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Why your camera brand doesn’t matter

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A few weeks before Christmas my best friend’s husband rang me:

Daniela, I want to buy M a camera. What should I get her?

I asked the standard questions: how much does he have to spend and what sort of photography does he think she’ll be doing. He tells me there’s £500 in the kitty and she’s been making murmurs about taking more landscapes and getting better photos of the dog. I suggest that maybe he wants to look at an Olympus PEN. They fall well within his price bracket; they’ve a good frames-per-second rate and lots of AF points for capturing their off-his-rocker dog; and they’re pretty light. Given that my best friend lives close to the Alps and walks a lot, this is a bonus.

However, I add my usual disclaimer. ‘For that money, no one is going to sell you a bad camera. It’s more important to find the one that best suits your specific needs.’

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Just how invasive is Meitu?

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Yesterday afternoon I noticed that my Twitter and Instagram feeds were humming with curiously styled selfies that slimmed faces, lightened skin, and applied a veneer of gloss and sheen that supposedly turned the selfees into animé-like characters. The transformations were courtesy of a Chinese app called Meitu that had suddenly become the height of fashion. I thought Meitu did a fantastic job of producing the archetypal Widow Twankey, so while I wasn’t desperate to have a go myself, I could understand why people were enamoured with it and enjoying a giggle.

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If I want to print a photo, what size does it need to be?

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I took the photo just down there from the deck of the ferry that took me from Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsular in New Zealand. My camera was in my lap and in one split second, everything came together to create that image. It looks almost as if I’ve shopped in the cruise liner, doesn’t it? I was travelling alone, and minding my own business, but two older couples struck up a conversation with me.

It was the camera that they noticed. We spoke about all sorts, but what I recall specifically from the conversation was one of women mentioning that she’d tried to have one of her photos printed by an online print company in New Zealand, but hadn’t been able to manage it. Whenever she uploaded it, the image was red-flagged for being too small. She wasn’t really sure what she was doing wrong, or what size her image needed to be so that she could print it.

Almost five years on from that February day and it occurs to me that between ppi, dpi, pixels, and megapixels, people are probably still confused by minimum image sizes for printing. This is especially so, given that smartphone photos are regularly saved at 72ppi, but printers prefer 300ppi. I decided, therefore, to go straight to the printers’ works and ask a selection of companies what their preferred sizes were for printing wall art (so that’s canvas or acrylic or any other type of medium that you hang on your wall) sized 20 by 30cm (8″ by 10″, roughly A4) and 40 by 60cm (20″ by 24″, roughly A2). Here’s what I learned.

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Every camera manufacturer runs some kind of ambassador scheme, somehow they don’t really represent women

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Most camera manufacturers run ambassador schemes. They vary in their numbers and the precise ways in which they’re run, but the principles seem similar enough: pick a range of photographers who use their gear to promote them to the public. But I’ve a feeling that they could do better.

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Uploaded any photos to Foursquare? They could feature in Airbnb’s new guides.

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In April this year Airbnb launched its Neighbourhood guides where locals share their knowledge of where they live to enable people visiting cities from Seoul to San Francisco to get the best experience from their trips. To help illustrate these guides, Airbnb has struck a deal with Foursquare. From now on, photos uploaded to Foursquare could make their way into an Airbnb guide.

Foursquare might not strike you immediately as the most obvious source of high quality images to illustrate a city guide, but if you step back and think about it from Airbnb’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. First, Airbnb’s guides are intended to give guests and visitors a local’s eye view of somewhere. Foursquare-shared images do just that. These aren’t perfectly lit, carefully framed professional photos presenting a polished version of a pub, restaurant, or landmark. These are smartphone photos hastily snapped in between your first and second glasses of prosecco and just before you dive headlong into a bowl of gnocchi the size of your face. They are, to use the word of the moment, authentic.

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The rise of the disappearing photo

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At the beginning of this week Instagram announced that it was introducing a Snapchat-like option of disappearing photos and videos to its service. As we’re now at the end of the week and it’s been covered everywhere–not to mention people would have been using it, or at least had discovered it over the past five days–this is hardly news any longer. So why do I feel compelled to write about it? It is the result of a question posed in an article covering the announcement: ‘Does yet another large social media outlet turning to instant photo-messaging tell us that the media we share is[sic] becoming more disposable than ever?’

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6 tips for photographing brown food

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One of the highlights of my Sunday is reading Jay Rayner’s restaurant review in The Observer. I have to say that the photography that illustrates the articles isn’t always fantastic, but that’s not what I’m interested in. In fact, I barely look at it. But Sunday 6 November’s review of Jaya in Llandudno, the photography generated quite a few reader comments. You see, the restaurant was outstanding, but because most of the food was brown, the photos didn’t do it any favours what so ever.

Brown food is notoriously difficult to photograph. It’s dull and comes across as unappetising. Consequently, many people recommend avoiding taking pictures of it at all. But, brown food is a reality and that means there will need to be photos of it. The good news is that all is not lost. It can be done, and done well.

The secret to photographing brown foods is very much in the styling. Yes, there are some photographic tips to be implemented, too, but before you get to your light and your lenses, it’s all about how the food is presented.

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How and when to ask for photography advice

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‘Please I need your help fast.’ Gosh, that’s a fairly desperate title for an email. Normally I’d delete that sort of missive as being a scam, but as it came through the Photocritic helpdesk the chances were that a student might’ve been a little overwrought.

It turns out that the email wasn’t from a student, although the sender could probably benefit from signing up for the school. And without wishing to belittle the sender, if you can wade through the hyperbole of desperation, it’s probably worth unpicking. I think there’s a great deal woven into the letter that people wanting to seek advice can learn from it.

I’ve redacted the sender’s name, but otherwise this is the email as I received it:

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The complete photography guide to shooting in museums and galleries

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I dropped into the British Museum on Monday and spent a few hours in the Mesopotamian galleries with a brief flit through the Greek and Roman rooms, too. I don’t often take photos in museums—that’s mostly the subject of another article—but there were plenty of people using their phones to take photos of the artefacts on display. Getting the best out of a museum with an iPhone might not be the easiest, but there certainly are some techniques that any photographer can apply in order to improve their exhibition photography.

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Can someone snap a photo of me in the street and use it to identify me?

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With facial recognition technology you can take pictures of people in the street, run them through publicly available photographs online, and get a match.

You would have heard this statement if you had been listening to the 20 September 2016 episode of Seriously on BBC Radio 4, called ‘The Online Identity Crisis’. I only heard it yesterday, though, as I caught up with it by podcast. It did, however, set me thinking. Just how likely, or easy, is it that someone should take a photo of me in the street, run said image through facial recognition software, and be able to identify me?

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