Portraits have the potential to be amongst the strongest photographs we ever produce, but often the results are dull and lifeless.
Just sitting someone in front of a commercial background and firing a studio flash at him or her will produce a picture of a person and strictly speaking will produce a portrait, but will it [...]
Split Grade printing in it’s most basic form is a process whereby two exposures are given, one through a Grade 5 filter and one through a Grade 00 filter. These two exposures can be varied in order to arrive at the correct contrast for almost any negative. I have another, simpler version which i will [...]
As photographers we are primarily concerned with light, but often the most interesting shapes come from the absence of light – the shadows.?We are usually instructed as photographers, that our exposures should be worked out accurately to ensure that we have plenty of shadow detail, but I often find that having a deep shadow, or [...]
I’ve been thinking recently about how I see myself as a photographer/artist and how my students see themselves. They generally downgrade themselves with comments like; ‘I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be shooting this kind of stuff’ ‘Is this ok?’ and ‘I feel like I’ll never be as good as you’.?The trouble with this [...]
It’s almost a year since I started this blog and one of the first articles I wrote was about shooting in the snow on Ortho film (See ‘High contrast snow scenes’, Feb ‘09). I also wrote another article on achieving higher contrast by altering the film ISO and increasing the development time (see ‘Flexible film’ [...]
Nearly five years ago I was kindly given a Canon G3 on semi permanent loan. I had never used digital before and my first impressions were how advanced the technology had become and how easy it was to take pictures which were perfectly exposed and automatically colour balanced.
I particularly enjoyed the freedom it gave me [...]
One of the most important areas of photography is the processing of negatives. The quality of your images is dependent on how much care and attention you take with your developer, dilution, times, temperature and agitation. Following much of the literature which has been published on the matter though, could give you too many things [...]
Looking around on the web I see many, many photographers who are producing sharp, well exposed shots and many of them are very competent photographers.
Often though, there is something missing; Too many of the shots are just BORING.
Making an image which is sharp and well exposed is the easy part, making an image which affects [...]
An earlier post which I uploaded from my phone whilst on holiday, referred to an obscure Chinese panoramic 120 camera which I had been using.
I have since processed the films from this camera and I was rather disappointed at the quality. Some were just OK, and others were really poor. The camera suffers from a [...]