is consciously competent and knows how much they know. This is someone who understands how most photographs are taken. They recognise lighting, compositional techniques and often where post-processing has been used….
Last weekend we drove down to South Wales for our niece’s 18th Birthday fancy dress party. This posed something of a dilemma – should I take the DSLR and flash and get some well-balanced photos of the people there or should I take the Lumix TZ60 to get some fun snaps of the evening recognising…
In my last post, I introduced the concept of the 4 Stages of Learning, today I want to expand on the first two of these; Beginner As I described before, someone who is unconsciously incompetent (meant in the nicest possible way of course), they don’t know how much they don’t know. Just because they are…
Continuing on the theme of whether buying kit is the best way to improve, I thought I’d share with you my take on the 4 stages of learning to be a photographer. It can be hard to define precisely the four stages in terms of what skills you have or don’t have but I like…