John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.
Chernobyl Legacy is a heart-wrenching photo essay that reveals, in a series of stark, intimate and haunting portraits, the terrible human cost of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident. You’ll never be able to forget after you see it.
… Continue reading Chernobyl Legacy Photo Essay by Paul Fusco
In the previous two installments of this series, basic concepts and lines and curves, we covered how to control what is in your viewfinder and the use of lines in your compositions. In this third article, I want to talk a little more about framing because it is so important. In particular, a very simple concept that can have a profound impact on your photographs: filling the frame with your subject.
… Continue reading Learning composition: getting in close and filling the frame
I was planning on having the next post in the composition series up this morning, but life hath intervened. I’ll have it up later tonight. In the mean time, check out these interesting web morsels:
… Continue reading Life, it sneaks up on you when you’re not looking
Bokeh. Have you heard this term bandied about in conversations while looking at a photo, listened while someone proclaimed that the bokeh in a photo was good or bad, but you’ve been too embarrassed to ask just what it is? It’s something every photographer should understand because it affects your image. And whether you know it or not, you’ve probably evaluated the bokeh in your own photos. Well hide your shame no longer. After reading this article, you will be able to hold your head high and raise your nose as you talk about the bokeh in your next photo.
Sometimes you want to shoot but you can’t seem to find any ideas. Or maybe you feel like every shot you take has been done before or you just want to try something new. It’s the photographer’s equivalent of writer’s block. Fortunately there a bunch of places you can go for help getting your creativity flowing:
I listen to music a lot. And it seems like lately I’ve come across a fair number of songs that have something to do with cameras. Just for fun, here’s a sampling, some classics, some questionable, and some newer ones, too.
In my last post on composition I covered the basics: what composition is, how you can control exactly what appears in a photo (and what doesn’t), and some tips to get your started. A photo with impact grabs the viewer’s attention right away and doesn’t let go. Subject matter certainly contributes to this. But composition is one of the most important factors. Two photographs of exactly the same subject can look completely different and evoke different feelings in the viewer simply by changing the composition. In this second article, I’ll talk a little bit about another concept: how lines and curves can make a composition stronger.
The silhouette is an old art form, said to have been named after �tienne de Silhouette, Louis XV’s finance minister. Apparently, he was so stingy that anything cheap, including portraits, were labelled “a la Silhouette.” Silhouettes became very popular in the 18th century but went out of fashion after the invention of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography. And now here we are, creating silhouettes with our digital cameras. Ain’t life grand?
… Continue reading A simple technique for creating eye-catching silhouettes
There are many things that go into the concept of “composition.” Composition is a defining characteristic that separates a forgettable snapshot from a photo that has a strong impact on the viewer. It’s more important than mega-pixels, more important than what equipment you use. This will be the first in an ongoing series to try and demystify this pretentious-sounding subject and show you how thinking about composition, even a little, can help you improve your photos. We’ll start with a few basic concepts and some guidelines you can follow that will help you start creating images with impact and that draw the viewer in.
… Continue reading Learning composition: basic concepts and framing
I recently finished a task that turned out to be undeserving of my procrastination and left me with a welcome sense of relief. I made a backup of every digital photograph in my collection, over 15,000 images, spanning nearly 6 years from early 2000. It had been far too long since my last backup. It was easy, didn’t take a long time, and now I know that these treasured memories will be safe if something catastrophic ever happens to the hard drive they are stored on. Here’s how I did it.
