Photocritic photography blog

When I was about seven, I became seriously aware of photography, and I wish someone had started teaching me things back then. Of course, digital photography didn’t quite exist, so that makes it a lot more difficult (and expensive) to learn by trial and error, so things have changed a lot. I was on the train the other day, thinking about how I would teach photography to a young’un with the current technology available.

I discovered I couldn’t think of how to do it - so I got in touch with one of my friends who is a teacher, and she got so stoked up about the idea that she went ahead and wrote up a phenomenal article for Photocritic… Read the rest of the article »

Dearie me, it seems as if we’ve got some truly pacifist photographers in our midst: My recent post on making a killing jar to easier be able to take macro photos of insects attracted 27 comments, largely along the lines of ’sure, you can kill them, but where’s the challenge in that?’ - with variations, of course.

David Harper felt particularly strongly about the topic, and went to the point of sending me a series of photos taken with a Canon SD-100, and argues that if he can take photographs like this with simple equipment without killing anything, then why should you have to? The man’s got a point… Read the rest of the article »

If you want to get extremely close to insects, you may have to convince them to stop moving somehow.

Sadly I have yet to come across tranquilliser darts for bumblebees (if you know of any, post a comment!), so killing them is the only way to persuade them to sit still.

It sounds terribly barbaric, but it isn’t, really: If you make one of these jars correctly, you can kill insects quickly and painlessly. If you feel bad about it afterwards, you can always bury it in a tiny grave and sing it a song - make sure you get photos first, though! Read the rest of the article »

By now, there are a hundred ways of displaying and selling your art on-line. We’ve looked at a few solutions in the past (Including the rather impressive one-man-band FotoViva I wrote about a while back), but I recently found a new one, Red Bubble, which seems to really resound positively with me.

Using a user interface that reminds me a little bit of JPG Magazine (i.e extremely Web 2.0: Simple but pretty and functional), Red Bubble doesn’t pitch itself initially as a photo sales site. Instead, it’s an online art gallery where you can upload - and sell - your artwork. Read the rest of the article »