Innholdsfortegnelse for March 9, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

AP Editor’s award speech ‘Each of the cameras nominated for the Amateur Photographer Consumer Camera of the Year 2013 award deserves to win a prize for the level of control it offers, for the image quality it is capable of producing and for the fantastic value it provides for not only the SLR beginner. This year’s winner, though, goes beyond the field with its exceptional sensor and professional-level resolution. That camera is the Nikon D3200.’ Test extracts AP 16/06/12 ‘Most importantly, the D3200 is capable of some very impressive images even with the 18-55mm VR kit lens, and more so with a fixed prime such as the 35mm or 50mm f/1.8. Crisp and punchy images with a wide dynamic range can be produced on a large scale thanks to the…

“By mutual agreement the contract was terminated” • 24.1MP sensor • 51-point AF • Due 21 March NIKON TARGETS D7100 AT ENTHUSIASTS NIKON has unveiled an ‘enthusiast-level’ camera called the D7100 as it strives to boost DSLR ownership in the UK – which lags way behind Germany and Switzerland. As we went to press, the D7100 was due to be showcased at the Focus on Imaging show in Birmingham from 3-6 March. The ‘extremely durable’ D7100 boasts a new 24.1-million-pixel sensor and weather sealing on a par with the firm’s D800. It will run alongside the 16.2-million-pixel D7000, which was launched in September 2010. The new DX-format flagship is due out on 21 March priced £1,099.99 body only, or £1,299.99 in a kit that includes an 18-105mm VR lens. At…

● MASTERCLASS: PROFESSIONAL STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY by Dennis Savini, £45.99 Say ‘studio photography’ and many people immediately think of portraits, but there are many other ways for a studio photographer to earn a living. Dennis Savini uses examples of his own work to illustrate how to execute studio shots, and his advice is solid. ● THE PHOTOGRAPH: COMPOSITION AND COLOR DESIGN by Harald Mante, £38.50 Harald Mante takes a very principled, technical approach to explaining the art of composing an image, with a focus on the rules of lines, shapes and colours. The visual aids are a tremendous help in understanding Mante’s points, especially given that the writing is quite dry and analytical. This is a book for study, rather than idly flicking through. ● LAND OF CONTRAST: SOUTH AFRICA’S DIVERSE…

THIS shot was taken around 13 years ago, when much of my time seemed to be spent running around after the children and picking up toys. I’m sure it’s a scenario any parent of young children can relate to. At that time, I was necessarily producing a lot of photography around the home and I learned that just because you’re faced with familiar surroundings, it doesn’t mean you can’t produce worthwhile images. When you look through the viewfinder and isolate certain areas, they become something in themselves. I ended up producing a book on the subject called Home Photography, which included a lot of the material I had produced during that time. This is one of those images from that period. We used to have a beautiful jasmine plant on…

Mark Sykes West Yorkshire Mark has been interested in photography for a number of years, mainly taking photos while on holiday. However, all that changed in 2005 when he bought his first DSLR and began taking hia photography more seriously. One of his favourite aspects of the hobby is that it gives him a reason to travel around the world, and he particularly enjoys shooting landscapes in the USA. ‘They interest me more than UK landscapes,’ he says. Mark has a knack for shooting architecture, as demonstrated on these pages. To see more of his images, visit his website at www.marksykesphotography.co.uk. 30 St Mary Axe 1 Mark has expertly composed this image from inside London’s Gherkin, with the building’s ‘eye’ sitting right on the thirds line Nikon D800, 24-70mm, 1/5sec…

A FAVOURITE of photojournalists and wedding, portrait and event photographers, the 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom lens has a reputation for good control over curvilinear distortion, as its available focal lengths are typically easier to correct. Further appeal comes from the constant, fast f/2.8 aperture throughout the entire focal range. The five lenses on test here, from Canon, Nikon, Sigma, Sony and Tamron, also come equipped with, or have access to, optical stabilisation, which makes handheld use possible even in low light and at telephoto settings. While these lenses are all designed for use on a full-frame camera, those using the APS-C format will be able to enjoy a 105-300mm focal range (or 112-320mm when used with Canon APS-C-sized sensors). This extension makes this kind of lens ideal for more distant…

APART from a softbox, the most useful accessories that I have for my small lighting kit are different-coloured lighting gels. However, mention lighting gels and many photographers will think of images seen in photography books from the 1970s and ’80s, where portraits were lit with blue- or red-coloured lights – and sometimes even both. This garish style looks very dated, and has probably deterred quite a few photographers from ever buying a set of lighting gels. Yet these gels are useful for a variety of different purposes, and are one of the cheapest accessories available. There are basically three ways that lighting gels can be used: for colour correction; to create a special effect; or to simply illuminate an area or subject with a particular colour. The key to using…

INVERSE SQUARE LAW According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the inverse square law is defined as ‘a law by which the intensity of an effect, such as gravitational force, illumination, etc, changes in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source’. It is therefore fundamental to light (illumination), and by extension photography, but it is something that is often glossed over. At its most basic, the inverse square law states that the intensity (brightness) of a point light source decreases (falls off) the further it is from the source. While not rocket science, it’s not quite so simple either, as the inverse square law quantifies this fall-off: the illumination level ‘changes in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source’. Let’s break this phrase…

Editor’s note Scooping three AP awards, the Nikon D800 has been a true camera sensation, and it was obvious immediately that it could be our Product of the Year. The D800 has been the talking point of 2012/13, creating a massive stir and almost defeating the AP resolution test chart by reaching a higher reading than every camera before it. The Nikon D800 wasn’t only popular with our technical team: it was voted the most admired and desired camera by the readers, too. Test extracts AP 28/04/12 ‘We talk about the bar being raised occasionally, and Nikon has certainly raised the bar in the full-frame market.’ ‘With the high resolution of the D800, not only is Nikon setting a benchmark for stills cameras, but it is also aiming at the…

Wednesday 6 March DON’T MISS Focus on Imaging 2013, last day at NEC Birmingham. Costs £10 on the door. Tel: 01489 882 800. Visit www.focus-on-imaging.co.uk. EXHIBITION Herbert Pointing: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition 1910-1913, until 23 March at Chris Beetles Fine Photographs, London W1B 4DE. Tel: 0207 434 4319. Visit www.chrisbeetlesfinephotographs.com. Thursday 7 March EXHIBITION 24: 2013, outdoor exhibition (curated by Magnum photographer Peter Marlow), until 23 March at Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London. Visit www.24photography.org. EXHIBITION Century of style by Norman Parkinson, until 12 May at the National Theatre, London SE1 9PX. Tel: 0207 452 3000. Visit www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. Friday 8 March EXHIBITION Tom Wood: Photographs 1973-2013, until 16 June at the National Media Museum, West Yorkshire BD1 1NQ. Tel: 0844 856 3797. Visit www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk. EXHIBITION After the Fall by Hin Chua,…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 4GB media card* AS TOUGH AS THEY COME What a fascinating article describing Alexander Jansen’s photography while serving as an active combat engineer in Afghanistan (Welcome to Afghanistan, AP 23 February). His enthusiasm for photography almost jumped off the pages. For those of us with relatively comfortable lives, it is hard to imagine being in such a hostile place, let alone combining our photography with perilous combat duties. The article also extolled the virtues of Pentax DSLRs and lenses in a way that Pentax Ricoh Imaging never seems to manage. The Pentax K-5 and earlier K-7 are hard to beat in terms of durability, with their very effective dust and weather…

AP’s resident photographer Andrew Sydenham shows four readers how to create simple still-life images of flowers using the most basic of tools. Oliver Atwell joins them HERE at AP we often talk about how important it is not to let the winter blues get in the way of your creative output. But it’s not always easy. Few of us fancy venturing out into the biting cold and even fewer of us have access to studios and professional lighting. However, that’s no excuse not to have fun exploring all the opportunities to be found in your own home. Take a look around your home and you’ll soon see that there are countless little pictures that leap out at you. With this month’s Masterclass we are going to take things a little…

Csilla Szucs Casa Milá Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd, 4.7-84.2mm, 1/750sec at f/2.8, ISO 100 RECOGNISE this Gaudí building in Barcelona, Spain, as I have been there myself, and indeed while there I levelled my camera to my eye to take almost the same shot as Csilla has sent in here. In fact, there were hundreds of people shooting that same view. I actually didn’t take the picture because I realised that even in colour, and on a day with a nice blue sky, the eye would be drawn away from the building and straight into that great oval space. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, but it rather wastes the location, as we can take a picture of the sky from anywhere. Here, with Csilla’s very bright and white sky,…

IT MAY well be true that curvilinear distortion is less noticeable in real-world images than lab images, but good control of this is still desirable in a lens because it is flattering for portraits and less distracting in uniform patterns such as brickwork, which would otherwise be warped. None of the lenses here suffers badly from curvilinear distortion, but differences can be seen between them when viewing the results from our lab – as seen in the bowing of lines in our graphs (below). Generally, each lens shows minor barrel distortion at 70mm, and by the mid 135mm setting it has shifted to pincushion distortion, which is again almost negligible. Pincushion becomes more pronounced at the 200mm setting, but is not a concern. A direct comparison shows that the Tamron…

EXPOSING FOR SNOW Q When I took some pictures in the snow a few months ago, I had problems getting the right exposure as my shots always seemed to be underexposed. I tried using manual settings, the meter reading and P mode, but the pictures were still underexposed. Do you think there is a problem with my Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro’s metering system? Keith Chapman A Although I haven’t seen your specific S3 Pro, I’m sure this isn’t a fault with the metering system. It sounds as though it’s down to the way in which in-camera light meters are designed to work. The light meter built into your camera assumes that every scene it reads will average out as a midtone. That is, if the scene were in black and…

MY FATHER always insisted on using slide film. His reasons were sound from a technical point of view. Slide film offered higher image quality than prints. This was due to the means of viewing, that they depended on transmitted light rather than reflected light, which in turn meant that they could reproduce a wider range of tones from bright to dark than prints could. My father therefore became one of the surprisingly large band of photographers whose photography was more about the taking of photographs than the display of them. The setting up of the screen and projector was enough of an inconvenience that viewings were a rare event, and for the most part the slides remained unviewed, stacked in their wooden boxes. While digital photography has probably significantly increased…

I WONDER whether it is convenience or quality that regulates the way you look at your finished images. Historically, the two have been some distance apart, as those of us who used to shoot everything on slide film will remember. Slides represented the ultimate technical quality of the time, but were frankly a pain to project – and you’d never set up the projector to display just one or two images, it had to be a ‘show’. Now, of course, you can plug your camera or your card into a TV to view your images and share them with as many people as you can fit in your living room. The problem is that the quality of the display may not show your images off at their best. Prints, even…

Shadow and Light By Sarah Hermanson Meister Thames & Hudson, £34.95, hardback, 208 pages, ISBN 978-0-500-54424-2 WHILE Bill Brandt books are nothing new on the market (Brandt Nudes was reviewed in AP 1 December 2012), this full examination of his life’s work is one of the broadest and most interesting. Not only do we see Brandt’s accomplished photojournalism of English society before and during the Second World War, but there are also landscapes, portraits and nudes. Author Sarah Hermanson Meister has garnered a wealth of biographical material. A glossary of Brandt’s retouching techniques by Lee Ann Daffner is a particular treat. Brandt made no secret of his opinions on the value of retouching prints, and the technical details of how he shaped his final images are fascinating. Geraldo de Barros:…

SOME 15 years ago I changed careers from a budding semi-professional photographer to that of another profession. During this period I have kept a loose interest in photography, but it is only within the past year that I have decided to attempt to become a professional photographer once again. Oh, how things have changed – and for the worse! Having been taught photography using film, 35mm to 10x8in cameras and darkrooms, I am used to pressing the shutter release when I am confident I have the shot I want, processing the film carefully and methodically, and then, if the image is to be printed, spending time in the lab producing a quality print. All-in-all, it was a well-thought-out, wellprepared exercise that filtered out the technically good and artistically gifted photographer…

DESPITE seeing magazines, postcards, and advertisements full of images of sunshine and clear-blue skies, reality rarely plays out perfectly. The coast of my home state of Alaska is drenched by rain for most of the year. The forested islands are perpetually clothed in mist, while the glaciers radiate blue in the overcast. Yet to believe the cruise-ship advertising and magazine spreads, you’d think it was as sunny as the south of Spain. As photographers and travellers we are subjected to the reality, and if we want to make images, regardless of the weather, we have to be prepared. Cold, tropical humidity, saltwater, wild places, and river trips all hold their photographic challenges, risks and rewards. Knowing what you need when you face these situations is the best way to get…

Twice a month we test of six of the best accessories on the market. Here we take a look at sling straps Custom SLR Camera Strap and C-Loop Street price £25 (strap), £35 (C-Loop), £50 (both) www.customslr.com Custom SLR has designed its camera strap with a split shoulder pad for maximum comfort. The result is a lightweight strap that adapts well to the shoulder. It’s certainly comfortable even with heavier kit, the strap distributing weight evenly across the shoulder. The swivelling buckles that connect the strap to the pad increase flexibility, although they do make the strap slightly more prone to becoming twisted. Also available is the C-Loop strap mount, a clip-on attachment that fixes the strap to the camera via the tripod screw. The mount is fully rotational, and…

IT IS not possible to make direct comparisons between the Nikon, Sony and Canon lenses because a different camera system has been used for each to record our resolution charts. However, as close a comparison as possible has been used, with the 24-million-pixel Nikon D600 being used for the Sigma and Nikon lenses, the 24-million-pixel Alpha 99 for the Sony lens and the 22.3-million-pixel Canon EOS 5D Mark III for the Canon and Tamron lenses. Our resolution charts indicate centre sharpness for each of the lenses at the optimum f/5.6 and f/11 settings, and it is difficult to note any differences between them at all. The brand lenses show slightly better contrast, with the Sigma lens a tad softer, but all five models are able to resolve up to 30…

Low-key portraits BAHoltPhotography asks How do I shoot low-key portraits? When people use flash, the background in their images is always pitch black, but when I have tried this it has always resulted in the background being revealed by the flashgun. How do I avoid including the background when taking photographs with flash? PeteRob replies You need studio lighting. To keep a background completely unlit, the subject would have to be carefully lit using several light sources to get a natural effect. I think you would also need a fairly large studio to ensure a good separation of subject from background to avoid overspill and you would also need a non-reflective background. NosamLuap replies You’re spot-on regarding the separation between the subject and background, but it doesn’t need studio lights,…

EVERY now and then you see through a big lie. Usually, it is a lie that has been repeated so often that you have never even questioned it. Just recently, I saw through one of the biggest lies in photography. It is that colour is more realistic, more natural, than black & white. This piece of nonsense is based on a simple intellectual failure to distinguish between reality and representation. If that’s not clear, let me rephrase it. Anyone who says that black & white is an acquired taste, and that colour is more ‘real’, has never thought about the nature and history of either art or communication. The very first representations, made by our remote ancestors, were not colour photographs. They may have been lines drawn in the sand;…