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Want to be a Child Photographer but Don’t have Kids?

I just had an excellent question over on my Facebook page. One reader asked, “How easy, or not, is it to get into child photography? I don’t have children, none of my friends have children but I have a growing interest in investigating the child photography side of things.”

Well one thing’s for sure – you won’t get accused of being a MWAC! Lots of us child photographers got into this genre because we have children and our passions grew out of that experimentation. However, we can get a lot of slack in the professional arena for being perceived as nothing more than a ‘mom with a camera’. So in that respect, you may find it easier to ‘get into’ this field.

But my real answer is this: My fire for photography was sparked when I decided to start photographing my children. And it grew from there. So your first hurdle will be finding enough children who you will be allowed to photograph in order to explore this, first, as a hobby.

Before I had children, kids scared me. I was skittish around them – they made me nervous. I never knew what they were going to do or what they were thinking or really how to handle them. So I can’t imagine how I would have been able to photograph them the way I do now. That’s not to say that other photographers couldn’t have made that happen. But for me, photographing a child is a two-way street. And I don’t mean “I pose you and you comply”. I allow children

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Fujifilm X10 Review

Described as an ‘enthusiast camera’, this one took me quite by surprise. With a new camera for review I normally take it out of its box, tap a few buttons, power up, then delve deeper.

So where was the ‘on’ button? Ain’t none.

You get the thing to come alive by manually rolling the lens barrel anti-clockwise from OFF to any of the lens settings within its 28-112mm range (as a 35 SLR equivalent). Simple huh!

As a natural successor to the well-received X100, the retro-styled, non-interchangeable lens X10 has a high degree of elegance, completely black with milled aluminium controls picked out in white; it’s easy to hold, thanks to the speed grip at right and is easy to pocket with power off (and lens closed of course!). The upper control deck and base is made from die-cast magnesium alloy. The covering is textured faux leather with a speed grip bump at right. The camera feels good in the hand.

Fujifilm X10 Features

The bare bones approach continues when you look around the rest of the camera: top deck is the mode dial, shutter button and exposure compensation plus a teeny wheeny Fn button which takes you directly to choice of image size and quality, AF mode, ISO setting etc; at rear is the usual four way jog wheel, the menu button plus AE, AF and white balance buttons; then, tucked away in the lower right hand corner is a dedicated RAW button, if you should need to instantly capture in that file format.

The lens is a 4x Fujinon f2-2.8 zoom, viewed

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Capturing Vanishing Cultures with a 35-Foot Camera

A Kickstarter fund has been created for a project that revolves around photographing vanishing cultures with a camera the size of a truck

Photographer Dennis Manarchy is working on a project that is mind-blowing in scale, a 35-foot camera that produces two story tall prints, all in an attempt to capture some of the forgotten and evaporating societies of the United States. The project is called Vanishing Cultures, and Manarchy is raising funds through Kickstarter in what can only be described as a Herculean effort.

Manarchy has already constructed a prototype of the camera. It's 35-feet long, and creates 4.5-foot by 6-foot negatives, which are then used to create prints that are two stories tall. That's a tremendous amount of detail captured in a single image, unlike anything else you can imagine. The technical shooting itself is also understandably hard. In an interview with Film's Not Dead, Manarchy described his technique:

On this new camera, to get enough lighting set up and having enough power in the lights has taken me at least 4-5 months. The ISO is 3 for this camera, so you can imagine how much power and light it takes to make an exposure. The lens starts at F11 and I need to be at about F32 to get enough depth of focus so it needs a ton of light. Even developing the negative is a lengthy process. The darkroom itself is about 80 feet long in order to get the trays set up big enough to develop a negative.

On the Kickstarter page, he also explains how it takes two

...

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Less than 24 Hours Left to Save 33% on our New Post Processing Guide

One month ago we launched our brand new volume in our ‘Photo Nuts’ library of eBooks with Photo Nuts and Post: a Guide to Post Processing.

The month since launch has been an exciting time for the team at dPS HQ. Not only have their been some very kind reviews written about the eBook – we’re also excited to finally have our vision of 3 Photo Nuts eBooks all together at last!

So now we have:

Photo Nuts and Bolts – all about knowing how your camera works in order to take control of it
Photo Nuts and Shots – tools and techniques for getting more creative with your photography
Photo Nuts and Post – exploring what to do with those images you take once they leave your camera

So now we’ve got you covered – from start to finish of the shooting process.

24 Hours to Go to Save 33% and Win a Great Prize

When we launched our new Photo Nuts and Post we introduced it with the opportunity to grab it at a 33% discount ($19.99 USD instead of $29.99). This discount ends in just under 24 hours at midnight on 21 February (US Eastern time).

In addition to the discount we’re also running a great little competition where one lucky buyer of the eBook will win their choice of one of the following:

a Canon 60D DSLR with 18-135mm lens – worth $1180 USD
a 21.5 inch Apple iMac (2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 with 500GB Hard Drive) – worth $1199 USD
Adobe Photoshop CS5 and a 16GB Wifi iPad 2 – worth $1200 USD

This winner will be drawn at

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My Still-Life Photography Adventure

Everyone has photographed still life images at one time or another. It’s usually one of those everyday images that catches our eye such as the sun shining through colored glass bottles on a window sill, fresh flowers in a vase or a stack of old books on an antique table. Photographers are attracted to beautiful, interesting or just random things, and just naturally want to capture those images. I have done my share of random still-life shots, and especially enjoy shooting collections such as colored pencils in a row or old tools in a barn. But I had never created a still-life scene from scratch with the goal of telling a story in a single frame. This process is much more involved, requiring thoughtfully selecting the items, placing and lighting them in a visually appealing way.

Last September my Dutch photographer friend Klaas van Huizen asked me to join his still-life photography project. The plan was that we would shoot only still-life images, but of any theme we liked, stage each on a black background, and each select 8 to 10 of them for an exhibit in the Netherlands in January 2012. I am a busy photographer here in the US and was at first reluctant to take on another project. And whatever spare time I did have was spent developing my international photography workshops to launch this fall in Paris. My plate was pretty full, but I just couldn’t resist the challenge. The project was too interesting to pass up and I was confident that three months was plenty o

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