Photocritic photography blog

So you’ve finally graduated from taking photos with a compact, and have your grubby little paws on a fantastic digital single-lens reflex. All good and well, but why don’t your pictures come out as fantastic as some of the ones you see on Flickr? Surely, they’re using the same camera as you - where are you going wrong?

That was essentially what Pieter asked me about this week. So, without further ado, 8 ways to make your photos jump off the screen. Read the rest of the article »

Combine a good old-fashioned team-based treasure hunt with a photography competition, and you’ve got a recipe for success, right?

Well, that’s what I thought too, when I signed up to attend Shoot London, an event based out of the Tate gallery, organised by Shoot Experience, a company who organises these kind of events for public and corporate events.

Sadly, it turns out that I’ll probably give future Shoot Experience events a miss - to find out why, I spoke to another participant of the event… Read the rest of the article »

It is relatively self-explanatory that doing a photo critique is quite difficult. What few people stop to think about, however, is that receiving a photo critique can be as difficult - if not more difficult: When you move beyond mere snapshots and start putting more of yourself into your photographs, you are a lot more intimately involved with the work you are putting out there.

Putting your photos up for criticism - whether it is at your local photography club, via a site such as DeviantArt, or even when asking a good friend to give some feed-back - is like putting your own head in the guillotine and taking a chance.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the best ways to improve as a photographer, and one of the best lessons you’ll learn is to discover how to deal with negative photo critiques… Read the rest of the article »

To understand exposure in photographical terms, EV is probably the single most important number you will have to understand, to understand the theory behind the art of photography. This goes from your tiniest, least significant compact camera, to your cock-on-the-table style medium format camera with a digital back. Read the rest of the article »

You’re working as a photographer, you take fantastic photos, and you’ve even got a pretty sweet website to show off your work… So why is your web server just sitting around in the corner, smoking a fag and nipping at a cup of coffee? Why aren’t the buyers running the door off its hinges, and, come to think of it, where are your damn groupies, already?

The internet is a cold and heartless place, and the biggest source of traffic to any website should be coming from search engines (Photocritic, for example, gets about 70% of its traffic from search engines. Mind you, it’s mostly people looking for pictures of nude women. Go figure.)

Luckily, there are quite a few things you can do as a photographer to make your site really zing in the search engines - and for the sake of making a nice round figure (and, of course, so the Digg and Reddit crowds will love it like a kitten loves tuna fish) - here’s a lovely top-10 list to get you started! Read the rest of the article »

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 »

The other day, I received an e-mail Stephan D, one of my readers, with a load of questions about me and my photography career. I occasionally get questions about who I am and why I run Photocritic, so I figured that I might just do a post about the man behind the blog, as it were.

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.

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… Read the rest of the article »

We do an experiment with microstock, and discover that while I sold three times more photos, I earned 40 times less money from the micro stock sales than from a full-on agency - with the exact same photos on sale…

The lesson? If you’re a decent photographer, stay the hell away from micro-stock: The bigger agencies treat you better, pay you more, and actually make an effort to sell your photos on a bigger scale. Read the rest of the article »

“From this day, the painting is dead”, Paul Delaroche exclaimed when he saw the first Daguerreotype in 1839. He turned out to be wrong about the bit about the art of painting being dead, but photography certainly had a profound impact on our way of life.

As a matter of fact, as early as in 1900, it was said that “the daily press, advertisements, posters, scientific literature, the popular lecture, decoration, and now the kinetograph, not to speak of the coming colored photography, have all contributed what is probably slowly coming to be a new mode of pictorial thought” (Goldberg 1991, p16) Read the rest of the article »

I’ve been a fan of Renoux on DeviantArt for a long time: His style of strongly emotive nude photography always appealed to me strongly. Playful, and with levels of nudity ranging from regular portraits to borderline pornography, he manages to capture the essence of the human body in a way that is quite unlike any other photographer I have come across.

Photocritic had a chat with Pascal Renoux, to find out what drives him…

Depending on your work, this article might not be safe for work. Read the rest of the article »