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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.

Patience, a photographer’s ally

By John Watson
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I went to the beach on Sunday evening to try for some nice shots of the Huntington Beach pier at sunset. Shooting sunsets is always a hit or miss proposition. Sometimes you get beautiful, jaw-dropping colors and patterns in the sky. And sometimes it just gets dark. Around here this time of year it’s especially random because of the change in the weather. So I packed my D90 and tripod and took my chances.

Approaching the shore I could tell it was going to be a difficult day. The fog was rolling in and it was so thick I could barely see the water from Pacific Coast Highway. I almost turned around and headed home. It was disappointing. But I was already there and I know some good spots for free parking. I decided to walk down and see what I could see. I’d arrived about 45 minutes ahead of the sunset so I had some time to scope out possible compositions and exposure settings. I went through the motions.

I saw at least four groups shooting family photos that day. Two groups were doing the “white shirt and blue jeans”

… Continue reading Patience, a photographer’s ally

Review: The Flip Mino HD Video Camera

By John Watson
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I really like the Flip video cameras. I reviewed the original Flip Mino back in June and recommended it for anyone who wanted to shoot more than a couple of minutes of video at a time or who wanted to reserve the space on their camera’s memory card just for pictures. The Flip Mino is a handy, compact, easy to use video recorder. And the Flip Mino HD (Amazon) is virtually identical in every way except one—it records 720p HD video.

Everything I liked about the Flip Mino I like about the Flip Mino HD. The body and controls are identical. You can’t even tell them apart visually except for the “HD” logo on the back. They operate exactly the same and feel exactly the same in my hand. Everything I wrote in my earlier review about the Flip Mino applies to the HD version. So let’s get on to video quality.

The video and sound quality are quite good. Video is recorded in H.264 format at 30 frames per second. Audio is recorded in AAC format at 44.1 kHz. The average bitrate is about 9 Mbps which lets the Flip store about 60 minutes of video on its internal 4 GB memory.

… Continue reading Review: The Flip Mino HD Video Camera

The Canon Selphy: A portable photo printer in a bucket

By John Watson
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In a what?

It’s so weird, I don’t know how I missed it when it came out. I was out buying ink today when I stumbled across the Selphy. Somehow, those wacky guys over at Canon had the brilliant idea that portable photo printers ought to come in bucket form.

The Selphy CP770 (Amazon) is a playful little 4×6 dye-sublimation photo printer that comes in a plastic bucket big enough for its accessories, paper, and cables. The printer itself becomes the “lid” of the bucket and latches on with two large green plastic clamps. And you carry it around by the handle. On the bucket.

CNET Editors gives it a “very good” rating citing excellent photo quality, fast printing, and ease of use.

I’m still a little boggled. And yet I am intrigued. Would you dare bring this to a corporate or any other kind of “serious” environment? You’d have a hard time getting anyone to take you seriously. But, whip out this fruit tart of a photo printer at a child’s birthday party or family social gathering and fire off some 4×6’s at grandma and I predict you’d be the hero of the moment.

… Continue reading The Canon Selphy: A portable photo printer in a bucket

Animoto for Photography

By John Watson
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I created the above sample video in about 5 minutes using my photos and music from their commercially licensed stock library. Dead simple, nice results. Animoto is so easy because it allows you to exchange control over the video for incredible production speed. Although Animoto does most of the work, you can use the “Spotlight” feature to highlight certain photos and adjust the speed of the video. Animoto could be just the ticket for photographers looking for a secret weapon to help promote their business or as an add-on to sell to customers. It’s also a lot of fun.

Animoto says:

Created by TV & film producers, Animoto for Photography lets you turn your breathtaking photos into stunning video in minutes. Fast, award-winning production value plus a library of 175+ free, commercially licensed songs, gives photographers the most powerful video creation tool available.

Founded by MTV and VH1 alumni, Animoto for Photography automatically produces professional video from the photos and music that a photographer selects. Each video is stunning, completely unique, and takes only minutes to produce.

Animoto: Photography For Business

… Continue reading Animoto for Photography

12 Steps to Understanding Your Digital SLR

By John Watson
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From wikiHow, a 12-step program for getting to know your brand new digital SLR camera:

When they were first introduced, digital SLR cameras were enormously expensive and a tool for professionals only. Since then, they have come down in price into the consumer price range. Because of this, many people buy digital SLRs without understanding how they work — and, consequently, not making the most of them. This article will guide you through the most common functions they have, and to show you how to learn to use one by experiment. The principles herein are the same for any camera; but you will probably not be able to set your shutter and aperture manually on most non-SLR cameras. Read on nonetheless.

How to Understand Your Digital SLR: 12 steps (with video) – wikiHow

… Continue reading 12 Steps to Understanding Your Digital SLR

Free Secrets of Digital Night Photography Webcast

By John Watson
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O’Reilly is putting on a free webcast on Digital Night Photography by Harold Davis, author of Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, reviewed favorably by yours truly back in May. The webcast will be on Tuesday, December 2, at 11am PST. Advance registration required:

In this webcast, professional photographer Harold Davis, author of Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers and creator of the Photoblog 2.0 and Digital Night web sites shows why night photography has become increasingly popular among digital photographers. He demystifies exposure techniques at night, and explains how he post-processes night photos. Following Harold’s presentation, there will be time for a Q&A in which he’ll answer your questions about night photography.

Secrets of Digital Night Photography Webcast

… Continue reading Free Secrets of Digital Night Photography Webcast

Advice to young photographers from Magnum photographers

By John Watson
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Alec Soth asks 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers two simple questions:

  • When did you first get excited about photography?
  • What advice would you give young photographers?

One of my favorites:

“Forget about the profession of being a photographer... Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don’t care about.” — Christopher Anderson

Click to read all of their answers: Magnum Blog / Wear Good Shoes: Advice to young photographers

… Continue reading Advice to young photographers from Magnum photographers

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

By John Watson
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“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”

LIFE has released over 10 million images on a new hosted image service from Google and in Google Image Search. They claim that 97% of the photos have never been seen by the public and that the collection contains “some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.” It’s certainly interesting to browse through.

Unlike The Commons project at Flickr, these images are not in the public domain. LIFE is selling fine art prints (in partnership with Qoop it seems) of the collection and the photos are only available online as 1 megapixel scans.

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

… Continue reading LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Screencast: Creating black and white cutouts

By John Watson
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We ran an article last month called Black and White with a Splash of Color. In this video I’ll show you a few additional simple but powerful techniques that will allow you to easily reproduce that effect.

You should be able to use these techniques in any image editor that supports layers and masks such as Photoshop, GIMP, Seashore, and Paint.Net.

… Continue reading Screencast: Creating black and white cutouts

Review: The Art of Black and White Photography

By John Watson
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First of all, let me get something off my chest. I’m not picking on this book in particular, but generally, when will photography book authors quit talking about digital photography like it’s some crazy new thing that people need to be gently introduced to? Why does every photo book have an “introduction to digital” section that is all but useless filler? It’s 2008 people! If I wanted an introduction to digital photograhy, I’d have bought an introduction to digital photography book. Ok, rant over.

Read on to learn more about the book and find out how you can get a free copy.

Mercifully, The Art of Black and White Photography by Torsten Andreas Hoffmann keeps the intro to digital section to a mere 9 pages.

The meat of this book starts in section two. Section two devotes a full chapter to each of many different genres and concepts and attempts to show by example how to make black and white photographs.

Topics include overcoming clichés, architecture, portraits, street photography, and moods. Arguably, these are all topics that apply equally well to color photography.

… Continue reading Review: The Art of Black and White Photography

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