Only ten years ago, professional photographers would scoff at the idea of using a mobile phone to take good quality images, and they would burst out laughing at the thought that one day the humble smartphone would give professional cameras a run for their money.
We’ve all heard the saying that a camera adds ten pounds, and to an extent that’s true. Choosing the right lens for your portrait photography really depends on the effect you want to give. The same portrait of a person shot with different lenses shows how much a lens, and the distance you are from the subject, affects the way the person looks in the photograph.
Your camera requires a service at least once a year, depending on how you use it. By taking it to an authorised service centre, you are prolonging the life of your travel companion, as the technician will make sure that everything is working well, that your sensor is clean, and that your camera firmware is up to date.
A photo editor once told me that the difference between a good photo and great photo can be measured in a fraction of a second. Having hopefully mastered your ISO and aperture settings in these past few months, we can now focus on what is for most, the most fun setting in photography; The shutter speed.
For the uninitiated, auto mode on the camera would seem like a blessing. Point the damn thing where you want to take the photo and the camera does everything for you. Except it doesn’t. As expensive as it may be, as professional as it may be advertised, and despite leaps and jump in technological advances, modern digital cameras are still, well, stupid.
In fact, the term “point and shoot” should really be banned, or renamed to “point, shoot and hope for the best,” because really that is what we are doing. You stick it on Auto mode, you take a shot of this wonderful moment and view the image only to discover the camera didn’t focus where you wanted it to. Or the photo is all shaky, or noisy (grainy), or entirely out of focus.
Those of us born before the new millennium most probably would have handled some sort of film camera one way or another, and whether that was a 35mm or a 120mm, thinking about dad’s camera brings back many warm memories. I still have my dad’s camera, a 1965 Nikon F and apart from the broken light meter – a common problem with the first series of this legendary camera – it still works like it just came out of the factory
The iPhone Photography Awards has gotten us all excited and so today’s blog is all about tips on how to understand some of the settings on your iPhone to help you improve your shots, as well as some apps to help you edit, and even add a different feel and “film” effect to your photos.
Apple is giving standard digital camera companies a run for their money. The picture quality for such a tiny little sensor is amazing (thanks to Sony), and the ease of access and user control is just incredible, but because the phone camera is set-up to be used by people without any photographic experience, it is inevitable that things will go wrong.
There really is no better feeling than getting yourself geared up to take off for your holidays with your camera. As photographers, a change of scenery and the opportunity to document the amazing world we live awakens the artist in us all.
But if we are not careful our well-earned trip could come at a cost. Camera manufacturers insist that our camera gear is “weather resistant”. And there’s the magic word. “Resistant”. But no camera or lens is truly weatherproof.
There is one thing that demanded a lot of practice in the analogue days of photography: FOCUS.
Since its advent, photography has seen many focusing methods:
There were fixed lenses with fixed focus, then the rangefinder-type of focusing, then the split screen focusing and finally came the “loved by all” Auto Focus.
