Reader Recap for March 8-14, 2010

Daylight savings may have thrown off my Sunday, but luckily, it didn’t throw off the rest of my week. Below are some of the articles from around the web that I found particularly interesting last week. We look at places to find inspiration, how to control depth of field, tips for photographing flowers, an assortment of cheat sheets, and how to build a large pinhole camera.

10 Places to Find Photographic Inspiration – At any given moment of time, I can probably give you a list of at least five things or places that I’ve been meaning to photograph and just haven’t gotten around to it. After reading this post from Photofocus on places to find inspiration, my list has probably doubled, if not tripled. A couple of my favorite places from the list are actually the first two: movies and old family pictures. I’m not much of a painter, but I’ve used the look and feel of a couple of movies for paintings before, but I’ve never tried to apply that concept to my photography. I love looking at old ’80s fashion, toys, and gadgets in family pictures, and as soon as I realized that they could be a source for my own photos, I immediately knew which photos I wanted to use as inspiration.
Three Ways to Control Depth of Field – In the first of a pair of posts from Epic Edits this week, we have a simple and straightforward explanation of the various ways you can alter depth of field. Controlling depth of field is one of those concepts that I don’t care how many times I hear it, it still takes me a few times to actually remember. What I love most about this post is that it explains how best to control DOF using compact and point-and-shoot cameras.
8 Tips for Photographing Wildflowers – A lot of the tips in this post from Digital Photography School were actually covered in the Creative Close-Ups book that I recently finished, but this post covers them in a much shorter amount of time. A couple of the things that bear repeating are to use the histogram instead of the LCD preview to check the exposure (I’m guilty of not doing this) and wait for an overcast day. I learned my lesson about shooting flowers in bright sunlight the hard way.
Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier – My favorite photography site to follow, The Photo Argus, has this awesome list of cheat sheets for when you’re in a bind. Unfortunately, not all of the cheat sheets are free, which is a real shame, but the ones that are will come in very handy. I particularly liked the 49 Photo Tips Cheat Sheet, which is exactly what it sounds like, but covers everything from when to shoot and what gear to bring to how to touch up in Photoshop and how to sell your photos.
Building a Large Format Pinhole Camera – As promised, here is the second post from Epic Edits for the week. I have a special place in my heart for lofi projects such as pinhole and box cameras. I’ve never made a pinhole camera myself, but every time I see one, it moves higher on my to do list, and the photos from this project may have just put me over the top. I wrote about a digital pinhole camera tutorial back in January, and that just may turn out to be my next project before taking the leap into trying out the real deal.