Category Archives: Photography

What’s missing from the typical DSLR, anno 2010? What could be improved, using simple established technologies, to make the DSLR a better picture-taking device? And why don’t the major DSLR manufacturers do some of these things, which might help sales?

The modern DSLR is a great image making machine, and I don’t want to change it’s core paradigm. But as I use my cameras in different ways, I recognise a number of lost opportunities and frustrations which have yet to be addressed. Now is the time to divert a small fraction of that enormous engineering effort from the hunt for ever more megapixels to the development of software and mechanical features which will make the DSLR a more flexible and better-integrated photographer’s tool.

In this article, I suggest a round dozen ways in which DSLR manufacturers could easily improve the product, mostly through simple software or mechanical refinements, to ease the process of taking and processing photos.

A recent post by Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer decried the frequent difficulty of quickly reviewing an online photo collection to understand the photographer’s interests and style, in order to decide whether to invest more time in studying the content in greater detail.

Mike’s solution to this is to suggest that each photographer’s website should start with “A photographer’s ten best, or ten favourite, or ten most characteristic pictures, up front.” He gives this concept the excellent name of the tenset.

Suitably chastened and inspired, I’ve taken this suggestion to heart, and my website now contains my very own “Tenset”, as the first grouping on my gallery page. If you’re not sure what makes me tick as a photographer, the subjects which interest me or the style I am trying to develop, look here. If you like what you see, continue browsing. If you don’t, then go no further.

I’ve also written a short article providing a bit more background on the tenset concept, and how I managed to choose my own selection.

If you’re lucky enough to own either a waterproof camera, or a waterproof housing for your digital camera, you’ll have experienced the problem of trying to correct for the extreme blue cast of shots taken underwater.

The problem is that there’s little reliable advice on how to correct this. There are a few articles on the web, but I haven’t found any to provide a reliable and repeatable process which can be applied to “casual” underwater photography.

After a fair amount of research and experimentation, here’s my analysis of the options available, and a suggested technique which I have developed and which I haven’t seen documented anywhere else.