Enrico Fermi famously asked “where is everybody?” when he realised that the likelihood we should have heard from other intelligent life in the universe was irrefutable. He then postulated that these civilisations destroyed themselves just prior to discovering a method of interstellar travel. A pattern which seems more than likely when looking close to home. Somebody […]
There were more photographs taken in the last year than all the pictures ever taken up until then. That’s right … since photography was invented nearly 200 years ago! All of them. All added together. Okay, I’ll stop repeating myself now. The thing about nearly all of these photographs is that the subject was uppermost in […]
Okay then, what is the correct exposure? Your equipment may indeed decide that the exposure should be the one which will create the result that you want. Equally, it may not. After all, your camera isn’t creative, despite what the advertising propaganda would have you believe. It doesn’t know how you want the highlight areas to […]
You’re out and about and something catches your attention. It appeals to you. You examine it through the viewfinder of your camera. “There’s a picture,” you think to yourself. But is it? Is what’s in your viewfinder really a picture, or are you only seeing what caught your eye in the first place? What you might […]
Walk into any camera shop … ooops, sorry … I was forgetting … there are now more of those in history books than there are in high streets. You used to trip over them all over the place, and you’d buy all sorts of photographic stuff from people who knew about photography. Car salesmen … same […]
If you look at a subject, any subject, and then at a sample of people, any sample, let’s say ten thousand people, you would find that there would be very few who would be very good at that subject, and there would be very few who would be comprehensively appalling at it. Add those two numbers […]
It’s been raining hard all night. Relentlessly. It has been for days, on and off. It had been a wet winter. Now it was a wet spring. The rain stopped half an hour ago and Mrs. Jones, who works as a book keeper at a small manufacturing company four miles away down the road, opens her […]
It’s pretty much accepted that the majority of images captured in 2020 happened after pushing a button on a mobile telephone. Did I just say button? Okay, we’ll let that one go for now. Actually the number of images taken around the world in 2020 roughly equal the total number of images taken in the entire […]
It used to be simple. Well, sort of simple anyway. How sharp an image is depends on two things. The lens and the image capturing device, either the film or the electronic sensing device, both of which vary greatly. In equipment tests, we used to read a great deal more about lens performance than we do […]
HDR. It’s something that gets bandied around all over the place. You can hardly get away from it. For those who don’t know, it stands for ‘high dynamic range.’ You know what happens when a new toy comes along, it usually gets misused. Like nuclear fission. Well actually, apart from the atom bombs in 1945 nuclear […]
