Recent content by chris malcolm

I once had a Nokia mobile phone, one of the old fashioned kind which only did phone calls and texts, and I replaced the very thin battery back with a much thicker 3rd party one, about the size of a pack of ten cigarettes. That allowed the phone to go for at least a month between recharges, often...

In my own experiments on the best settings for jpeg quality I found that generally speaking I very rarely could tell the difference between 100% (no compression) and 80%. I could, with difficulty, often tell the difference between 75% and 100%. I could easily tell the difference between 65% and...

A camera to photograph friends, relatives, and days out can be anywhere between the tiny cheap but surprisingly good purse camera a friend of mine uses all the time, and my own approx £1,000 worth of camera and "Swiss Army Knife" do everything lens, weighting about 1.5Kgs, which is what I carry...

In between almost giving up film photography and respraying myself as a digital photographer I kept my lenses on a shelf in a damp unused bedroom. Some of them sat up there for fifteen years without being touched. When I got a mount converter and started trying them out I discovered one long...

I always shoot RAW+JPEG. I'll process the jpeg to see if jpeg tweaks will be good enough. Usually they are. If not I go back to the RAW. I reduce the number of times I need to go back to the RAW by increasing the latitude of adjustment of my jpegs. I do this by adjusting my in-camera jpegs to be...

You don't need to decide this in advance. Just shoot RAW+JPEG, then you can use both, try them out, compare them. I've been doing that for more than ten years, and still haven't decided which one is best. Sometimes it turns out that my jpeg with a little processing is fine, sometimes I need the...

The problem with photographing my cat is that she's very fond of me. As soon as I point a camera at her she jumps up and starts walking towards me. So most of my photographs of her are either of her fast asleep, or else taken sneakily from a distance with a long lens.

Does your 70-200 lens have its own foot? Are you mounting the tripod at an attachment point which is underneath the centre of gravity of camera + extended lens? If you can't do that then a longer quick release plate will let you do it. I have a 70-400mm which sags nastily on my best ball head...

My general rule of thumb when learning a new image editor and using every slider experimentally is to find where I like each slider to be, and then back it off 50% of that. Then before exporting the edited image I'll go back and turn each adjustment off in turn to see what its contribution is...

I wonder if AI is going to come up something which lets ordinary computers behave like very big powerful computers?

The other day I was standing with about eight other photographers taking photographs of a kingfisher. I was using a camera with a big white lens. As was one other photographer. The rest were all using phones. The question is, if you're taking a photograph with a phone are you a photographer? If...

I used to be an SLR film photographer. Around 2001 I started checking out these new digital cameras, started reading reviews, looking at all the photography magazines in the supermarket shelves when I did the shopping, etc.. By 2008 I had been thoroughly converted and bought my first DSLR. I...

Before DxO upgraded DxO Optics into DxO Photolab they had a habit of releasing the older version of DxO Optics free when they did a major upgrade. Those should still be available and will process your RAW files. Their strategy worked on me. I used DxO Optics v9 free, upgraded it to v11 when that...

The best camera for a beginner is one that's cheap enough that you don't mind giving it away when you've found out what kind of camera you really want. Its cost is part of the price of your education. But you do have to decide what kinds of photography interest you. A good camera for...

How about a monopod? Even just tucking its unextended foot into your trouser belt can give you a few extra stops of stability. You can get quite good stability for long exposures with a monopod if you can brace yourself or it against a wall, tree, etc.. I've sometimes taken good exposures of as...