Innholdsfortegnelse for February 16, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

WHILE National Geographic magazine has been probably the best place to find picture stories from around the world, it used to be that it wasn’t the only publication that carried them. I remember The Sunday Times colour supplement would feature a documentary about some far-flung tribe, the life of the Tokyo commuter or working conditions in Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine. Articles such as these inspired not only generations of naturalists and environmentalists, but also hordes of photographers to seek adventure. To be inspired to seek adventure you don’t have to find it on a grand scale; you can sit at your desk all day dreaming of the rainforest, record a local river as though it were the Zambezi or your neighbours as though they are primitive pierced creatures. Photographers…

ALMOST a year since Samsung announced the launch of the NX210, its successor, the NX300, has been unveiled to coincide with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, USA. Although the design of the camera’s body may give the impression that this is simply a slight upgrade of the NX210, the new camera has some significant improvements, particularly regarding image processing. I spent a morning out shooting with a pre-production version of the NX300, and even in this early version of the camera the improvements were plain to see. BODY The Samsung NX300 is instantly recognisable as an NX-system camera, with the familiar flat front and slightly curving handgrip. It is a style that features in the NX210 and the NX1000, as well as on the Samsung Galaxy Camera.…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 4GB media card* SMALLS SHOPS SUFFER IN TRADING FREE-FOR-ALL It was interesting to read the camera dealers’ comments about the reasons for Jessops’ failure (News, AP 2 February), as I had a similar conversation with the owner of a local small camera shop just recently. While there are good online retailers, there are also many who sell very ‘grey’ imports. They offer no after-sales service, but sell goods at way below the ‘normal’ price. This isn’t the whole story, though, as the big makers have long offered discounts and priority to the large retailers like Jessops that they deny to small camera shops. And whereas many years ago all camera shops…

SINCE I moved out of London, I have been busy exploring the local countryside. I have been waiting for it to snow so I could photograph the trees shown here. My plan was to create a black & white image where the trees were isolated in a sea of white. I decided to shoot a sequence of photographs and merge these into a single panorama. This not only allowed me to extend the angle of view, but also to increase the pixel resolution of the final photograph. As it was snowing heavily when I took the photographs used here, I ended up capturing a lot of blurred snowflakes, which did make the photograph look as though it had been shot using an extremely dirty sensor! As I explain in the…

Kyle Moore Suffolk Although just 14 years old, Kyle Moore has been taking photographs since 2010 and is still loving every minute of it. Living in Suffolk provides him many opportunities to photograph his favourite subjects – animals and the natural world. ‘I just love being out in the wild, watching all the great wildlife we have,’ he says. ‘I love the challenge of trying to get something different from an often-seen animal.’ Moore would like to be a professional photographer, and plans to explore different parts of the British Isles to build up his wildlife portfolio. To see more of his images, visit his website at www.kylemoorephotography.co.uk. Red deer stag 1 The golden sunlit mist illuminates the deer and gives this image a gorgeous tone Canon EOS-1D Mark III,…

ALTHOUGH third-party flashguns, such as those from Metz, Nissin and Sunpak, are often competitively priced compared to proprietary units, they often lack a few of the more refined features. However, Nissin’s latest flashgun is different. The MG8000 Extreme does not set out to compete on affordability, but promises better performance than you might expect from a Canon or Nikon unit. It is aimed squarely at the serious amateur photographer or professional photographer who shoots press, wedding or PR work and, as such, promises better build quality, too. BUILD AND HANDLING Compared to Canon and Nikon flashguns, the Nissin unit is less complicated to use and its user interface is less cluttered. A small colour LCD screen displays only the information needed at the time, and usefully rotates through 90˚ when…

Wideangle or fisheye? AJMullen1977 asks I take a lot of landscape photographs and have a Sony Alpha 55 DSLR. Can anyone advise me on the best wideangle lens or fisheye lens to use for the widest photos of the Scottish Highlands? GeoffR replies Fisheye lenses are really a specialist tool and sell in small numbers – get a decent 12-24mm or similar lens and you will be fine. Very few applications make good use of the 180°-plus angle of view offered by a fisheye lens. Bob Maddison replies If you want extreme wideangle, your best bet is a good tripod. Then you can take a series of photos and stitch them together to achieve a wideangle effect using Photoshop, or my own favourite, the free program Autostitch (autostitch.en.softonic.com). All you…

PHOTOGRAPHER I PHOTOGRAPH I ICONIC CAMERA BACK in the 1960s, it was not just the Beatles, Mary Quant and Harold Wilson who changed Britain. Nor was it only Nikon, Pentax and Minolta that brought Japanese innovation to amateur photographers. The Olympus Pen wrote a memorable page of photographic history and led several other manufacturers to compete for half-frame supremacy. Designed by Yoshihisa Maitani, a very young but brilliant engineer at the Olympus Optical Company, the half-frame Pen cameras shot 72 exposures 18x24mm on a standard 36-exposure cassette of 35mm film. The resulting negatives or transparencies were remarkably sharp, brilliantly contrasty and, because of the short focal lengths of their lenses, displayed great depth of field. The cameras were easily pocketable and, in the early years at least, entirely mechanical. Despite…

• Jessops name survives ¥ Business guru snaps up brand DRAGONS’ DEN STAR BUYS ‘JESSOPS’ DRAGONS’ Den entrepreneur Peter Jones has bought the Jessops brand name. A source close to the discussions has not ruled out the re-opening of some stores. In a statement, Rob Hunt, joint administrator at PwC, told AP: ‘We can confirm that we have sold the brand and certain other assets to a number of buyers, including entrepreneur Peter Jones CBE.’ It is understood that ‘certain other assets’ refers to stock and intellectual property. AP understands, from a well-placed source, that discussions over the future of Jessops are ruling nothing out, including the possibility of re-opening some Jessops stores through a cherry-picking process. Meanwhile, retail restructuring specialist Hilco – which was among around half a dozen…

Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden By Frans Lanting. Taschen, £27.99, hardback, 252 pages, ISBN 978-3-8365-3415-4 FIRST published in 1993, Frans Lanting’s year-long photographic exploration of Africa’s Okavango has been updated in this splendid new edition, filled with stirring images of wildlife at its most raw and uncontrolled. The contrast between the lean months of the dry season and the rich, abundant life that comes with the wet is fascinating to view and must have been even more so to witness. Lanting’s film photographs still look great, and his accompanying notes give an immediate sense of the extreme situations he got himself into. With conservation still an issue, and many African ecosystems still under threat, these photographs remind us of the beauty we stand to lose. Denis Piel: Moments By Denis Piel.…

THE TECHNOLOGY debate has seemingly become more of an important aspect in our hobby/profession than it has ever been before in my picture-taking life. Ten years or so ago, most of the ‘serious’ photographers around me were using SLR cameras with ISO 100 or 200 colour film. If mono images were required, the film had to be replaced – which is not exactly convenient when you’ve used only half a dozen exposures – or you had to switch to another camera fitted specifically for black & white shooting. This deterred many people, including myself, from ever being able experience the nuances that monochrome can produce. Fast forward to today and most of us can afford a DSLR of some kind, allowing us to take poster-sized photos in colour or black…

FOUNDED in 1888, the National Geographic Society this year celebrates 125 years of scientific, geographic and explorative successes. Much like Amateur Photographer, the National Geographic (NG) magazine has been at the forefront of photographic developments for more than a century, and we take this chance to speak to professional photographers about what the magazine has meant to them. THE MAJOR MILESTONES In 1903, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor became the first full-time editor of National Geographic. Over the next 51 years, Grosvenor used photography as his lens on the world, filling the pages of each issue with Egyptian tombs, Chinese canals, Canadian Rockies and back-garden insects. As soon as photographic processes made it possible, he introduced colour photos to the magazine. In fact, in 1914, Grosvenor’s National Geographic printed the first natural…

ProDot $9.99 (around £6.35) www.customslr.com INITIALLY designed to improve the control of a camera’s shutter button, the ProDot can also work well with any repetitively used finger-controlled devices, such as a computer mouse. It is a press-on, self-adhesive ‘dot’ that provides a raised and textured ‘dampening’ surface. In use on a DSLR’s shutter release, the press of the button produces less strain on the finger because one does not need to depress the button as far or as hard. The result is not only a subtle reduction in vibrations when pressing the shutter release, but also a fractionally quicker response and a more comfortable action during intense shoots. The adhesive on the dot is strong enough to ensure that it will not come off even when the camera is lugged…

A GREAT thing to try with a high-powered flash is stroboscopic photography. Show the movement of a subject by shooting it in dark conditions with a long exposure, lighting the action with a burst of flashes each a few milliseconds apart. Guns like the Nissin MG8000 Extreme are great for this, with fast recycle performance from the battery pack helping to keep the action going without lengthy pauses between shots. Shooting multiple flash images like this can be fiddly and requires some skill and patience to get right. 1. SET-UP Shoot in a dark room so no other light affects the exposure, and shoot against a black background so you can see the moving object in the foreground. Try to have your subject standing off the background slightly; the extra…

OPTICAL RESOLUTION (SCANNER) Optical resolution is a term that’s commonly used when referring to scanners, although it’s also used when talking about digital cameras (often to differentiate it from ‘digital zoom’). At its simplest, a scanner’s optical resolution tells us how much information the unit’s optical system can produce without any interpolation involved. This is important, because it is the optical resolution that shows a scanner’s ‘true’ potential. Take Canon’s CanoScan 9000F, for example. This scanner has an optical resolution of 9600x9600ppi when scanning film, and 4800x4800 ppi when scanning printed material. In the case of film, this means that the scanner can produce 9600 pixels for each linear inch (horizontally and vertically) of film that is scanned. INTERPOLATED RESOLUTION While optical resolution is the important resolution figure for a…

SOMEONE once made the point that all the best images in the history of photography were made using cameras that are now out of date. I’ve often repeated this quip myself, but it really is a bit self-righteous, don’t you think? If they had been around in his time, don’t you think Henri Cartier-Bresson would have used an articulated LCD screen? Or Robert Capa would have appreciated touch AF? Photography is about finding great moments and a pleasing composition before it’s about any particular process or button, and for this reason I don’t think the old masters would be the Luddites many assume them to be. It’s 2013 and the first slew of new camera announcements were made at CES in Las Vegas, USA, with more to come surely, and…

Wednesday 13 February EXHIBITION Man Ray Portraits, until 27 May at National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H OHE. Tel: 0207 306 0055. Visit www.npg.org.uk. EXHIBITION Katako ‘From Urban Decay to Scrap–Art’ by Hugh Ardoin, last day, at theprintspace, London E2 8DL. Tel: 0207 739 1060. Visit www.theprintspace.co.uk. Thursday 14 February EXHIBITION Debbie Harry Queen of Punk: Portraits by Brian Aris, until 17 February at Proud Chelsea, London SW3 5XP. Tel: 0207 839 4942. Visit www.proud.co.uk. EXHIBITION Works by Mark Boulos, Gerard Byrne and Richard Wentworth, until 9 March at Lisson Gallery, London NW1 5BY. Tel: 0207 724 2739. Visit www.lissongallery.com. Friday 15 February EXHIBITION The Archaeology of a Disaster – the Aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami, by Dean Chapman, until 16 March at Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 3JE. Tel:…

● LAKE DISTRICT LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER by Peter Freeman, £16.99 The excellent landscapes throughout this book lend plenty of credence to Peter Freeman’s advice on getting the most out of photographing the Lake District. The writing is sometimes a little blunt or inelegant, but the content is solid and Freeman does a decent job of translating the lessons of his own experience into simple terms. ● THE JOUBERTS: BIG CAT ODYSSEY (DVD), £14.99 Another entry into this National Geographic series from naturalist filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert, ‘Odyssey’ is certainly an apt term for the 30-year journey these two have undertaken. The documentary features some fantastic footage of the big cats. ● GREATER KRUGER: A POCKET MEMENTO by Heinrich, Philip and Ingrid van den Berg. Text by Keri Harvey, £8.99 This…

THIS photograph of a glossy starling and a Cape buffalo was one that I came across quite by accident. My reason for being in the location was not to capture the shot, but when I saw it I instantly knew it was an image worth taking. I was on assignment in Kenya during the 1980s, working for National Geographic, where I was tasked with the slightly intimidating role of photographing rhinos. I was there to document the fact that rhinos were becoming an endangered species as a result of poaching for their horns. On these kinds of trips you don’t tend to do a lot of walking. Most travelling time is spent within the relative safety of a Land Rover. We were driving along and suddenly it started to rain.…

AS A CHILD, I can recall how each winter my grandmother would send us a parcel of the first snowdrops picked from her Suffolk farm – all carefully packed in moss. That was decades ago. Now, we appreciate wildflowers beyond our own gardens left for everyone to enjoy. After the bleak winter months, the first snowdrops cannot fail to uplift our spirits and encourage flower fanatics, as well as macro enthusiasts, to capture what are often the first floral images of the year. However, while we marvel at extensive snowdrop carpets in British gardens and woodlands that have been cultivated here since medieval times, the flowers are not native plants. SWEEPING CARPETS It takes a while for snowdrops to get established, so that clumps mass together and carpet the ground…

NTIL a couple of years ago, owning a DSLR with a full-frame sensor was something of a holy grail among enthusiast photographers. A camera housing a sensor with the proportions of a 35mm film frame was generally the preserve of professional photographers, being too expensive for the average enthusiast. yet slowly things have changed, and the introduction of the Canon EOS 5D, Nikon D700, and Sony Alpha 850 and 900 started a shift towards making full-frame DSLRs attainable for the non-professional photographer. In September 2012, Canon and Nikon announced the EOS 6D and D600 respectively, their most affordable full-frame DSLRs yet. ith the D600 commanding a street price of around £1,450, and the EOS 6D a close £1,650, the two cameras are likely to find themselves at the top of…

SCANNING OPTIONS Recently, I was given numerous rolls of long-expired Fujichrome 120 film, so I took the opportunity to satisfy a 25-year-old desire to use the format. I picked up a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 from the Wolverhampton Camera Fair, which was already loaded with a Kodak print film I exposed the same day over a pub lunch. The results were satisfactory (considering I opened the camera back at the fair), but when I use the Fujichrome film what will be the most cost-effective way of scanning and viewing the resulting slide strip? M Joannides The most cost-effective solution will depend on how much film you’ve got and how much you intend to use in the future. If you’ve got just a couple of rolls and haven’t yet decided whether…

On sale Tuesday 19 February ON TEST APS-C DSLR KIT LENS UPGRADE Why change your kit lens to an own-brand and third-party ‘upgrade’ ? We find out AP AWARDS 2013 THE WINNERS Find out which products won the coveted Amateur Photographer Awards TECHNIQUE SOMETHING FOR A RAINY DAY If it’s wet outside, don’t stay in. Brave the elements and you’ll AP GUIDE TO SIX OF THE BEST MESSENGER BAGS A round-up of some of the best single-strap messenger-style bags on the market DOCUMENTARY AFGHAN DISPATCHES First Lieutenant Alexander Jansen, a serving US soldier, discusses photography in a war-zone…