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Photocritic photography blog

The Photocritic DIY photography projects blog

We’re on Twitter + new RSS feed!Yesterday

Right, this is mostly a service announcement, so if you don’t use RSS or Twitter, feel free to ignore this post. Or you could, y’know, start using RSS and Twitter (Check out ‘RSS in Plain English and How to use Twitter on VJ).

SO… 2 things:

Twitter - Photocritic now has a Twitter account; you can see the updates in the side-bar (look for the Twitter-coloured box, you can’t miss it really) or follow me @photocritic. Go on, you know it makes sense. If you’re really curious, I’ve got a personal Twitter account too…

RSS / Syndication feeds - Turns out that the 30,000-odd RSS subscribers (Yes, really! Amazing stuff - thank you everybody!) are taking their toll on the server, so I’ve moved the RSS feeds across to Feedburner. I’ve done some clever redirection malarkey, so if you were already subscribing, you should just simply be redirected to the new feed, and you don’t have to do anything. If you’d rather get the feed from feedburner directly, check out feeds.feedburner.com/photocritic

Photography Gift GuideDecember 3

Are you looking for the perfect Christmas gift for that special photographer in your life? If so, you’ve come to the right place. I know from personal experience that present shopping for photography-obsessed people can be tough.

The world of photography turns quickly, so it can be a challenge for many of us to keep up. That’s why I thought I’d bring out this handy Christmas gift guide just in time for the holidays. (Well, that, and last year’s guide was one of my better visited pages, so I figured it’d be rude to not do a re-run with a bit of an update, too)

No matter what your budget, you should find something on this list that will bring a picture perfect smile to your photo-junky friend’s face.

Behold… Photocritic’s From sub-$40 to credit crisis-incurring gift guide (of DOOM)

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In the $40s and below range:

Looking for an inexpensive photography related gift? I won’t lie; sometimes it can be tough to

Film developing databaseDecember 2

I had an e-mail from a gentleman called Danny the other day, who was wondering where my film development database had gone - and to be honest, I was sort of wondering it that myself.

My black and white film development database is designed to look up times for combinations of black-and-white film and a specific developer. If it can’t find it, it does it best to calculate a likely development time for any given combination of film of developer.

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Seeing as it was one of the very first things I ever coded in PHP, the code was a bloody mess, and it used a horrible tables-based layout, so I’ve spent a fair bit of time tonight not only tidying up the PHP code, but I’ve also given it a bit of a CSS-driven layout update, which means that the HTML pages went down in size significantly.

So, Haje, how did you come up with the idea?

Well. I came up with the idea when I was doing some processing with some obscure films. I could find processing times for a combination of my film and another developer, and I could find the combination of my developer and another film. However, I also found the combination of the other film and other developer. I thought: There has to be some way to interpolate the data so I can make an educated guess as to how long the films need to be in the developer!

So I came up with a clever formula that calculates

RAW usage up massively, JPEG bites the dust.November 29

There are tons of reasons for using RAW instead of JPG when you’re taking photographs. Your photos will be sharper, you will be able to unlock your camera’s full dynamic range, and you have a better flexibility over things like white balance.

It seems as if people are cottoning on in a big way, too - I ran a poll about 2 years ago about whether people were shooting in JPEG or RAW… And I re-ran the same poll earlier this month.

The changes are staggering…

2 years ago

Early 2007, 36% used Raw mostly or exclusively. 55% used JPEG mostly or exclusively:

Today

Today, a whopping 66% of you use Raw mostly or exclusively, and only 26% still prefer to shoot in JPEG:

25 cameras with the best dynamic rangeNovember 27

Following from my post about dynamic range in cameras a few days ago, I did some further research… I give you: The 25 cameras with the best dynamic range!

Interestingly, it seems as if Nikon is generally doing quite a bit better than Canon, and that a camera launched almost 5 years ago is actually one of the ones with the very best dynamic ranges out there - And it’s not the brand you’d think, either!

Oh, and interestingly, there’s been a serious shift in the number of photographers shooting in raw - more about that in the end of this article.

The list…

1 - FujiFilm Finepix S5 Pro (13.5 ev)
2 - FujiFilm Finepix S3 Pro (13.5 ev)
3 - Nikon D90 (12.5 ev)
4 - Sony Alpha 900 (12.3 ev)
5 - Nikon D3 (12.2 ev)
6 - Nikon D700 (12.2 ev)
7 - Nikon D300 (12 ev)
8 - Canon EOS 1Ds mk III (12 ev)
9 - Canon EOS 1D mk III (11.7 ev)
10 - Pentax K10D (11.6 ev)
11 - Sony Alpha 350 (11.5 ev)
12 - Nikon D200 (11.5 ev)
13 - Nikon D40x (11.5 ev)
14 - Canon EOS 50D (11.4 ev)
15 - Konica Minolta DYNAX 5D (11.4 ev)
16 - Nikon D60 (11.4 ev)
17 - Canon EOS 1DS mk II (11.3 ev)
18 - Leica M8 (11.3 ev)
19 - Canon EOS 40D (11.3 ev)
20 - Sony Alpha 100 (11.2 ev)
21 - Samsung GX20 (11.2 ev)
22 - Nikon D80 (11.2 ev)
23 - Canon EOS 1D mk2 N (11.2 e