Photocritic photography blog

The last few months have been nothing short of insane - the sheer amount of support and help I’ve received from my readers has been truly heartwarming. Read the rest of the article »

If you are serious about product photography, you can’t get around using a good light tent. Essentially a large diffusor through which you can send light in order to create soft, even lighting, a light tent is a pretty simple device - but they retail at stupid prices from photography stores.

So, we had a look around on the Internet if we managed to find a cheaper solution. Mission successful. Read the rest of the article »

If you have a lot of ‘old-fashioned’ film laying around, you may want to consider a film scanner. But what if you only want to do simple scans, and you only need them in relatively low quality - say, for posting them on a web-site?

If you own a digital camera, why not just build your own? 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 »

Tired of harsh flash, but not feeling like paying up for an expensive flash diffuser? There are dozens of way you can accomplish this yourself, but few are as cheap as the version Ed Perchick has cobbled together - built out of a plastic milk jug! Read the rest of the article »

After reading our extreme macro photography on a budget, quite a few of our readers were wondering how they can take their new-found obsessions further - what if you want to go more extreme? What if you aren’t on a shoestring budget? Read the rest of the article »

Up until yesterday, Photocritic seemed to have been on every blog and website known to man, including MSNBC, Adobe, Digg, and scores of photography blogs. Yesterday, we captured the holy grail of web-traffic: A posting on Slashdot. Unfortunately, my lovely little server kicked the bucket before the fifth comment on slashdot. Read the rest of the article »

Andreas Krautwald has built a simple hood which attaches to a MAGlite. It is a very low-tech solution to the problem of lighting, but it is powerful enough to use for creating a handy, soft light in connection with macro photography and similar. Read the rest of the article »

So, you like the idea of doing macro photography, but you think you can’t afford it? Think again - with less than £1 worth of equipment, a little bit of sweat and tears (and blood, if you, like me, are a bit on the clumsy side), and you can build yourself a surprisingly good macro lens. Don’t believe me? Well, have a look at the article, and think again!

Of course, as I’m using a Pringles can to make this lens, you also have the opportunity to pause for a snack. Now that’s the type of DIY projects I like. Read the rest of the article »

Often when you scan things, or take pictures, you discover after you see the picture on your screen that you were a few degrees off the horizon. Usually this doesn’t matter, and you can get away with cropping out the edges, and nobody will ever be able to tell. Read the rest of the article »