Xmas and New Year tend to be the season of purchasing, forget about the “good will” stuff, that’s a myth.  One of the favored purchases is digital cameras.

Wondering what to give for Xmas?  Want something different?  How about your great wall art?

Great images do not just “happen” - they are “made”.  Your masterpieces deserve a permanent place in the décor of someone’s home.

One way to “make” great wall art is to follow a theme and display the images as a diptych or even triptych.  (Fancy words for two or three pictures mounted side by side.)

I read a most interesting piece of research which came from the Sony people.  According to the Sony survey, 72 percent of DSLR buyers only use their cameras to “capture family memories and for fun.”

As technology takes over our lives, we older photographers tend to remember with much fondness the pre-digital age photography.

One of the most important factors was to see if the shot had a sharp image.  With a portrait, focusing on the eyes was the standard way, but until you got the negatives back and could check with the enlarger, there were many hours of anxiety.  Had you really got the image that was required, because with professional photography, if you goofed, you re-shot at your own expense.  And if that shoot included professional model fees, you were going to be considerably out of pocket.

A friend is doing a photography course by correspondence and has come up against DOF, the contraction for Depth Of Field, so this is for you Harpic.

What’s DOF?  Quite simply, it is Depth Of Field, and mastery of DOF really is the second rule of photography in my opinion.  Before you ask, the first rule is to walk several meters closer to the subject!

Henri Cartier-Bresson was the originator of the phrase in photography, “The Decisive Moment.”  Undoubtedly he was one of the great photographers of the 20th century.  However, according to his biographer Pierre Assouline (Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography, Thames & Hudson) he was also a difficult and haughty individual with total confidence in his own artistic superiority.

I have kept thousands of photographs I should have thrown away - however, they do have a value.  They teach me what I did wrong, several times over!

Looking over many of the shots showed me that I took a lot of shots of almost exactly the same things.  One wrong shot was repeated over and over again, as if I expected God to come and fix the photo for me.  He didn’t.

We are all looking for the elixir of youth.  There’s a Peter Pan in all of us, but one of the quickest ways to get old is to retire and have nothing to do.  There is a limit to how many times you can sit on the beach, or play golf.  No matter how much of a beach fanatic you are, or an avid golfer, there can certainly be too much of a good thing.  This is why I ask you to consider photography.

I will admit to owning a box of filters of many types.  Some I have not used for years, but some of them can get used every week.  So what should you have in your filter box?

A friend of mine is doing a photography course by correspondence.  Each week a ‘project’ is suggested, with the tyro then emailing his or her results to the tutor.  What a wonderful world we live in these days where technology allows us to send photographs through the ether.  Definitely quicker than postal bags!