Photography goals for 2008

It’s the season for New Year’s Resolutions of course, and there’s no doubt that having goals can help direct your work for the year, and keep you focused when you lose a little motivation.Setting goals is valuable, but publicising them even more so – there’s more commitment involved in making your goals public.So here are my photography goals for the year (in no particular order):

Read a photography book a month

There’s so much I don’t know about the photography world, so I’ll be trying to plug some of the gaps with my reading this year. Some books will be aimed at improving my technique, but I’ll also read some history and criticism books, to get me some much-needed context. (more…)

What Angelina Gave Brad for his Birthday

According to State of the Art, it was a one-off super-pimped Littman 45 Single:

a unique 4×5 rangefinder built on the chassis of a Polaroid 110 that has been completely reengineered to permit both focusing and parallax-corrected viewing through a single window. Translation? It’s sort of a Leica on steroids

Sweet, if a little over-egged with an exterior described as ‘a sort of retro-futuristic homage to the early 20th-century skyscraper’. There’s no word on how much it cost, but apparently Brad Pitt’s a serious amateur photographer. About the only thing I have in common with him.

7 things I learned about DSLR photography this year

It’s Christmas Day (the roast’s in the oven, Finn’s asleep and I’ve got a couple of minutes before our friends arrive). As I sit here next to my shiny new Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens – Santa was very good to me this year – I’m thinking of all the digital SLR cameras that people found under the Christmas tree today.

This time last year I didn’t have a digital SLR, and I’d just started using my film SLR again. Now I’ve had an article and photos published in national and local publications, sold prints as wedding presents and spent a huge amount of time shooting and learning.

So if you’re wondering where to start with your new camera, here are a few pointers from someone who’s on the same journey as you, just a little further along.

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Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II – Prime Suspect

It’s cheap, plastic and it wheezes. But it’s by far my favorite lens. My precious is the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens.

Eschewing such luxury developments as USM focusing or full-time manual (and don’t even think about image stabilization), this $70 lens – known variously as the ‘nifty fifty’. ‘thrifty fifty’ or ‘plastic fantastic’ – produces amazing results.

It’s in no way a pro-grade ‘L’ lens, but Canon have been working on this classic for decades – 50mm is seen as the standard focal length for 35mm film cameras – and it does one thing very well.

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Shooting sick

So I’m struck down with a pre-Christmas cold that won’t move through the accepted stages like it’s supposed to. Scratchy throat and dull ache should have turned into streaming nose and sneezefest by now, but no joy.

But we had some snow, and I ventured outside in my pyjamas and jumper to get this shot of our wall. I like finding simple semi-abstract views that have some minimalist calm to them.

With luck I’ll be well enough tomorrow for the Christmas Eve walk up Canyon Road here in Santa Fe, where people light farolitos and fires and the whole scene is gorgeous (if very dark – think I’ll bring my 28mm f/1.8 prime and hope for the best – too crowded for a tripod).

Color management – an intro to an intro

I must confess to have been only vaguely aware of the wide differences in the way colours are displayed online – until recently. Or rather, I was aware of the differences from testing sites in different OS and browser combinations, but I was only vaguely concerned – Macs’ 1.8 gamma meant a difference from PC’s 2.2, and every now and again in my work as a web designer, I’d get a photo to edit that had a colour profile attached, but that was it.

And I was partly right about this – unlike the print design world, where color profiles for monitors, printers and the like are carefully controlled, and there’s a real struggle to get color matching as right as it can be, in the online world, we have to be a little more flexible.

Almost all of our audience wouldn’t know a calibrated monitor if it ate their lunch, and most browsers (the programs, not the people) are a sorry bunch that don’t support color management anyway. It’s a sRGB world, for better or worse. Or so I thought.
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