Photocritic photography blog

The main problem of taking photos free-hand is that your hands aren’t particularly sturdy. Myself, I find using a heavier camera makes it a lot easier (the inertia of the camera means it is reluctant to move, so up to a point, a heavy camera is easier to hold still for the duration of a photographic exposure than a very light camera.), but what about lighter cameras?

The obvious answer is a tripod or a monopod, but these devices can be terribly heavy, and they are not particularly portable. One solution is to hold the camera against a surface (a tree, a building, or a signpost), but that doesn’t always work either, and none of these items offer an awful lot of flexibility. Read the rest of the article »

I am quite fond of bicycling (I recently did the London to Brighton bikeride), so when I stumbled across a guide to making a steadycam mount for a bike, my curiosity was instantly set ablaze.

The creator explains:

I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn’t want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn’t want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build my own “steadicam” camera mount that would absorb some of the shock, providing a better quality video.

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Tripods are cheap as chips nowadays, but the cheaper ones have a few flaws. Most importantly, they are too light, and too unstable. So what do you do when you are working on macro stuff, and your tripod won’t stop vibrating, or the high winds are trying to disturb your photographic peace? Read the rest of the article »

A DIY photo gadget that you can make from stuff you probably have kicking around in your basement or shed? Is right! We are hooked!

It’s one of those completely daft projects, but it may actually work - I’m sure as hell going to give it a shot!

The main problem of taking photos free-hand is that your hands aren’t particularly sturdy. Myself, I find using a heavier camera makes it a lot easier (the inertia of the camera means it is reluctant to move, so up to a point, a heavy camerea is easier to hold still than a very light camera.), but what for lighter cameras? The answer might just be a String Tripod! Read the rest of the article »

There’s some amazing software out there for panoramic photography: They warp, stitch and blend sequences of photos so that they look like one big, seamless panoramic photo.

To get the full benefit out of this software, however, you need a good tripod - and panoramic tripod heads are ridiculously expensive. Unless, of course, you build one yourself… Read the rest of the article »