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.

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.

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.

I blame the camera manufacturers for this attitude. In order to sell as many cameras as possible, they need to create the impression that, if only you had this latest gizmo, all your troubles would be over and every picture you take would be perfect. Now we photographers know that that is about as true as expecting super models to chase you down the street if you wear a certain brand of after shave, it’s just a sales pitch. The gizmo may or may not make things marginally easier, but you, the photographer, still have to compose and capture the picture the way you want it.

Unfortunately for us, fortunately for the camera manufacturers, joe public doesn’t know that it’s all sales blurb until after he has bought the camera and tried to capture his masterpieces. By which time the camera manufacturer has got his money and probably brought out another new super gizmo, without which we won’t be able to take great pictures.

What do you think?

There are though, a couple of problems with using these cameras for movie making. One is quite obvious, they don’t have motorized zooms like movie cameras do so it’s almost impossible to zoom during shooting without jogging the camera. OK not a terrible thing as you shouldn’t be doing too much of that anyway, it’s one of the big no-nos of movie making.

The second problem is a bit more difficult, the camera tends to overheat quite quickly. There is a cut-out circuit to stop this doing any damage but I found, after my last attempt at shooting a movie at a swimming pool, that next time I did some still photography, the shutter jammed. This, needless to say, frightened me to death. I thought I was going to have to pay out for a new body, gulp! It’s all very well sending stuff back to the manufacturer for repair, but what do you use in the meantime? Anyway I scoured the internet for some kind of solution to the problem and found a post on a forum (complete with legal disclaimer) telling me to hit the camera with my hand from underneath to free the shutter. And, much to my amazement, it worked!

I had to use the hit-with-the-hand method quite a few times over the next few days, together with the other piece of advice in the same post, which was to fire the shutter 50 or 60 times to lubricate it. After a week or two, it stopped jamming altogether and now, six months later, I still haven’t had any more trouble. However I have stopped using it for movies altogether and bought myself a proper movie camera.

The next day I was out in the sunshine shooting a sports event and had forgotten to put the exposure compensation dial back to zero. I looked at the first few exposures as usual to check everything was OK but, in the very bright sunlight, did not really notice anything wrong. However it began to feel wrong, the numbers didn’t add up (I had also left the ISO at 800 from the night before in the black hole).

Now like most people, as I said, I use auto a lot but, unlike most people, I do know what the reading should be, more or less, especially on a sunny day. In the old days, when you bought a roll of Kodak 100ISO film, inside the packet there would be a list of shutter speed and aperture settings for you to use in different weather conditions. And, believe it or not you young people, you didn’t really need a light meter to get a decently exposed piece of film. Every photographer back then knew that in sunlight at 100ISO you needed to set the camera shutter speed to 1/125th of a second and the aperture at f16 to get a correct exposure. Have a look next time if you don’t believe me, almost any scene in sunlight, unless it has an unusually dark or light background, will yield a reading of 1/125th at f16 at 100ISO.

So, knowing some of these numbers by heart can make you aware when something’s wrong. It certainly saved me from a red face the other day at my sports event.

On occasions, when I used to work in London, I have taken my meagre efforts to such a place as this. The service and attention you get is absolutely first class, you’re dealing with people who really care about the results of their efforts and pull all the stops out to get the best quality they can from your work. Unfortunately such places are only really viable in big cities where they can be assured of plenty of high quality work, but the good news is that they now have an online service which will deliver anywhere in Europe. They do large format printing, they do small stuff too, they’re not cheap but when you need that special quality and a print that will last a lifetime on archival paper, click on the link above and have a look at their website.

It’s great to see, in these days of excessive mass production, that one-off hand printed quality is still available.

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 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.

Shooting a sequence is pretty easy really, you just stick your camera’s drive mode on ‘high speed’ and press the button. If you’re doing something like the shot above then you’ll need to either pan with the subject as I have done or, better still, put the camera on a tripod and frame the shot to cover the whole scene. This is a bit more tricky than it sounds as you need to ‘guestimate’ where the skier is going to take off and land. Doing it my way, panning with the subject, means that you end up with a bigger picture (more pixels) because each frame overlaps the previous one but also extends it, if you see what I mean. Whereas, if you set up your camera to cover the whole likely scene, you end up with a picture area the same as if you had taken one single shot, probably smaller really because you will need to leave  a bit of room for safety. However, putting the shots together will be easier as you just have to stack them into layers in Photoshop and they should all fit one on top of the other. The panned shots will have to be pieced together carefully, rotating the shots and matching them one by one. The easiest way to do this is to set the topmost layer to 50% opacity and jiggle the two pictures together, rotating if needed as you go.

Once you have got all the pictures lined up and stacked in layers in Photoshop, it’s just a question of applying a layer mask to each layer and removing the parts you don’t want, to reveal the layer below. This sounds hard to do, but really it’s not, it’s just very time consuming. As with the alignment of the pictures, the trick is to use the opacity setting of each layer to see what you are doing. The picture above was actually quite easy to do as the sky is the same in each picture, allowing me to cut a very loose mask, and there are very few places where the ‘skiers’ overlap. Where the skiers overlap of course you have to be very accurate with the brush.

Here’s the layers palette which, hopefully, will make the whole thing a bit clearer. The black bits on the masks are the bits that are cut out, the ‘holes’,  revealing the layer underneath. As you can see from these masks, the background is actually made up from bits of each picture, so they have to line up perfectly and match color and contrast. On the top layer I had to cut round the skier completely, I couldn’t get the background to line up properly, because I wanted to change the position of the skier slightly.

The drive on my Canon EOS 7D shoots at a maximum of eight frames per second which, as it turned out, was a bit too fast for this shot so I ended up using every second shot from the sequence.

Try this technique yourself, it’s good for all kinds of action events.

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?

Well, I suppose it depends on what type of pictures you want to take. The phone will be fine for a few pics of your friends on a night out, to stick up on Facebook and embarrass them with the next day but, if you want to do some serious photography, I can think of at least three good reasons why you should use a proper camera.

1. The critical factor is the actual size of the sensor and therefore the size of each pixel. We have all been brainwashed into thinking that ‘more pixels are better’ by the marketing companies but somehow they forgot to tell us that pixels come in different sizes. If you look at the results from a full frame camera like the Canon 5D, you will see quite a difference in overall quality compared to the Canon 7D which has the same number of pixels but a smaller sensor. The sensor in an iPhone is about the same size as that in a lower end point and shoot camera.
2. The lenses, although quite good quality, have a fixed focal length, so no zooming in, and many are fixed (fairly wide) apertures. Those of us who have DSLRs know that you get the sharpest results around the f8 or f11 mark, not usually possible on a phone camera which may be fixed at around f2.8 or so. Also, although I have no facts to offer here, I cannot believe that a tiny phone lens will be able to resolve the same level of detail as my mega DSLR lenses.
3. The quality of the product aside, one of my biggest problems with phone cameras is how on earth do you hold them still? The only way to hold the camera so you can see the screen is with your finger tips. This is not going to produce very sharp pictures in any but the brightest of lighting situations. I recommend to people, when they are using such a camera, that they rest their elbows on a table or other flat surface for extra stability, but that is not always possible. What these instruments are extremely good at is, surfing the net, checking your emails and making phone calls, and with that in mind here’s a link to a very good deal at O2 .

So, don’t put the DSLR on eBay just yet, I’m all for miniaturization but not if quality is going to suffer. Keep your phone camera handy for those emergencies, but keep your proper camera for the real photography.