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52 Week Photography Challenge for 2018

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The first two Dogwood Photography 52 Week Challenges were an amazing success, with tens of thousands of photographers participating from around the world. We enter the third year of the challenge with the Community Challenge!

This challenge has been created by photographers who participated in past year’s challenges to push themselves, and you, even further in your photographic journey. The Community Challenge is a great follow on to the other two challenges, but is also suitable to be completed as a stand-alone challenge. There is no specific start date for this challenge. Each photographer is on their own journey, and only competing with themselves from week to week. If you wish to form a challenge group and compete with others based on this list you are welcome to do so! If you form a challenge group drop me an invite I would love to watch the progress.

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3 powerful tricks that improve your fine art street photos and save you time

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You don’t have time? Perfect, me neither!

We both have one major challenge: time.

While you may be reading this in an office right now, I write it in one as well: the EHS headquarters in Amsterdam. Producing fine art street photography while running an international fine art street photography label takes time…a lot of time!

Throughout the years one key insight blew my mind.

Less is more, even in your fine art street photography journey. You can vastly improve your street photos…by saving time!

Let me share with you my top 3 strategies that not only save you time, but also improve your street photos. I guarantee you that they will help a lot! I use them for my own fine art street photos and they work wonders!

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The best autofocus most photographers never use

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Photography is so complex that there are a million approaches behind it. However, there is one thing that almost every photographer can agree on: you have to focus right! Otherwise it ends up blurry and the photo doesn’t clearly portray what you wanted to present. Blur isn’t necessarily bad though. If you want to convey a sense of abstraction, it works very well. Even if you didn’t nail the focus, an otherwise incredible photo remains great despite that flaw. Sometimes it even makes it seem more real and vivid.

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Believe It Or Not: The 3 Deadly Photography Sins

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A drunk guy in a bar in Amsterdam said the following to me after I told him I work as a fine-art photographer: “So man, you love that photo stuff, right? Do you have to pray to the photo gods for good shots or how do you get them?” Although he spit all over me, it really made me think. On the ride home I asked myself: “If your photography was a church, what would you believe in?” This article focuses on my strongest beliefs to create great photos and my personal deadly sins that prevent me from doing so. I can’t wait to hear your sermons, sins and “shaaaame” shouts in the comments! This is my personal answer that merely serves as food for thought to confirm, re-evaluate or expand your beliefs.

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This is how I meter and expose landscapes for color film

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Looking back through my archives, I realized that I’ve covered topics like film selections and scanning film but to date I’ve skipped one really important part: metering and exposing color film.  This is something I get quite a few questions about so bear with me while I try to be very thorough and cover topics from different lighting conditions and how I would meter with the various film types, both color negatives and slides.  While graduated neutral density (GND) filters deserve an entire post for themselves, I’m going to have to touch on that topic as well since they are a critical part of my film exposures.

As a disclaimer, I’m going to be covering my methods for metering.  These may not be the methods you’ll read about in most books but I’ve found them to be both effective and extremely quick which is crucial when the light is changing dramatically.  It’s come to a point where metering is mostly second-nature to me and takes up a very small portion of my workflow.

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20 tips and rules to make you a composition ninja

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There are no unbreakable rules when it comes to how you should compose your photographs After all, who likes rules except for your old school principal or heads of H.R. departments? There are however, several guidelines you can use to help improve the composition of your photos. In this tutorial, I’ve listed 20 of these guidelines along with examples of each. I’ve started with the most basic ones and finished with some of the more advanced composition techniques.

First of all we have to define what is meant by ‘composition’. Composition refers to the way the various elements in a scene are arranged within the frame. As I’ve already mentioned, these are not hard and fast rules but guidelines. That said, many of them have been used in art for thousands of years and they really do help achieve more attractive compositions. I find that I usually have one or more of these guidelines in the back of my mind as I’m setting up a shot.

We’ll start with probably the most well known composition technique: The Rule of Thirds.

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Homage to the Tragically Hip

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It’s been a bit of an emotional weekend for us Canadians – our “national rock band” The Tragically Hip performed their final concert on Saturday night in a performance that was half mourning and half celebration.

Earlier this year, lead singer Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer – but instead of fading away, Gord and the band decided to rage against the dying of the light and put on a 15 show tour across the country (after Gord underwent radiation treatment, chemotherapy and brain surgery).

If you’re not from Canada, you’ve probably never heard of The Hip, but to give you an idea of how big a deal this was to Canadians: Canada’s national broadcaster the CBC broadcast the three hour concert live with no breaks or commercials (instead of previous scheduled primetime coverage of the Rio Olympics), nearly 1/3 of the entire population watched the concert (including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who was there rocking a full-on Canadian tuxedo and who was just as emotional as everyone else) and tens of thousands gathered in backyards, around campfires and in public parks to watch and listen with friends and fans.

The Hip’s lyrics are cryptic and enigmatic and everyone has a bit of a different personal association with their music, so in this post I thought I would share a few photos that I associate with three specific Tragically Hip songs.

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Confessions of a newbie – Business advice I wish I’d known

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I have to admit, when I first started my photography business I didn’t think it was going to be that difficult. I thought I’d get a camera, take some photos, put some stuff out on Facebook and people would start hiring me. They would give me money, I would give them photos – done deal! How tough could it be?

Well…as it turns out, it was a bit more complicated than that. But most of what I could find still focused on the photos – and I was struggling more with the business side of things. So for anyone else out there still in those beginning stages, here are a few things I had known for getting your photography business up and running.

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Leica M – The Full Review

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It was early in 2014, long enough after the introduction of the Leica M (also known as the ‘Typ 240’, or ‘M10’) when I finally bit the bullet and decided to sell my trusty Leica M-E for this newest, rather different digital rangefinder camera from the German niche camera maker.

I always vowed I’d write a thorough review on it, much like I’d done for the Bessaflex TM. I do always feel, however, that a truly great review puts a product through its paces. It frustrates me when a journalist only gets to use a product for a short amount of time to deliver a rushed impression to an inquisitive reader. I didn’t want to be that guy. So, I ditched a few drafts in the last two and a half years.

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