Photography: check this out

Earn a photography diploma from Penn Foster! Penn Foster Career School prepares you for today's competitive job market by teaching career skills that will prepare you to earn more money in a job you'll love! From Medical Transcription to Veterinary Assistant to Professional Bridal Consultant, Penn Foster Career School offers over 80 degree and diploma programs. Learn on your own time, in your own home, and at your own pace. Distance learning is the fastest growing educational method for adults looking for a convenient and affordable way to train for new careers, qualify for promotions, and make more money. You'll earn your degree or diploma from a school accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). Penn Foster Career School is also accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools for our high school and vocational-technical programs. Many people are happy taking pictures with a compact digital camera. They are affordable, easy to use, handy to carry around, generally fun to use. So why should anyone want to upgrade to the kind of camera most of the pros use, a digital single lens refllex (DSLR)? Cons DSLRs cost more, some many times as much, although the cheapest models such as the Nikon D40 or Canon Digital Rebel XT can now be found complete with kit lens for only a little over $500 US. DSLRs are bulkier and heavier. They don't fit in pockets or handbags. Either you carry one around your neck and it gets in the way of all sorts of things, or you start carrying a special bag to hold it. DSLRs are complex. You have to read a manual, often a couple of hundred pages to find out how to use them. DSLRs are noisier and more obtrusive to use. So why do people bother with DSLRs? Simple really. Quality, speed of working, precision, versatility. I'd love a camera in a compact size package that could compete with them, but its only for my dreams. Some compacts share a few DSLR features, but nothing can compare with them overall. Larger sensors means less image noise, particularly better images in low light. Raw format means better images in difficult lighting conditions and the ability to correct images more after taking them. Accurate and clear viewfinder for eye-level use, even with close-up images. Camera ready for use immediately on switch on. Camera can take images in rapid succession. No waiting before next shot. Can fit different lenses with wider angle of view or more powerful telephoto It's hard to show many of these advantages in small images on a web site. But the image at left would have been impossible with a compact, as it used a fisheye lens giving an angle of view of 180 degrees across the diagonal. It shows 5 people holding hands dancing at Piccdilly Circus; with a compact I'd only have got the three central figures in the shot. With the DSLR I have more choices. The Chinese New Year of the pig or boar started on Feb 18, 2007, and the festivities last until the Lantern Festival two weeks later, although the public holidays in China only last for a week, and they are shorter elsewhere. Because the dates are based on a lunar calendar, the start of the New Year can vary - this year is close to the latest it can get on our calendar. But it seems an appropriate time to look at some Chinese photography. The 798 Photo Gallery was the first art gallery dedicated to photography in China, established in April 2003 in a Bauhaus-style factory building built that had been built with East German aid. Although I've not been to China, I was delighted to visit the gallery's stand at Paris Photo, and to talk to the people there and look at some of the work. There are now around 15 galleries showing photography listed in Beijing alone, with others in Shanghai, Hongkong and elsewhere. The 798 Gallery web site has biographies and examples of the work of around 30 photographers, including some already quite well-known in the West, including Wu Jialin, whose pictures were first shown outside China at Houston in 1996 and Zhu Xianmin whose book won at prize at the Leipzig Fair in 1989 and had an exhibition in San Francisco in 1995. On the New Chinese Art site, you can see (and buy) work mainly by younger Chinese artists and photographers. It does give an impression of some of the very varied work being produced, although unfortunately tells you nothing about the photographers involved. This is a fairly unusual image for me as it was taken on the Nikon D200 as a jpeg. I have to admit it happened by accident - I'd been going through the manual trying out a few things with the camera and simply forgot to change back to my normal raw setting. Fortunately I wasn't doing anything important, as it served as a reminder to me of how much more control using raw format gives, and the great advantages of using it. It's one of several major reasons I prefer to carry my relatively bulky digital SLR camera rather than the handier compact. With raw, I make very few exposures that don't give me usable results, with the ability to adust color balance and exposure in 'developing' the raw files, and particularly the ability to get more out of the shadows while not losing highlight detail. Using jpeg I found almost a quarter of the exposures I made couldn't produce results that satisfied me after correction in Photoshop. With this image, even though exposure was fine, somehow it hasn't - even in the larger original - got quite the highlight detail in the hat that I would have expected with raw. If you have a camera that can create raw files and don't make full use of its potential, the feature Raw Power is worth reading. It's also important - whether shooting jpeg or raw - to get the exposure right - as the feature Digital Exposure: Getting it Right - explains and shows your how to do. But if you do this when shooting jpegs, almost all of your pictures will often come direct out of the camera looking far too dark, as mine did yesterday. Every picture needed some tweaking in Photoshop to bring out its best. Conditions weren't great for shooting. Daylight was dim at best and even at ISO 800 it was hard to cope with moving subjects, especially when I had to use the telephoto end of the 18-200 zoom (this image was taken at 1/100s, f5 with the zoom at 75mm.) London was celebrating the Chinese New Year, and the streets of Chinatown were jam-packed with crowds, most of them with digital cameras. first wrote about Trent Parke when he was awarded the 2003 W Eugene Smith Award for his work 'Minutes to Midnight' and it was immediately obvious that this was something new and different. In 2002 he was the first Australian photographer to become a Magnum nominee, and I wrote more about him when this project documenting the changing state of the Australian nation was shown at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2005, where it attracted a record attendance. Although I wasn't able to attend the opening of his first London show at Photofusion a couple of days ago, I dropped in earlier in the day to have a good look at the work on the wall. 'Dream/Life and Beyond' was his first published project, taken on the streets of Sydney, mainly from 1998-2002. Parke's work is deeply personal, documenting the emotions he experienced on moving from a country town to the big city when he was 20, wandering lonely and lost with his Leica M6 and a wideangle lens. His is a view that it built very much around light and shadow, hunting out scenes and happenings that are fragmented at times to the edge of comprehension by their accidents. At times you can see echoes from the work of Frank, Friedlander and Winogrand, but Parke's is a highly innovative synthesis and development of their vision. You can see over a hundred images from this project, including most of those in the show on screen at Magnum, although the understandable watermarking on the larger versions is sometimes annoying. His images are shown without in on in-Public, which also includes a color gallery. The ideal medium for Parke's images might perhaps be a screen, although obviously at somewhat larger and higher quality than current web standards. There are many photographers whose work demands to be seen in the actual print, others for whom it works best in book format (Bill Brandt is a good example.) Parke self-published his 'Dream Life' in 1999 and it was awarded 2nd prize in the American Picture of the Year awards for photography books in 2000. He also brought out a second book, The Seventh Wave with his wife, Narelle Autio, who won the 2002 Oscar Barnack award at Arles in 2000. Both are long unavailable, and reprints and new books are long overdue. Magnum, the world's leading photographic agency since its formation 60 years ago following the end of the World War II by photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour now has its own Magnum Blog. The introduction describes it as "a new medium for us to illuminate the stories behind the images, to explore the motivations behind the projects, to discuss the systematic issues that affect all photographers, and to explore the industrial and societal changes that inform our expectations of photography." The hope that the Magnum blog will inspire debate and invite comments on the stories there. They also give an email address so you can suggest topics and address questions to individual photographers and invite their response on the blog. The winning image in this year's World Press Photo came as a surprise to us all, least to Photo District News, who a couple of weeks ago ran a feature Guess The World Press Photo Winner which listed the motifs that have dominated the last 50 years of winners. Topping the list were images showing children in distress and mothers and children. I first read about this in a Lightstalkers forum, where photographer Bruno Stevens (see yes