Photocritic photography blog

We’ve told you what Lomography is, how it works, and we’ve even established that, while the results are rather special, Lomography doesn’t magically defy the laws of physics (aw, shucks).

But what do you do if you cannot be bothered to actually buy a Lomo camera?

Enter the 21st century: What we can’t do with cameras, we’ll replicate digitally! The upside of this is that there are quite a few different ways to Lomotomize* a photo! Read the rest of the article »

So, you start taking photos. First, you take photos of an apple. Then, perhaps, you move on to people. If you’re serious, you move on to slightly faster-moving items, such as running people, or even bicyclists.

Move over, Ansel, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Andy Lees’ photos - he’s one of the world’s top Formula 1 photographers, with a massive library of pics from tons of race tracks.

Interesting enough in itself, perhaps, but far more excitingly, the man’s written a guide to how he works, which was where my ears stood up and my attention was well and truly captured… Read the rest of the article »

I’ve written about Lomography once before (if you have no idea what I’m on about, you’ll probably wanna have a peek at that post first), and briefly talked about what it is, how it works, and how there seem to be a huge bunch of nutters who love the art-form (I’m one of ‘em).

The question that remained, though, is ‘how can a camera allow you to take special photos’? After all, all cameras adhere to the same laws of physics and optics - so how do Lomo photos manage to look so distinctive and different? Read the rest of the article »

Hi all,

A while ago, a publisher asked me if I wanted to write a book on a topic within Photography. I’m terribly excited and humbled, and I can’t wait to get started properly.

Of course, this means that I won’t have quite as much time to update Photocritic over the next couple of days, but I still hope to manage an update every third to fourth day or so :)

I’m hyped to shreds about this project! I will probably need a bit of help from some of you guys over time (Here’s your chance to have some photos published, perhaps?!), but I can’t divulge too much at this time - I haven’t even signed any contracts or anything yet, although I’m reasonably certain it is going though.

Stay tuned, as they say on radio. Perhaps I should say “stay bookmarked”, instead…

- Haje

I don’t normally write about camera equipment launches - there wouldn’t be much space for anything else on this blog if I did - but it’s rather worth noting that Canon are launching their brand new baby-brother of the digital SLR family, the 400D. Read the rest of the article »

If you like clothing, photography, and are between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, you’d be bloody nuts not to enter the Nikon Young Fashion Photographer of the Year awards! Read the rest of the article »

Whenever I travel, I have a very loose approach to packing my stuff. Mostly, I pack in less than 20 minutes - regardless if I’m going away for a night or three weeks. There are four checks: Passport, tickets, credit card, and camera.

It’s just the way it goes, you can’t get by without either of those items (except perhaps tickets, if you are travelling with an airline who has embraced eTickets). If your journey is especially designed for photography, however, the task may be slightly different. Read the rest of the article »

Displaying photos is becoming a strenuous task. With services such as Photobox, you can print your photos cheaply, but who wants a stack of paper anymore? Alternatively, you could go the digital photo frame route, but the price of these devices is a bit silly, for what it is.

Unless… Well, the answer is in the head-line, really. Why not make your own? Read the rest of the article »

Are you a photographer occasionally writing about photography? Post a comment.

Do you have your own photography blog? Post a comment.

Do you know of a site who runs DIY projects that sometimes are about photography? Post a comment.

Do you have a website which has some original angle on anything? Post a comment.

Do you run a page which has nothing to do with anything I’d be remotely interested in? Post a comment anyway.

See a pattern yet? Exactly - I’m very curious to find out more about what makes my readers tick - and of course, I’m looking for new sources from where I can pilfer ideas for interesting articles for Photocritic.

Too shy to post a comment in public? Send me an email instead - get your submissions in to hajejan@photocritic.org!

You can even send press releases, if you are a company, but if they are crap, prepare to be ridiculed.

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 »