One night last September the news came to me, and I found that all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there as fast as possible. The fire was coming straight for us and travelling pretty fast, so we jumped in the car and made a swift exit.

The residents of our little mountain enclave spent the night in a bar a safe distance from the action. We were all pretty subdued, not knowing whether we would have homes to go back to the following morning. As it turned out there was minimal damage to property, which is amazing as the fire consumed over 600 hectares of land. There were 500 fire-fighters there that night and they did a really good job.

I’ve never wanted to be a news photographer anyway, but this incident made me realize that what those guys do is dangerous. If you think about it, almost all news stories carry a certain element of danger and the photographer has to put himself in harm’s way and take risks all the time, even if it’s just the risk of being hit round the head with some reality TV star’s handbag.

So the saying goes; ‘you only learn from your mistakes’. And it’s as true in photography as any other activity. When the camera is churning out perfectly exposed pictures every time, we are pleased of course, but we are not really learning anything new. When things go wrong, as they will inevitably at some point, and you have to reach for the manual or pay a visit to a site like this to get some answers, that’s when you start learning.

I’m sure you’ve heard the exclamation ‘Oh dear, the pictures didn’t come out’, perhaps even used it yourself at some time. Well, there’s a reason they didn’t come out well and, unless you find out what it is, you are doomed to repeat the same mistake over and over again. So maybe the saying should be; ‘you only learn from trying to correct your mistakes’, but that would be too cumbersome.

Many people come to this site seeking the answer to a specific problem and, as soon as they find it, they’re gone, until the next time. Most photographic mistakes are preventable if only you had the knowledge to anticipate what is likely to happen in any given circumstances. The answers to most of the common problems are here on this site, all you have to do is devote a bit of time to reading the tutorials and learning a very few facts. The time you spend doing this will be repaid many times over as you produce more and more beautiful photos.

So get reading , start here with the list of photography tutorials.

What’s the big deal? You pick up the camera, point it at something and press the button. Where’s the skill in that? Well, nobody quite says it to me like that, but sometimes I think, deep down, that’s what they think.

Not long ago I was sitting in a bar with some friends and work colleagues and the person next to me said “I’m going to get myself a nice camera like yours and then I’ll be able to take great pictures too.” So, in a way, she was saying something nice about my pictures, but also assuming that it was the camera that did all the work. Would she think that, if she bought a nice guitar, she would suddenly be able to play like Brian May? No, she’s not stupid, she knows that that would take a lot of practice. Just because the act of taking a picture is simple doesn’t mean that getting it right is simple. I can apply paint to a canvas but I can’t guarantee to produce anything that you would want to look at. Read more…

When I bought my Canon EOS 7D a couple of years ago, the last thing on my mind was to use it for shooting movies. However the idea grew on me as, at the time, I didn’t have a movie camera that would shoot high definition. Also being able to move between shooting stills and shooting movies at the flick of a switch was quite appealing. I found it quite difficult at first, not so much twiddling the knobs but getting my head round doing two things at once. Mentally the two things are quite different and clicking my mind from one to the other was not so easy, although it came together eventually.

There are though, a couple of problems with using these cameras for movie making. Read more…

Like most people I use my camera on auto-everything quite a lot. Why not? It does a good job, most of the time, so let it get on with the maths and I can then concentrate on the ‘arty’ bits, like where to point the camera and when to press the shutter. Of course, like all auto systems, they can easily be fooled when something out of the ordinary happens. Which is why I had the exposure compensation dial set to under expose by one stop, when I was shooting actors against a black background as I knew that the camera would over expose the people. Read more…

Ever walked into a shop, especially a fancy clothing store, and wondered how they get those superb display prints done? Like everything else in the photographic chain it requires dedication and a high level of skill. These guys don’t send their pictures to Boots for printing. They don’t print them themselves either. The level of skill and knowledge you need, not to mention the enormous outlay on top quality equipment is beyond even the world’s top photographers. They go to a place like Metro Imaging in London who are renowned for their professional photo printing. Read more…

The internet is full of garbage, full of stuff that has been written by people who haven’t got a clue what they are talking about. The internet is the publishing world without editors. Those cruel people who seem to delight in sending out rejection letters to dash the hopes of budding young writers. They actually serve a purpose, they protect us, the general public, from having to read so much garbage in order to find what we are looking for. It’s like the wild west where anyone can set up a blog and start writing. How liberating, how egalitarian, how touchy-feely is that?

Photographic writing is, unfortunately, not exempt from all this, there is a lot of garbage written on our subject too. Only the other day, I don’t remember where, I saw a piece of advice that a beginner photographer “should stick to one ISO setting until he/she had mastered that before moving on to another.” So you’re gonna spend the next six months or so “mastering” each ISO setting. It made my blood boil.

If you are a beginner photographer and you are looking for a place to start, start here - Begin at the Beginning.

I just got myself a new pair of glasses. For years I’ve been putting off the evil day when I would have to wear glasses all the time. I had a pair of varifocals fifteen years ago but they were very heavy and really annoyed me. So I bought some reading glasses and decided that my distance sight was good enough.

I recently went for an eyesight test to renew my driving licence. I looked into the machine and saw four dots which I presumed would be replaced with letters for me to read when the test started. Then the lady said “well, when are you going to start?” The four dots were letters, but so small that they had to enlarge them three times before I could even make a guess as to what letters they were. So I decided to get some glasses.

Now the world is a different and exciting place, everything is crystal clear, everything is beautiful, everything is pin sharp, everything is . . . like a photograph!

Alas the ski season is over for another year. Here in southern Spain our resort, near Granada, closed last weekend. The tragedy is there’s still plenty of snow.

My two favorite things in the world are skiing and photography, so it’s great to be able to combine the two with talented skiers to photograph like the guy above. Yeah, I know this shot would have been better if he had decided to spin the other way, or I had stood the other side, but I still think it serves as a good example of the noble art of combining several shots into a sequence.

Read more…

Can you get away with using a mobile phone for photography?

I suppose the best thing about using a mobile phone camera is that it is the one camera that you can always guarantee to have in your pocket. Nobody these days feels properly dressed without their mobile phone in their pocket. So, in an emergency, it’s a lot better than not having a camera at all. The good ones have got upwards of five million pixels, I believe the new iPhone 4s has eight million, which is nearly as many as my Canon EOS 400D (10 million). So why don’t we all sell our cameras, stop lugging around all that heavy equipment and use our phones instead?

Read more…