Photocritic photography blog

In the past, we’ve covered why it is important to sharpen your photos, and how you can use the Unsharp Mask tool in Photoshop to make sure your photos look their best.

I am a firm believer of understanding how things are done manually, however. If you are to take shortcuts, you have to know the long road to get there first. So… If you have a darkroom, how can you sharpen your images without letting the film go anywhere near a computer?

Here’s how… Read the rest of the article »

You’re a keen photographer, and you find yourself in a city where the world’s biggest art festival sneaks up on you. It’d be rude not to do anything, really… But what?

Katie Cooke, a long-term friend of mine, who might be more known in the photography world as the queen of pinhole photography, decided to set up a little market stall in the middle of the mayhem, and take photos of people who felt like being photographed. Using a classic Toyp 45CF field camera loaded with Ilford HP5+, she decided to show the Fringe from an unusual angle… We’ve caught up with her to find out how and why. Read the rest of the article »

I’ve written about bulk loading before, and praised Josh Wand’s excellent FAQ, only to find it vanished off the internet. While it’s probably a slightly dodgy thing to do, from a copyright standpoint, I think it’s more important that the bulk loading FAQ stays available on-line, so I’m mirroring it here for everybody who needs it.

If you have further tips for how people can do their own bulk loading, please e-mail me or drop a comment in the, er, comments, and I’ll update this FAQ Read the rest of the article »

So, you fancy yourself a bit of a photographer, do you? Awesome, that makes two of us. Or, judging by the number of people regularly visiting his blog, a few thousand of us. If you’ve ever played around with pinhole photography (and if you haven’t, you totally should), you’ll have stumbled across Paper Negatives - or the idea of using photosensitive paper rather than film - to make photos.

My good friend R. James Davis (check out his website, his photograhy rocks) recently wrote a wicked little piece about what Paper negatives are, what they are, and how (and why) they are used. Read the rest of the article »

I just found the best web page ever. I know, it’s a bit of a tall claim, but I think it’s probably the truth.

What if there was a web-site out there that explained in great detail how cameras work, history of photography, and offer up a ton of cheap mods you can do to a camera to broaden its use to astrophotography, micro photography, and lots of other nifty stuff? Yeah, I thought that’d catch your attention! Read the rest of the article »

As a response to our Darkroom on a budget post, Stefan asked us if you need to have an enlarger in the dark-room.

Well, technically, you don’t, but it depends on what you wish to do with your dark-room. To be honest, I never owned an enlarger myself. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Read the rest of the article »

As some of you might have cottoned on to, I work in automotive publishing*. As such, I wade my way through thousands of press releases. Most of them are completely pointless, some of them are interesting, and others again spark my interest. There is a lot of amazing photography that happens when trying to show cars from their best angles, for example.

When the World Cup was raging at its hardest a couple of months ago, I saw a photo something quite unlike the others. Basically, it was a single photo, taken from the air, of 400 Toyota Yaris cars (you may know them as Toyota Vitz or Belta, depending on where you live) parked in the shape of a St George’s cross.

Today, I stumbled across the blog of the photographer who did the photos… Read the rest of the article »

Introduction

The Unsharp Mask is an old photography trick that has become available to ‘the common man’ through the introduction of digital editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop.

In this article, I will share with you my knowledge and experience of the Unsharp mask tool in the darkroom, and also a thorough introduction to its digital name brother, the Photoshop USM filter. Read the rest of the article »

So, you’ve gone tired of making pinhole cameras out of milk cartons, tins, and boxes? You are thinking bigger? These guys built a pinhole lorry, using the entire loading bed as a pinhole camera!

American photographer Shaun Irving and English Art Director Richard Browse have created what they believe to be the world’s largest mobile camera. Designed in America and constructed in Spain, the cameratruck is a simple box camera built right inside a standard delivery truck. Measuring 5 metres long, 2 metres wide and 2 metres high, the gigantic camera is capable of taking pictures almost 3 metres across. Read the rest of the article »

Ah, it’s a proper blast from the past, this one… Did you know you can actually load your own photographic film into 36mm canisters? It’s possible, it’s easy, and it actually saves you a mahoosive amount of money, because buying film in bulk is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying film by film. Read the rest of the article »