A digest of some of the interesting photography related websites we found this week.

Week Commencing: 30th November 2009

The Online Photographer had a great post up this week, which threw a hilarious spotlight on the topic of photographic critique and criticism and how the likes of Flickr et al have changed it. No doubt that anyone who has ever used the internet to post their images will have a chuckle to themselves over this piece. Here’s an excerpt from the page:

“Dear Ansel: You’re making such progress! I really like the simplicity of this composition, but there’s so much “detail” missing from the finished image. Have you considered HDR? I’ve taken the liberty of fixing your photo to show you what I mean. Keep snapping,

Bill”

The Phyla of Street Photography is a great post on the 2.8 website and anyone into street photography or the history of photography should give it a read. Thanks to Charlie Kirk for this link. A little teaser from the article:

“If you spend time studying a particular genre of anything, you start to see the genre’s edges, as well as its internal patterns and repetitions. Groupings. Street photography (of people) has them, and I wanted to sketch out a few examples, list perceived pros and cons, and generally prove how writing something down helps to completely confuse the issue. Plus, classifying anything is arbitrary and dictitorial, which makes it that much more fun!”

Presets Heaven is a website that deals pretty much exclusively with presets for Adobe Lightroom.  I don’t use Lightroom but I know a lot of you folks do, so you should certainly find something of interest here. Nicely laid-out site made by someone who is obviously passionate about the topic.

“I’ve been sitting here for hours now. Playing around in Lightroom, testing and adjusting before I finally got satisfied. Photoshop have a nice feature called “Curve adjustments” where you can change the color channels (RGB) separately with a few clicks with your mouse. I really wishLightroom had that feature built in.” Click here for the article we took this excerpt from….

Before you click on this article about 2009’s best ‘100 Free But Premium-Looking WordPress Templates, I will tell you something for free as well: if you need a website and haven’t discovered WordPress yet, go discover it now. That’s an order! It is simply the best free internet content management system that there is and this list of the best free themes for 2009 has some crackers in it. Check out this one for instance, which I really like the look of for photographic portfolios….

From the site: “This is a very basic WordPress theme with a clean and efficient design intended to put your best content forward in a way that is enticing and fun for the user. If you are looking for post comments, pagination, categories, tags, widgets or anything else like that, this is definitely NOT the theme for you.” Get it here and see a live demo here.

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Quick List of Some Other Photography Sites you should check out this week:

• Photopreneur: afraid about what can happen to the pics you post on the web? One article this week on Photopreneur recounts the horror-story of how one 14 year-old’s self-portrait ended up as the cover of a porn DVD.
• CinemaFX app for the iPhone – which I am about to download, check out and then review. Looks like it might be good.
• Digital Photographer magazine’s latest issue: in which my work is featured. Haven’t received my copies yet and can’t wait to see how they all came out.
• How does a freelance journalist, especially one starting out, know what to charge? To help, the National Union of Journalists issues a Freelance Fees Guide. Its London Freelance Branch also collects rates actually being paid, and publishes these in the Freelance newsletter – and now on the web,  here.