So I decided to launch a new website to help you out.

Every week, I get a huge stack of e-mails from readers (well, I get lots of e-mails, I don’t actually print them out and put them in a stack, that’d be ludicrous) who want some help finding a Digital SLR camera. Every time, I have to send them away again, because, well, I’ll be honest with you: While I love, and know a fair bit about photography, my knowledge of actual cameras is limited.

Sure, I’ve used most of the DSLR cameras Canon have launched over the years, and I’ve probably given Canon more than their fair share of my money in the past decade, too, but the truth of the matter is that I’m reluctant to give people advice. I don’t want to re-spark the age-old Canon-Versus-Nikon debate every time I do so either, because frankly, cameras are so good nowadays, that it’s unlikely to be the camera that’ll be the bottleneck in your creative process - it’s the photographer.

On the other hand, I hate sending people away - I like to pride myself on being useful and helpful, and it bothered me that I was unable to help. So I decided to come up with a solution.

Some of you may have noticed that a list of D-SLR cameras appeared on the right of this page - well, that was part of a testing phase, which now is finished, and I’m proud to launch Photocritic SLR.

For every dSLR currently on sale, I have:

• Researched it, and written an introduciton
• Gotten a photo of it from the manufacturers
• Found out what it costs, roughly
• Found some of the best reviews of each camera out there

As I said, I willingly admit that I can’t give particularly thorough advice, but there are dozens of websites out there that can. As such, the Photocritic SLR site gives you a chance to get a rough overview of the market, and delve into the details in all the reviews that are out there.

Best of all, if you, in your journeys, come across a brilliant review that I’ve somehow missed, you can add the review to the right camera yourself! Fabulous.

So go on, if you’re in the market for a camera, check out Photocritic SLR. Let me know what you think in the comments!

There’s been a lot of books written about photography throughout the years (I had a stab at it myself…), but to be perfectly honest with you, a lot of them are complete and utter rubbish.

If you’re a regular reader of Photocritic, you’ll have noticed that I don’t do a lot of book reviews; and there’s an excellent reason for that: I rarely come across books that I truly enjoy, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than to slag off the bad ones. Peterson’s Understanding Shutter Speed isn’t one of these books - If you’re still struggling to figure out how this whole shutter speed thing works, and to see some rather splendid examples of what happens when you use different shutter speeds for different jobs, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of this book.

Peterson skips the basics and the theory behind exposure - for which I’ll be forever grateful, because frankly, it’s not that exciting. Instead, the whole book is filled with a vast number of breathtakingly gorgeous photographs (about 160 pages worth, which means around 150 photographs or so, I think), and a fair chunk of text.

What’s unique about this book, though, is that the text largely shies away from the theory, and instead takes you along on a journey, explaining the what, why, and how in a language that anyone can understand easily.

Throughout the book, you’ll get examples and suggestions about how you can use fast and slow shutter speeds to freeze action, imply motion, and capture photographs at night. It talks about panning, speed, and comes with some fanciful ideas about how you can capture great photos by fixing your camera to a moving object (a broom or a shopping trolly are but two examples of getting funky photos).

The best way to use the book is probably to leaf through it, find a photograph you like (and you’re bound to find many), and then read the description to learn how it’s done.

Peterson is an author who reminds us all that photography isn’t - and shouldn’t be - rocket science. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way to understanding how it all fits together - and, as stated already, this book is a great first couple of steps on the road to full-on creativity.

Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Shutter Speed is available from Amazon (USA / UK). Also check out Bryan’s website, if you want go get a flavour for the type of photos you can expect in this book.

The photos used in this article are © Bryan Peterson.

Sorry about more of the geekery, but basically, I’ve spent the past 48 hours trying to make Photocritic better. Part of that was getting shy of my (ludicrously expensive) colo-server, and getting myself on a virtual server instead. One of the geeks I work with (thanks Stuart!) pointed me at SliceHost, and I’m an absolute convert.

I’ve had a couple of problems with getting Photocritic moved over properly (mostly due to the fact that I’ve never set up Apache myself before, so I’m stretched well beyond my usual geekdom), but I think most things should be working properly now.

If you do stumble across anythign that ain’t working as expected, please post a comment with a desctiption, and I’ll look into it.

Finally, don’t worry, I’m about to launch into a series of wicked articles - they is gunz beez awsum, as te lolcats posse would have said :)

Anyway, Slicehost come with the warmest recommendations, and now I’m going to try and move some of my other sites across. Wish me luck :o

- Haje

Interestingly, AppleMatters have done an article about what the iPhone can do for us photographers, including nuggets such as:

3. Client Photos: I’ve always thought it would be great to take a photo of my wedding photography clients at the end of a sell, so the iPhone would be just the stylish camera to do so. I could send them a thank you email with their photo almost instantly. Better yet, I could take a photo of all three us together and send an email with the subject, “your wedding photographer thanks you.” Likewise, the camera on the iPhone could be a useful networking tool in the same manner. There are some people you meat and really become friendly with that you it’s great to snap a photo of them and keep in touch that way.

and:

6. iPhone on a shoot: The most difficult parts of shooting weddings is keeping up with group shots. It might be useful to keep a gallery of group shots on my iPhone that I can glance at to remind me of group shots that I might have missed—ort of a visual checklist.

Pretty awesome stuff. Check out the full article, 10 ways professional photographers can use the iPhone, over at AppleMatters!

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, I’ve been mad busy with my day-job recently (excitingly, we just launched our version of BBC’s iPlayer, known as Demand Five, yesterday), and I’ve got an exciting extension to Photocritic which is coming up soon, so I’ve mostly been doing behind-the-scenes work.

Want to contribute an article?

If any of you fancy writing a guest article on Photocritic, you are more than welcome to - a bit more info on how that side of things works is available here.

Feeds updated!

Also, exciting news about the feeds: The other day, I had a complaint that my feed wasn’t full-text. Don’t ever let it be said that I don’t listen to you guys: I’ve enabled full-text feeds on my blog as per this morning. If you guys fancy putting the feed on your website, you’re more than welcome to

Back into music photography

Finally, this week, I did the first gig photography I’ve done in ages, and I was well excited. My photos, as per usual, are on 3 Songs. The galleries taken on Wednesday were Narration, New Adventures, The Ruling Class, and Silhouette - check ‘em out! Also, if you fancy learning more about gig photography, check out our series on concert photography - especially the introduction article ‘Concert Photography‘!

Bear with me while I get my ducks in a row - hopefully, I’ll be able to go back to semi-regular updates of Photocritic soon!

That was essentially what Pieter asked me about this week. So, without further ado, 8 ways to make your photos jump off the screen.

Use low ISO

If you want the highest possible degree of sharpness from your photographs (and if you don’t, you’re reading the wrong article.), you’re going to have to start by removing anything that gets in the way of being able to extract as much detail out of your photos as possible.

Step 1 is to ensure that your pictures at the very least are recorded with the least possible amount of noise. To do this, set your camera to the lowest ISO setting - most cameras have 100, some have 80 as the lowest setting.

How does this help?

At higher ISO, you can get photos with faster shutter times (we’ll get to that in a bit), but the trade-off is extra digital noise. Which we don’t want.

Stop down your lens

Ooh, look at me using all sorts of photography terminology. In more readable English, ’stopping down your lens’ means to not take your photos at wide-open apertures. You don’t have to take photos at f/22, but the sweet spot for most lenses is at between f/8 and f/11.

How does this help?

At a wide aperture (say, f/2.8 or f/3.5), your lens lets as much light into the camera as possible. “That’s good”, I hear you say but that’s not always the case: you’d be surprised how much fuzzier lenses can be fully open compared to being stopped down slightly. This is doubly true for consumer-grade lenses, such as the lenses that are sold in body-and-lens kits.

Stop down your lens to f/8 to get as much sharpness from it as you can.

Get shy of vibrations

Now that the camera itself doesn’t degrade the image quality by adding extra noise, and your lens is operating at its very best, suddenly you, the photographer, are the issue. Try to make your subjects stand as still as possible, and use a good, sturdy tripod. Use as fast a shutter time as you can too - this counteracts the effects of any camera shake

If you’re shooting with particularly low light, you may even consider using a remote control or the self-timer to ensure that you don’t inadvertently shake the camera when you trip the shutter.

How does this help?

Any vibrations that are transferred through you to the camera cause a very slight blur. Some times, you can’t tell it’s actualy blurry, but trust me - it will affect the crispness of your photos (Why do you think that studio photographers use tripods a lot of the time?). Trust me, use a tripod.

Get enough light

All the tips so far are incredibly useful, but you’ll notice that they all ruin your light: The combination of low ISO, small aperture and high shutter speed mean that you need an ungodly amount of light. Shoot out-doors, use studio strobes, invest in a flashgun and a reflector, set off a nuclear bomb - do whatever you have to to get as much light as you can.

Always shoot in RAW

To maximise the amount of data you have to work with later on, when the time comes to edit your photos, shoot in RAW format.

How does this help?

We didn’t just spend all that effort just to let your camera screw up the photos by throwing away a lot of information and compressing it - which is what happens when you shoot in JPG.

RAW format gives you a load more flexibility, more data to work with, and is an overall better way to work with digital photos.

Watch your exposure

It is positively amazing how much data an imaging chip actually captures - there is so much information in a photograph that you’re never likely to even look at. The secret lies in that all this information is in the shadow parties.

Obviously, it is always better to try and expose your photograps perfectly (See ‘how exposure works‘ to find out how to get it right)

If you have to hedge your bets, it’s always better to underexpose slightly than to over-expose: You can work with underexposure in Photoshop, but an over-exposed image (with areas that appear ‘burned out’ or completely white) is a write-off, sadly.

Having said all that, you lose definition if you have to fiddle too much with a photograph - so do your best to get your exposure as good as possible.

Think about your workflow

Ideally, you want to treat your photos in this order:

1. Take the photo
2. Copy it to your computer
3. Make any adjustments to colour and exposure on the RAW file
4. Make any other adjustments in Photoshop
5. Resize the image for your target medium (a flyer, the web, an e-mail, a photographic print etc)
6. Sharpen your photo (but don’t over-do it)
7. Save it down at the highest possible quality

Sharpen your photos for the right medium

Now that you’ve done everything right, you can think about sharpening your photos. This is quite an in-depth process - so much so, that I could almost write a separate article about it. Oh, wait, I already did - twice!

Read a lengthy explanation for why you should sharpen your photos, and a separate one which treats the all-important question of how you sharpen photographs in the best way possible.

A final note

Pin-sharp photos are great fun, but it’s not necessarily the be-all and end-all of photography (Don’t believe me? Check out the Lensbaby, for example…), and you don’t have to do all of the above all the time. Pick and choose which techniques are convenient / viable given the circumstances - the more of them you implement, the sharper your photos come out!

Quite simply, most of the time, your tripod will be unstable because of shoddy construction, which can’t really be helped. The downside is that if there’s movement in the legs, you’ll find that the wind can actually move your tripod around slightly. Normally, this isn’t much of a problem (although if your camera is moving, there’s no point in lugging a tripod around, right?), but if you’re working with macro photography and similar, you might find it a bit cumbersome.

A lot of it can be counteracted by simply adding more inertia to the set-up, however: Make the whole thing heavier, and while it’ll still move, it will move less drastically!

So basically, attach something heavy to the bottom of the tripod, hanging from the bottom rod (the piece that has the tripod head attached to the other end). Some tripods come with hooks attached especially for this purpose, but you can easily make your own with a piece of string, a hook, or something similar.

Alternatively, take a triangular length of fabric, and tie each corner to a leg of the tripod. You now have a hammock in the middle, underneath your camera. Fill it with heavy things (stones, camera lenses, the treasures of the Sierra Madre, whatever you happen to have handy), and your tripod will be firmly pulled to mother earth. The result is that your tripod is held firmly against the ground, and that your camera is held a lot more steady!

One of the most beautiful ways of presenting photographs has to be getting your photos transferred onto canvas. The cool thing is that you can get quite creative what you do on a canvas - just ask Rembrandt & co!

There are a lot of companies out there who are offering the service these days, but I recently stumbled across one that stands out from the crowd with its snazzy Web 2.0 interface and its glorious prints.

I’ve done canvas printing a few times before, but I figured I’d give it another go in order to create a present for someone who’s got a birthday coming up (so if you are my sister, stop reading now. If you know my sister, don’t tell her, because that’d just be cheating).

The photo I had printed was one of my long-time fave photos I took in a safari park a few years ago - in fact, my sister was there when I took the photo (I’ve written about that trip before, on my private site, in an article titled The Lions might have a thing for Minis, but the monkeys destroyed my car. Don’t ask.), which is one of the reasons why I figured it might make a good gift.

Enfin, I was shopping around for a decent printing site when I came across Full Size Posters, and instantly fell in love.

Finally, someone who understood that I didn’t really want to faff about with a load of tickboxes and suchlike, just a simple, smooth way of printing a canvas print. Even better; they offer the option of not having it mounted on a wooden frame, which allows you far greater flexibility with how you put the photo on the wall.

The canvas print took about a week to arrive (and then another week for me to be able to get my act together and pick it up from the post-office, but that’s a different matter altogether), and I was rather impressed when I had a look at it.

I should tell you this though: Canvas prints aren’t for everyone; they’re a trade-off. What you lose in sharpness, you gain in character. There’s no doubt that regular prints have better colours, more detail, better sharpness and a high impact, but canvas prints have a beauty about them that you just can’t show off otherwise.

My initial idea was to go to town on the print with thick, translucent lacquer. By adding a layer of brush strokes, I figured, the photograph could turn into a half-painting.

Then again, my sister is quite a good painter herself, and I changed my mind: it would make an even better present if I turn it into a collaborative effort: I give her a canvas with a photograph on it, and I challenge her to paint on top of the canvas to turn it into a true artwork.

And thus, the true magnificence of canvas printing came to light: they’re great on their own, but even better as a basis for further artistic expression. Fabulous.

Well, that’s what I thought too, when I signed up to attend Shoot London, an event based out of the Tate gallery, organised by Shoot Experience, a company who organises these kind of events for public and corporate events.

Sadly, it turns out that I’ll probably give future Shoot Experience events a miss - to find out why, I spoke to another participant of the event…

Anthony was one of the people participating in the Shoot London event on May 17th. He was also on my team, so writing this up as an interview might seem slightly presumptuous, but then, this is my blog, and I do as I damn well please, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway. The basic rules for Shoot London are simple: you’re given ten clues, about the area of London, you have six hours, you submit ten photos. It’s easy to see why it is sponsored: it promotes interest in the city, and organisers end up with lots of creative photos that they have rights to.

In the event, sixty teams entered, and the four of us (Catherine, Daniela, Anthony and yours truly) made up team Auslanders (which, for some reason, the organisers kept calling ‘ozlanders’, as if they could spot the one-fourth-austrialian-ness of the team from a mile away).

The rules

The rules did not allow any photoshopping, which I’m cool with: it’s a completely different challenge (much, in fact, like the dpchallenge.com concept of days gone by - a photography site which I’m very fond of indeed) if you can only use in-camera effects. We ended up using in-camera settings which made the photos extra sharp; fuzzy; extra vivid; and black and white, depending on what the situation needed.

The rules were not opposed to us having any help at all – there were no restrictions on googling for answers, and we did find it beneficial to phone a friend (thanks for manning the intergoogles for us, Josh!). My iPhone also came in handy, both for quick Google-advice and for navigational purposes.

The ban on PCs was a bit arbitrary though, as we ended up deleting some very good photographs. As Anthony says, “it was emotional to go through the pics on the camera and delete four out of five good ones in order to keep one that was to be submitted”. In retrospect, I should have brought my EeePC along, if only to copy the good photos off the camera.

To be honest, we were also a little bit grumpy about the one-camera-to-take-the-photos rule - between us, we brought 6 cameras, I think (I brought my freshly acquired Canon 450D and my IXUS 960i).

One camera to rule them all

“Some of the rules seem to be limitations of organisational process more than anything else.”, Anthony muses. “Don’t think that if you have four good photographers with their cameras, you have four times as many chances of taking a good shot: All the photos have to be not just on the same memory card, but taken on the same camera”.

Presumably, this rule exists so the images come out in the same order (you could solve the clues in any order, but had to fill in a little form so the organisers can match the right clue to the right photo), and clearly, if one camera records ‘DC_0284.JPG’ and another records ‘IMG1948.JPG’, it’s hard to tell which photo was taken first.

Having one camera is a downside if the other team members aren’t used to shooting with it - but it’s not a total waste: “Having four team members makes a lot of difference,” Anthony explains, “to help carry gear and props, solve clues, come up with ideas and spot good shots, and to pose for shots. The other three don’t actually need to all be good photographers, but a good photographic eye will help.”

Learning to see what others see

It’s quite interesting to see how the other teams solved the riddles, though, as Anthony explains: “You can sometimes see a shot and think ‘wow that’s original’ … and then see four variations on it following”.

At the end most of the photos taken were shown, projected on a big screen in an auditorium. “I was seriously impressed with some of the photos, and saw some wonderful shots”, Anthony recalls.

“There was one photo with three people with umbrellas jumping on the millennium bridge - it was an amazing photo.”

Haphazard judging

Nonetheless - and this is what sort of ruined the fun for me, sadly - it seems as if the judges were just a little bit too rushed in their, er, judging. “But in many cases the winning shot wasn’t - in my opinion - one of the good ones,” Anthony says. “Judges seemed to favour an obvious joke – equivalent of a zany holiday snap - over a technically interesting or well composed art shot”.

Far more annoyingly, in one case, the judges ended up giving out a prize to a shot that plainly didn’t solve the clue correctly (they took a photo near the Globe Theatre, which was about a mile away and on the wrong side of the river from St Paul’s Cathedral, which was the correct answer) - while the photo itself also didn’t really strike us as being particularly amazing.

Of course, I fully expect comments along the lines of ’sore loser’, but it wasn’t the not winning which grated on me: Most of the time, our photo wasn’t as good as some of the other photos which were shown for a given clue, but it was better than the photo which won.

Good fun, but not photographically challenging enough

As Anthony summarised the experience; “there is no shortage of takers for this fun day out, but if you’re already a DSLR-owning, multiple-lens using, flickr-account-holding arty-shot-taking passionate amateur camera geek, this contest may not be what you’re looking for”.

… Which is a damn shame, because the idea really is incredibly good.

Our photos

As mentioned before, we had quite a few photos we were rather proud of - in the interest of completeness, here are our 10 entries - including the ones that were not-so-good. The only editing done on them is a resize from 12 megapixels down to 650 pixels across so they’ll fit on this blog better

Borough market, photo taken by Anthony, Sigma 17-35mm, vivid colours.

Imax cinema, photo taken by Haje, Sigma 17-35mm, vivid colours, the zoom effect was done by zooming while having a long (0.5 second) shutter time. The lights? Well, that’s just the way the underpass by the IMAX looks!

South bank book market, photo taken by Haje, Lensbaby 3G, in-camera black-and-white. I love the retro look the Lensbaby lends to this photo, especially with the top-hat and the old-fashioned looking clothing Daniela is wearing. Oh, and the Moleskine, of course.

Gabriel’s wharf, photo taken by Haje, Sigma 70-200. Not really happy with the way this one turned out, I think this was easily our weakest photo.

Blackfriar’s pub, photo taken by Haje, Lensbaby 3G. A less-than-inspired photo, sadly, but it was raining, and we were a bit scrapped for ideas in this one.

Blackfriar’s pub, photo taken by Haje, Sigma 17-35mm. Yes, we wore hats for all of this, and this is our ‘team portrait’, which simultaneously answered the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ clue

The tube (’see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’), photo taken by Haje, Sigma 17-35. We only had one stop to take this one, and the tube shakes a lot when it goes, so I had to shoot it at a high ISO (flash photography is strictly forbidden on the London Underground). I’m not really happy with the way this one turned out either, sadly.

St. Pauls, photo taken by 10-second self-timer, Sigma 17-35. On this one, we decided to try and do an ‘abby road’, to avoid the rather samey photos we expected everyone else was getting. This is one of the occasions where I was really sad to see the out-takes getting deleted, because we did have some wicked cool alternative shots on this one.

‘The sweet smell of success’, photo taken by Haje, Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 lens. On this one, we just decided that we couldn’t figure out a good way to answer the clue, so we decided to get ironic/sarcastic about it. Catherine went and spoke to the guy, and he was more than happy to be photographed - especially after we gave him about £5 in change. With a bit of increased contrast, I feel this photo would really be quite good.

The Millennium Bridge, photo taken by Haje, Sigma 17-35mm. It’s really difficult to photograph the Millennium bridge well, possibly because it is such an iconic landmark by now - everyone is so familiar with it, that once 60 different teams have had their way with it, there is little left. We did spot this grid, however, and decided to do something interesting. Anthony pointed out that “this photo looks like film frames, with the main frame being taken up by Daniela”, and I can’t but agree - I think it was conceptually one of the coolest photos we did.

This post was co-written by Anthony Steele

I make little secret of my dislike for microstock, as re-iterated in my ‘The Problem with Microstock‘ article a few weeks back. The curse of having a relatively high-profile blog, however, is that people tend to disagree with you. Well, that’s not really the curse, that’s a fact of life. The curse, specifically, is that you frequently get incredibly eloquent people disagreeing with you - people who disagree passionately enough to write their side of the story.

Seeing as how I’m not a politician, I’m fully entitled to change my mind about things, including Microstock. And while I still feel that the premise of Microstock is wrong for all the reasons described in that other post, I wouldn’t be much of an Economist subscriber if I didn’t see that there was a flipside to the proverbial coin as well - in this case, expressed by Willie Thomas, a man who makes his living with stock photography.

I caught up with him to find out how he does it…

Selling for Pennies - Life as a Microstock Photographer

What is Microstock?

Things that define what a Microstock agency is are:

1. Sells images exclusively via the Internet.
2. More accessible to a wider range of photographers than traditional stock agencies.
3. Sell their images at a lower than traditional rate.

This last point is why most traditional stock photographers often foster a deeply ingrained dislike of Microstock.

The counter-argument put forward by Microstock agencies is you will make-up lost income on a higher quantity of sold images. Ultimately, it’s all down to how much you earn in the long run. Say you need an income of $2000 per month, for example - does it matter if you sell 2 photos at $1000 a piece, or 1000 photos at $2 a piece?

Photographers submitting to traditional stock photography sites will say yes, and argue that making $2000 on 2000 sales is preposterous.

If all things in the world of stock photography were equal, this point of view wins - after all, nobody would dream of argue against making more money with less work? In the stock photography world, however, that’s no longer the way it works. Just like in all other free markets, a photograph has no value other than what a client is willing to pay. In practice, this still means that extremely good photographers are probably better off selling their work under rights managed licences - but for anyone who is mediocre, there is a huge slice of the pie left, in the shape of microstock photography.

The birth of Microstock

“I found Microstock back in the days when it still was the “Designer’s dirty little secret”.”, Thomas recalls. “I knew a designer that had many small business owners, restaurants owners and auto repair shops as customers”. Needless to say, they were all in the market for a new website. The problem was that in order to get imagery, you had a few choices available:

1. Steal the photo off the internet and hope for the best
2. Get a professional photographer involved
3. Buy photos from the established stock photography houses
4. Take the photos yourself

Take a look at those choices. In effect, 1 is illegal, 2 is brutally expensive (and not always possible - a grocery shop might not actually always sell dew-fresh tomatoes, but might still wish to use pictures of them on their website), 4 is probably impossible because photography is quite difficult, and, again, you may not have what you actually want photographed.

Which leaves option 3, which is also brutally expensive. On the other hand, there are a lot of quite good photographers on the internet, who take photos that are good enough for the mom-and-pop shop. If only there was a way to tap the amateur and semi-professional photographers, pay them a small fee, and use their photos…

Thus, microstock was born.

The economics of Microstock

The problem with the small websites, of course, was two-fold. “On average”, Thomas says “they had $400-$650 to spend. This is not much of a budget, if they needed five images, the licensing fees at a traditional stock houses each image would cost about $50, which totals to $250 USD”. Obviously, you can’t have photography alone take up more than half of the budget that is earmarked a website.

This puts web designers in a tight spot: “My web designer friend could not make a profit and still pay the licensing fees.”, Thomas concluded. And while he would love to be able to help, he couldn’t afford to shoot custom images and license them for $10 USD each.

Microstock to the rescue. “The designer gets to pay a license he can afford, the business owner gets a website that looks good, I can shoot the images, then license them to 10,000 other small business owners who are in the same boat”, Thomas says. That should leave just about everyone as a winner, right?

Wrong.

“Traditional stock houses photographers weren’t happy. At all.”, Thomas recalls. “Now that we are selling to this segment of the market that they have ignored, we are bottom feeders and accused of stealing the food from their mouths.”, he says, but points out that there’s something the traditional stock photographers seem to be forgetting. “The people who buy RF Microstock are not the same as the ones licensing RM.”

Why aren’t they the same people? Simple: “They are not the same ones that can afford to license RF from traditional stock houses.”, Thomas muses, and makes it clear how he feels: “These are customers that because of greed, arrogance, and mistaking business for art, photographers told to fuck off”.

Why the numbers don’t quite stack up…

Bruce Livingstone created the first Microstock company iStockPhoto in 2000, and sold it to Getty six years later for a mind-melting $50 million USD. The cynical would say that he was the only one who got rich of micro stock, but they’d be wrong.

Getty Images reported earning of 857.6 million USD for 2006. This was an increase over their 2005 earnings. In the same year a PDN survey reported, “In general, stock incomes have stagnated for most photographers over the past five years, with slightly more than half (52%) of respondents reporting incomes that have stayed the same or fallen”.

Wait a minute… The stock agencies are making more money, but the photographers shooting for the stock agencies are unhappy? How could that possibly be right?

The rumour has it that Photographers submitting to traditional stock houses are making the BIG BUCKS - and you frequently hear success stories of photographers who are making a very fine living indeed. Is that true for all of them, though?

“The PDN survey tells a different story”, Thomas says: Photographers selling images at traditional stock agency reported an average income of $86,400 (from all types of photography) half of that ($40,600) came from stock sells. Self-distributors those earned the majority of their stock income selling directly to clients reported an average income of $68,700 about 35% of that ($24,000) came from stock sells.

The big bucks microstockers feel they are missing comes down to $40,000 to $24,000 per year. These amounts are well within the range of any professional Microstocker to make. The survey also found that photographers that reported the majority of their income came from RF stock sales earning on average were $63,200 from this licensing model. For the photographers that reported the majority of their income came from RM stock sales the average was $38,500 in stock sales.

So, Why does the PDN survey reports an average microstock income of less then $1,000 per year? Thomas has an answer ready: “more people do photography as a hobby then a profession”. He also offers the flipside, though: “If you make it a profession, there’s ample opportunity to make a decent living in microstock”.

How can a photographer make a living on $.20 a download?

On any websites critical of microstock, you always see this amount ($0.20) reported. The chart above from the PDN survey shines a little more light on this subject.

As we can see, the only photographers making that amount are submitting to Shutterstock a subscription Microstock site. The other two sites shown, Dreamstime averages $1.15 per download and IstockPhoto $.85 per download payment.

Why are these figures per download payments so low? The majority of people submitting to Microstock site are hobbyist. These are the contributors with portfolio of 10-300 images and receive 2-4 downloads each day.

The professional Microstocker has much larger portfolios and higher download rates, though: “I define a professional Microstocker as someone with an average portfolio of 1000-10,000 images and an average download rate of about 30-250 images per day.”, Thomas says.

“In addition”, he claims - and I believe this is the crux of the matter “they treat working with Microstock sites as a business.” The problem with the large number of amateurs involved in microstock is that they have a very loud voice: Complaining about lack of sales or a low return isn’t countered by those who are doing well, because they’re too busy running their business.

“I will confine this discussion to Gold level exclusive iStockPhoto contributors, since I have the most knowledge about this level.”, Thomas says. “On average Gold, members have 1000 images in their portfolios, over 10,000 downloads and receive a 35% commission rate. The average payment per download would be closer to $1.54. A typical download rate per month would be about 1,100 images.”

If you’ve missed the math on that one, we’re talking pretty big money, but it doesn’t stop there, as Thomas points out: “Additional income consists of extended license sells, print sales, and custom jobs shoots from contacts made on these sites. Extended license sells and custom jobs shoots on average will add $50.00 to $100.00 to each month’s total. When we add these numbers together; (1.54 x 1100 = 1700 x 12 = $20,400) you get a better picture of the average professional Microstockers income.”

So, how does Microstock stack up against traditional stock photography?

At iStockPhoto a large file goes for $10 USD, a Gold level exclusive member would receive $3.50 USD or 35%. “Corbis licenses a 2 MB file for $140 USD of this I am guessing the photographer get about 20%, or $28 USD.”, Thomas estimates. “I have no way of knowing what the true commission is, but I know Getty pays a 20% commission. I can find no reason to believe Corbis would pay much higher.”

It is no surprise that the traditional stock houses photographer has made more money. The fact is he/she has made $24.50 more than the Microstockers.

How many large size downloads would it take the Microstockers to equal this income, seven large downloads. In the world of Microstock, images anything less than 10 downloads per month would be conceded a slow mover.

Buy for a penny and sale for a dime.

“I am not trying to convince photographers to switch over to shooting for RF Microstock.”, Thomas concedes. “Each person has their business to run and to make profitable”. He continues: “We really need really about how the new models of selling photography effect business and how we can capitalize on this new market.”

A keen eye for business can be as important as a sharp eye for a photograph: “Sometimes we treat our images like children, and we take things too personally. Stock photographic has always been about business, nothing has chanced in the last five years. What is the first rule of business? Buy for a penny and sale for a dime.”

By making a proper budget, doing the math, and operating like a proper business, you’re well on your way to making it big, then. Surely, there’s something missing from all of this… Oh, yeah. The photos…

So, what makes a good microstock photo?

There is little difference, as far as I can tell, about the type of photograph that sells well on Microstock sites or RF images sold by places like Getty or Corbis.

The only differences are the customer base and pricing. Some of the themes that seem to do very well are Business, Lifestyle images, and images dealing with concepts - think ‘illustration image’, and you’re thinking in the right direction.

Why choose microstock over big stock agencies?

“Microstock site are accessible!”, Thomas exclaims. “Microstock site do not ask you to submit 3,000 images for concretion. Microstock sites do not work under the “Good Old Boy” system of inclusion, and they’ve found new customer bases that were unable to buy images in the past. These customers are bringing lots of new money into the market”, Thomas enthuses.

In addition, there are a few advantages with the mediom of microstock: “Microstock sites have a very fast turn around time for getting these images on the market. An example would be, hot new media topic “world-wide food shortage”. I come up with a great idea for this topic, and submit images to a traditional stock agency. It may take weeks before those images pass thru the inspection and key wording process. Submitting the same images to a Microstock sites and the images can be online within hours.”

So, what does a good stock portfolio look like?

Willie Thomas is a successful microstock photographer, and that made me very curious about what his stock portfolio, in fact, looks like. Luckily, he’s happy to tell us: “As of April 23, 2008, I have 1176 images online. The pattern of downloads is 10% of these get multiple downloads each day. Another percent of the portfolio downloads once a day and some images download only once a month. What I am always surprise about is the total amount poor performers contribute to the bottom line.”

Despite all of this, he couldn’t quite live off his microstock earnings. “It question depends on how much money you need to support your standard of living.”, he quips. “You can find some very interesting ideas about this subject here. For mepersonally, I did not start in microstock to make a living. I started submitting images to supplement my photographic income.”

Thomas further explains that most of his images that sell well have people in them - not such a big surprise, really, considering his ‘day job’ is as a portrait photographer. “I shoot high-end portraits for business people, mostly”, he says, and believes that this gives him access to many location and models that work well as stock images. He has a few models he works with again and again, but is also on the look-out for new faces.

Investing in your stock portfolio

If you want to take (micro)stock photography seriously, though, you have to make some sacrifices. “Spend a penny to make a dime”, Thomas repeats, and clarifies that you really have to work hard and smart to make your stock portfolio pay for itself.

“With stock photography, since you do not know if or how long it will take to get your investment back, you must keep the costs low.”, he advises.

“I use 5% to 10% of each months earning and reinvest this into image making. This may not seem like much but so far, this has been working. I find you have to get creative to keep the costs this low.”

Just another grinder

When asked how good a photographer he is, Thomas jokes that he’s a “fucking rock star”, but once the laughter dies down, he admits he’s no better than many other photographers out there. “I am a grinder like 90% of the photographers working. I am passionate about photography and love my job. In my group of photo friends, I am the person who can light anything. In the end, I will let the images speak for themselves.”

“How long did it take you to build up your microstock portfolio?”, I ask him. “Hey, don’t ask a question like that - it make it sound like I have stop building it”!. The man’s got a point.

“I am a slow starter and it took me over six months to get 100 images into the portfolio.”, he says. ” Once I saw you could turn this into a profitable business I got serious about producing images. Remember selling stock images is just part of my photographic income. In the beginning I had to find a way to make, it fit into my schedule. To make this work and to keep cost low, my workflow had to be tight.”

A week in the life of a microstock star

Monday: Plan stock shoots/process images from last weeks’ shoots. I try to get two stock sessions done per week. For processing the images, I use Lightroom for about 90% of the work. I am a firm believer in getting it right in the camera, so I do not spend much time fixing images in Photoshop. I am a firm believer in Actions and Presets, if I do take an image into Photoshop more than likely I have built an Action to fix the problem.

Tuesday: Other studio business

Wednesday: Shoot stock images/upload images. A stock session last from two to three hours depending on what I have to shoot. After the shoot, it is back to other studio business for the rest of the day. I use software that allows me to bulk upload images, this part of the process is complete in the evening.

Thursday and Friday: Other studio business

Saturday: Flea markets/Stock shoots.

Sunday: Extreme couching!

Final advice

There’s no real secret to microstock photography: It’s all about the hard graft, putting in the hours, and delivering consistently good work. But then, that’s the case with all professions, right?

A huge thanks to Willie Thomas of EDPT fame - also check out his iStockPhoto portfolio!

Anyway… If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box.

With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on it.

Pure, unadulterated awesome - check it out here! (via)

The winners are:

#2 - ryan97ou
#88 - Luís Brás
#120 - John Jimenez
#116 - Tim Norris
#98 - Aaron Snowden

I’ll e-mail you all as soon as to get your addresses so I can ship the books out to you. CONGRATULATIONS!

Original competition for posterity:

I know I keep harping on about it, but I’m rather proud of this thing - loads of you have already bought the book (just saw the latest report from the publisher - incredible!), but if you fancy winning one completely for free, then here’s your chance!

I’ve got 5 copies to give away completely for free, and I’ll even sign them for you, if you’re interested. To enter, simply add a comment to this post.

The winner will be drawn on May 5th this year, at random from the commenters (so make sure that you’ve entered a working e-mail address so I can contact you to get your mailing address!).

If you’re not sure what to leave a comment about, why not just post a link to your DeviantArt gallery, Flickr profile, or website? I’d love to learn a little more about you lovely people!

As an aside, would you guys be interested in more competitions on Photocritic?

Putting your photos up for criticism - whether it is at your local photography club, via a site such as DeviantArt, or even when asking a good friend to give some feed-back - is like putting your own head in the guillotine and taking a chance.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the best ways to improve as a photographer, and one of the best lessons you’ll learn is to discover how to deal with negative photo critiques…

1) It may come across as crass, rude, or wrong, but there may be a kernel of truth in it.

If someone tells you “LOL learn how 2 autofocus, you dweeb”, you need to do 2 things: Live in the happy knowledge that whilst your camera might have had an off day, at least you know how to string a grammatically correct sentence together.

And perhaps that picture is a little bit blurry, now tat you look at it closely…

Take a step back, and take commentary on face value. If you honestly can’t say you agree with a piece of criticism, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you are objective enough to be able to try and see it from their viewpoint.

2) They might disagree, but they are your audience.

Ultimately, you are the photographer, and what you decide is how the final result gets done. Nobody can tell you what to do, and if you like your photo, then you’ve won one of the huge battles.

At the same time, it’s quite possible that the people ripping your photos to shreds are the people you were trying to target: whether you’re thinking about selling them as microstock, as art works, or just to give your mum a present is irrelevant.

Your photos are out there for interpretation, and if you care about the message you are sending, you’ll have to go the extra mile to make sure that they aren’t getting misinterpreted.

3) As soon as you let ‘em go, you no longer own ‘em.

It’s the curse of all writers and poets: They spend months - years, even - crafting their masterpiece, and then nobody ‘gets’ it. They all ‘get it’ wrong. Tell you what though, that’s where part of the beauty comes from: If you are taking a photo which you meant to symbolise the innocence of youth, and your first 10 commenters feel it’s a strong commentary on, say, child abuse, then they are per definition right.

It is not your job to interpret your own photographs, it is your job to take them. This is a good thing: if people can make up their own story to go with the photograph - their own connotations and bias, as it were - they are much more likely to connect emotionally with the photograph. If this is achieved; if someone is caused to feel something because of your photo; your mission is complete.

4) They talk. You shut up.

Remember that, just like you are not there to interpret your work, you’re not there to defend it either.

In a way, the best thing you can do is to never respond to any criticism. Let’s be honest - you will never be able to re-create the EXACT same image ever again anyway. Take the criticisms on board as points of reference for future photographs.

Learn from your mistakes, learn about what makes your audience buzz, and learn from your own opinions of your work.

5) Remember that the best works might be universally hated: Be thick-skinned.

Technical aspects of your photographs might be objective: A photo can be accidentally over-exposed, blurry, or have some rubbish in the background which makes your photograph less-than-perfect. Once you start killing the technical foibles of your photographic work one by one (don’t go too perfectionist on it though, it’s not useful to end up deleting all of your photos because of every little detail), the actual creative work starts shining through, and this is where the worst potential for getting hurt comes from.

You can kick yourself for small technical mistakes in your photographs (and you’ll continue making them for the rest of your photographic career), but if people start critiquing your artistic choices, it’s a different thing altogether.

The important thing here is to believe in your own work 100%: If you feel you’ve done it right, and if the image is an accurate representation of what you were trying to do, then all you can do is to shrug off their comments and move on.

Just think about it: Pink Floyd, The Decemberists, Pendulum, Metallica, Billy Joel, Leonard Cohen, Zero 7 - they’ve all been called ‘the best band ever’ by reviewers at one point or another, and yet it is never difficult to find someone who doesn’t care about - or even actively dislikes - them.

Non-technical

Let us imagine a value called TCE. This TCE (The Correct Exposure) does not exist, because you might for a variety of reasons want a different exposure than the TCE. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume TCE exists, and this is what you will want when you take a certain picture.

To get a correct exposure, you will want to have EXACTLY the right amount of light to capture your image. Not too much, and not too little.

So, what is it that might affect how much light comes to the film or imaging chip?

• Shutter speed - Imagine a mug with a lid containing a mysterious source of light, and the room you stand in is covered in darkness. Shutter speed would be how long you open the lid.
• Aperture - Same cup, same concept, but this time, how far you open the lid (if you open it a little - small aperture, i.e. high aperture numbers (for example f/22). If you open it all the way - large aperture - i.e. low aperture numbers (for example f/2.8)
• These are the two basic ones. The last factor that comes into play is your film speed, or the light sensitivity of your surroundings while holding the cup if you will.

That’s all there is to it - these three factors combined allow you to manipulate the light in all kinds of ways (big depth of field through small apertures, freezing motion through fast shutter times, etc).

So, to get TCE, you will want to combine these three factors into JUST the correct way. Now, if you replace TCE with TCEV (The Correct Exposure Value), you understand what I have been on about.

EV is a number describing an exposure - any exposure - regardless of its “correctness”.

Technical

The definition of EV=0 is an exposure of 1 second at f/1 using ISO 100 film, or any equivalent thereof (2 seconds f/1.4, 4 seconds f/2.0 etc)

The technical definition of EV is 2^EV = LS/C.

EV = the exposure value - explained above
L = field (or zone) luminance -
C = Exposure Constant - This is a constant that depends on what unit you are using to express the luminance (L)If you use candelas/ft², it is 1.3. If you are using candelas/m²*, it is 12.5*. If you use apostilb, it is 3,98.
S = film speed following the ISO standard

*) some of you might know cd/m² as lux or lumens/m²,

This also means that 2^ev = A²/T

A = the f-stop number of the aperture
T = shutter time in seconds

Combining these two; EV = log2(A²/T) = log2(LS/C) - which is the only formula you are likely to need, if you want to understand the basics of mathematics behind photography.

So what is the EV number used for?

Ah. Well, the EV number is used internally in cameras - an EV number of 10, for example, would refer to all the combinations of shutter times and apertures that would give a given exposure using ISO 100 film. This is useful, because a camera only has to add one thing to this equation; A light measurement. A camera with a lookup table or an algorithm to calculate the correct EV is all set for using all the different combinations that are able to give you the exposure you want.

But why would I care, if the camera handles everything?
Because the camera doesn’t always get things right. You may also want to use alternative exposures for artistic reasons.

Most cameras have an EV compensation wheel/dial, allowing you to choose how much you want to over/underexpose an image. This is usually measured in +/- 2EV, 1/3 steps. This means that you can over- or underexpose an image by two whole EV steps (which, incidentally, would mean the same as two full f-stops either way), in steps of 1/3 EV.

I hope that made things a little clearer - if not, leave a comment, and I’ll see what I can do!

The internet is a cold and heartless place, and the biggest source of traffic to any website should be coming from search engines (Photocritic, for example, gets about 70% of its traffic from search engines. Mind you, it’s mostly people looking for pictures of nude women. Go figure.)

Luckily, there are quite a few things you can do as a photographer to make your site really zing in the search engines - and for the sake of making a nice round figure (and, of course, so the Digg and Reddit crowds will love it like a kitten loves tuna fish) - here’s a lovely top-10 list to get you started!

For the sake of photography, you can basically optimise your site for two types of search: Text search (what most people think of when they think ’search’) and image search (take a guess…).

It’s worth noting that this list is in no particular order - but the more of them you implement, the better you are likely to do.

First of all, check out the phenomenal SEOMoz, and check out their ‘Google Search Engine Ranking Factors‘ document. It outlines a lot of the stuff you need to know about making your site accessible to Google etc, the most important of which is ‘Don’t use Flash / Flex to build your site’, and ‘Make sure you haven’t inadvertently blocked search engine spiders from entering the site by using a drop-down menu for your navigation system’

1 - Update often

First off, you could do a lot worse than making sure to update your site frequently, no matter what kind of content you have. Many SEO experts have observed that Google tends to give higher ranking to sites that are updated more frequently.

That might mean that, instead of posting 100 new photos once a month, you post 10 or 12 every 3 days. Another way to have new content often is to have a blog. Sprinkle your photos throughout the blog content and the search engines will eat them up like the proverbial fat lady at a cake sale.

2 - Context and categorisation is king

Context is important. The search engines want to know what your site is about. You might want to use the word “photo” in all of your filenames, to keep the context of a photography website consistent.

The next step is to stop and think for a secon - what types of photos do you take? Try to organize them into categories and maybe even sub-categories, so that you have some context for each page. See Rolf Hicker’s Photography website for a good example of photo categories. Of course he also…

3 - Place text near your photos

Once you’ve placed your photos on their pages, the nearby text becomes important. Google gets clues about the content of images from the text near them. Consider using captions or quotes that have the same keywords as apply to your photos, and place them next to the photos for maximum value in the search engine ranking.

Linnea Lenkus Fine Art Portrait Studios website, for example, is an excellent example of good use of quotes next to the photo. Contrast this with the Chesler Photo site doesn’t come up on the first several pages in a “maternity” image search, despite having a whole gallery of such photos, probably due to not having enough textual content on the site.

The Digital Photography School website is another fab example of the use of text on a photography page.

4 - ALT tags are your friend. Use them

When you add an image to your website, you’re using an <img src=”[URL]“> tag. You can - and should - add attributes to this tag, including an alt attribute.

Put an explanation of what the image depicts in your ALT tags. Not only do you make it easier for blind people to navigate your site (although why blind people would want to visit a photography site remains a mystery to me…), but it is one of the few sure-fire things that a search-engine has to go on when deciding what your photographs are about.

In addition to using keywords in your ALT tags, make sure that the actual file-name contains the same keywords.

Remember that your alt attribute can have spaces; use dashes to separate individual words if you want your filename to contain multiple words.

Don’t stuff the “alt” tag with lots and lots of keywords, however, or it will appear to be spamming; just describe the image honestly in the same way you would describe it to someone over the telephone.

Example: <img src=”/images/kitten-eating-tuna.jpg” alt=”Photograph of a black and white kitten eating tuna. Nom!”>

The Mackins Design Studio website is an example of good use of descriptive alt tags as well as filenames. As a counter-note: PremierPhotographer Pat McNulty’s site doesn’t come up on the first several pages of an image search for “castles” despite having a castle category - there could be many reasons for this, but not using ALT attributes will be at least part of the reason.

5 - Add a blog to your site

You probably never knew that Photocritic started off as a blog-belonging-to-a-photo-site, but it’s the truth. I guess it says quite a lot about me as a photographer that the photography blog became at least a bazillion times more popular than my photography site(s), but I guess it was a godsent: I was always a better writer than a photographer anyway.

Maybe it’s because blogs are generally updated regularly, but images used in blogs are often numbered in the top of image search results, even for blogs which have as their regular topic something that has nothing to do with the keyword. See Mr&Mrsijunky’s blog for a good use of blog with photos. In addition, it’s a lot easier to SEO the hell out of a blog than to make an image-led site really fly. Sad, isn’t it?

6 - Start using the TITLE attributes

Use the image “title” tag. Similar to the “alt” tag, it isn’t compatible with all browsers, yet, but will be accessible to Firefox users, and the spiders from Google and other search engines will see it. You can put text similar to what you put in the alt tag in this tag.

Usability expert Roger Johansson explains:

[The ALT attribute] is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element. That information is displayed as a tooltip by most graphical browsers, though manufacturers are free to render title text in other ways.

If you fancy geeking out about alt vs title tags, Johansson’s blog is the place to go…

7 - Keyword the hell out of your page title

Use keywords in the page title. The page title is a header tag that causes text to appear in the top bar of the window when the page is open in your browser.

Each page of your website should have a different title, a title that contains the keywords applicable to that page, but in title form, not as a list. Check out the browser window title of this very blog entry for a good example…

Also check out how the home page of Photocritic uses different keywords in the title tag, when compared to all the other pages on the site. This differentiation is designed to guide users (and, I admit, search engines) to the right place.

8 - Use keywords in the page URL

That really means the HTML filename for that page. Don’t name your pages page1.html and page2.html. A much better name would be castle-photo-gallery.html or dover-castle-panorama-photos.html

9 - Keep an eye on your directory structure

Use image folders and sub folders. Put all of your images into a folder called “images” when you upload them to your web host. Then, use sub-folders for common categories. The image named Sorbie_Castle.jpg should be in /images/castles/, for example. Not only does it make it easier for yourself, you’ll be able to

10 - Be smart when linking

Anchor text is the text that appears on a page when there is a link; it’s the text that is underlined and/or in a special color to denote a link. These anchor text links should be descriptive, and - if possible - contain keywords relevant to the page you are linking to.

If you put a link to your castles page somewhere else in your site, don’t say “click here” to see my castle photos. The text comprising the link should have the keyword in it, so it should say see my “castle photos” and the words “castle photos” would be the link to that page.

Do this on your own site and encourage others who link to you to do the same. You can even provide actual text they can use to link to you which contains your keyword. A good way to do this is to have a small note at the bottom of every page inviting people to link back to you, and including a link to a page containing the appropriate code with your keyword in the anchor text.

I am a firm believer of understanding how things are done manually, however. If you are to take shortcuts, you have to know the long road to get there first. So… If you have a darkroom, how can you sharpen your images without letting the film go anywhere near a computer?

Here’s how…

In the old days, limited film and lens quality kept the sharpness away from photography. When the negative techniques started evolving, and lenses and film became the bottlenecks, people started to experiment with ways to improve the image in various ways. Contrast became one of the first improvements, but this was comparatively easy to correct in the darkroom. Now sharpness was a different thing altogether.

The first cameras used horribly show shutter times; This increases the chance of camera and/or subject movement. Slight focussing problems also frequently occurred. Remember that a regular 24 x 36 mm negative is enlarged significantly, and even the tiniest blurriness becomes visual: Which is why some bright soul came up with a way to sharpen the final results.

How to…

If you want to have a go at using unsharp masking in the darkroom (heh - if you want to put yourself through stuff like that, let me tell you; I like you), here is a concise guide how it can be done. I have had a lot of surprises when using this technique - mostly positive surprises, but every now and then, things go very wrong. Even then, it looks interesting, if nothing else.

Right. Take the negative you want to have sharpened, and place it on a photographical-grade glass plate. Underneath the glass plate, put some unexposed film. Now, make a contact copy of the film, and develop the film from under the glass plate. That should leave you with a positive copy of your negative. This copy will be ever so slightly blurred (because of the glass plate), which is exactly what you want. Align the two film strips, and put them both in your enlarger.

Right - let’s have a look what has happened now. Theoretically - if the contact copy was 100% exact, you shouldn’t be able to see through your negative. Why? Well - what was light in your original negative should now be dark in your positive (effectively a slide), and all the gradations should be cancelling each other out. However, you don’t have (and didn’t want) an exact copy - you need the small differences. When turning on your enlarger, you will see a strange outline of your image.

This outline consists of the original highlights (which were black in your negative - cause it’s a negative, remember?), and the blur is introduced into the transitions in the shadows of the image. What this means? Well - your shadows will ‘take more space’ in the image, and eat into the blurred edges of your original negative.

So - what you’ll want to do is to just briefly flash this unsharp mask on your photographic paper, and then expose the paper normally, using only the negative.

You should be able to tell the difference between pictures that have / have not had this done to them.

So how long should you flash the enlarger? I wish I could tell you. I have spent endless days in darkrooms, and eventually it becomes second nature. You can tell approximately how much exposure a particular unsharped image needs - just keep practising, and bracket all your tries (yes - half step bracket your unsharp masked image, and then see what works best. Take notes to find out exactly how you can make it all come toghether perfectly.)

Good luck!

I was recently speaking to Elisa Longhitano, who found herself in the same situation. As she was telling me about how she was teaching herself photography, I found myself smiling, and wishing I had access to the internet back when I was learning. Either way, Elisa’s story is a lovely reminder of the fact that all you need to do to learn the dark (well, technically, the perfectly gradient) art of photography, is to be curious, and just that little bit inventive…

“It was during my last year in high school”, Elisa explains “that I decided to surf the web to find useful information about photography. During the search I stumbled across, and ended up contacting, Walter Lo Cascio, an Italian architect who has a powerful passion for photography. We became friends, and he ended up giving me a lot of great advice”, she recalls. The most important piece of advice was to seek inspiration from the outside world. “look at those great pictures that are in books and on the web if you want to learn how to take a good picture”, he told her.

Like many others would, Elisa was worried if it was possible to learn how to take photos without active mentoring. “I thought it was impossible to learn how to take a good picture just looking at others’ works”, she recalls. “Walter would be relentless, however, and started showing me some of his and of others’ best pictures.”

Learning by recreating the work and techniques of others

“I started surfing through photography forums and reading the comments left for the pictures that fascinated me.”, she explains. “Reading the comments has been pretty useful to me because I have been able to learn from others’ mistakes and also because I’ve been able to find some interesting information about topics like ‘lens aperture’, ’shutter speed’, and other technical aspects of the shot.”

One of the photos which got Elisa inspired is the photo by Adolfo Fabbri, on the right. (Bigger version here) She started experimenting with the very dark, almost Frank Miller-esque low-key photography style, wanting to recreate the effect herself.

She started off trying to use partial back-lighting, arriving at something like this:

Which, despite being a pretty attractive photograph, was nowhere near what she was trying to accomplish. Further experimentation resulted in something which was a little bit more like it:

Which is, well, Elisa is pretty much straight on the money: It’s not a bad shot, but “It is just a meaningless underexposure!”.

Obviously, more experimentation would be necessary to really learn this new technique. She continued experimenting, and eventually happened upon a photo which turned out to be rather beautiful. The only problem? “I didn’t remember exactly what I did to reach this result!” - I’m sure most of us have experienced the same at one point or another…

As a physics student, the fact that she was unable to recreate the shot drove her spare: “I just couldn’t be satisfied because I kept thinking ‘In physics, too, an experiment makes sense only if you can repeat it’”. So she did what any good scientist would do: Set herself a target. “I must be able to repeat this kind of shot”.

So, the experiments continued.

“I started thinking about what I had to do, and I realized that beyond the shutter speed or the lens aperture, it was also important to care about where lights come from, and what is behind the subject”

The further experiments involved a lot of taking photos into the light (or ‘backlighting’, as it tends to be called), as you can see from the photos on the left. “I liked these pictures”, Elisa told me, but still wasn’t quite happy: “Even if they are both taken against the light there were too many details”.

So, Elisa continued experimenting systematically. By taking a photo at one shutter time, evaluating it carefully, and then dialing back the shutter time yet a little bit more, her vision of what she wanted to do with low-key photography started to take form.

“I did nothing special or original”, she claims with just a little bit too much humbleness for my liking: “I only tried to learn and take inspiration from other works, and with a lot of attempts and effort I think to have reached something decent.”

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a story if it didn’t have a rather stunning end… And it does, in the form of a portrait of her boyfriend Emanuele, titled Against the Darkness:

Lessons learned

1. Use the internet to find photographs you like. With services such as Flickr (in this case, try searching for Low Key and select ‘most interesting’ as the sort order) or DeviantArt (Same, but ‘Low Key’ and ‘Popular’), you can find tons of inspiration.
2. Don’t let anyone tell you what is good or bad. Make up your own mind. Select 5 photos in the genre you are trying to learn something about, and then put them in order of best to worst. What makes the best photo ‘best’? How could you recreate this?
3. First, re-create a photo. This is a purely technical exercise - worry about creativity later.
4. Once you have the technical skills down pat (again, a website like DeviantArt can be incredibly useful in this respect - Tell people what you’re trying to do, ask for feed-back, sit back and be amazed), try to think out a photo where you can use the new technique you’ve learned.
5. Keep trying a new technique for a while, create your own style based on the technique.
6. When you go bored of it, or feel like you’re ready for another challenge… Well, go to step 1!

A huge thank-you to Elisa for contributing so strongly to this article. Check out more of her photos on Flickr!