I’ve always used a dedicated camera to take my photos. Phone cameras were not suitable for serious picture taking when I started out, and for my sort of photography a proper camera is always going to win out over a phone. Lighting with studio flash is just a non-starter with a phone camera.
Wide-angle lenses don’t get much love from macro photographers, and that’s a shame. There is precious little information in general photography articles about different macro lenses. If you want to take close-ups, you’ll buy the equivalent of a 100mm macro lens, because that’s the popular macro focal length for most systems.
Most of my knowledge about the happenings and people of the toy photography community comes second-hand from the other members of Stuck in Plastic. I’ve been surprised many times by new-to-me names that, it turns out, are veritable celebrities online with tens of thousands of followers. Seems I don’t actually look at that much toy …
I often take breaks from toy photography, I’m certainly not one of those photograph-a-day people. I don’t think I could take a photo every day even if I tried. My ideas have become more complicated as I’ve developed as a photographer and each photo has become more of a project than a quick snapshot. Almost …
The last LEGO Technic set I owned was the 8860 Car Chassis. It was released in 1980 and contained 668 pieces. Things have moved on a bit since I last built a Technic set. I’ve always appreciated the large Technic sets from afar, never feeling the desperate need to buy one. They’re masterpieces of technical …
Summer is upon us. I’m specifically speaking of the British Summer, often jokingly referred to as the “week of summer”, but often literally true.
I’ve always claimed I’m not much of a LEGO builder—when I buy LEGO sets I build by the instructions. Remember when LEGO sets had alternative configurations on the back of the box? Never did build any of those, there were no explicit steps to follow.
I recently posted about the trouble with colour in toy photography—that toys are all sorts of crazy inharmonious colours. Well, they also have another annoying property: they’re normally very light on texture.
Ever since I first held a camera, every photo I’ve taken has been in colour. The finished article may not stay that way, but my eyes see in colour, and my view through the viewfinder is always in colour.
Learning requires failure. In photography—as in all aspects of life—we have to see which of our choices work, which we can build upon, and which get us nowhere. In the world of photography it’s becoming more difficult to find out when we’ve failed.
