If you’ve ever been to the UK (or, indeed, anywhere in Europe), you know that football (as we like to call soccer over here, since it’s played with your feet and all that) is a pretty big deal. The sports sections thrive on covering the sport, it’s all over the news, and the fans lap it all up.

One football club decided they wanted to let only a single photography company take photos at their matches (presumably in return for a lot of money), effectively banning all other media outlets from sending their own photographers. Needless to say, it caused a bit of a stink. Continue Reading

You’re going to think that I’m obsessed with photographers’ rights and am heading up a mission—with a camera in one hand, a light sabre in the other, and Flickr as my shield—to defend the average photographer and prove that cameras won’t irreparably damage anyone’s souls. But please, indulge me this post and then I’ll return to the scheduled programme of camera releases and software updates. (For a while, anyway.) Continue Reading

I’ve just come home from a great weekend of music, poetry, and theatre at the Latitude music festival. There were heaps of cameras floating around Henham Park, from 8 year olds with disposable ones that you can buy in Boots for a few pounds to Nikon D3Ss toted by the press, via mobile phones and all shades of compact camera. But if you were an ordinary paying member of the public, you weren’t allowed to bring in a dSLR. Continue Reading

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write a review of a photographic exhibition. I wasn’t especially concerned by which exhibition, more that I wanted to look at an exhibition holistically: as a collection of photographs that had been brought together with a specific aim or purpose. I wanted to consider what I thought worked, what didn’t, and what could be done better. Ultimately, I wanted to be able to say if I thought that the exhibition had achieved its aim, or if it had made me feel something.

When I was on holiday – exploring Flemish cathedrals and drinking Trappist beer – I spent an afternoon at the Antwerpen FotoMuseum, or FoMu. Amongst its other exhibitions, it was displaying a collection of photographs taken by Belgian photographers in the inter-war years. Continue Reading

As I keep a relatively high profile photography blog which has written about photography competitions in the past (including the inspiredly-named ‘How to win photography competitions‘, which, if you haven’t read it, is worth a peek, if I may say so myself, and I may, because, well, this is my website, and I happen to quite like promoting my own articles in ridiculously long run-on sentences in parantheses when I really ought to be writing about completely different things, like the actual topic of this article, and I hope that you might in time forgive me for wasting your time with this aside), I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions.

Recently, however, I’ve received a series of e-mails (no fewer than six in the past few months!) asking if I would pretty please judge their paid-for-contests. The idea is that aspiring photographers pay an entry fee (anything from $10 per photo via a $500 site membership to a $100 per photo fee structure). They then get entered into a photography contest, and the best photo wins. Continue Reading