Innholdsfortegnelse for June 8, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

I DON’T know about you, but I find it very easy to get stuck in a rut. I don’t do it intentionally, and I don’t know I’m in one until I’ve been in it for some time. I start to get a bit bored and discontented. If I don’t sit back to look at myself and what I have been doing, I don’t discover what’s wrong with me. I just carry on travelling along that rut. The dissatisfaction doesn’t come about because the quality of my existence has changed, but purely because I have been doing it the same way for too long, without a change and without thinking enough about ‘why’. They say a change is as good as a rest, but in fact it can be far more…

● THE BEGINNER’S PHOTOGRAPHY GUIDE by various photographers, £14.99 There are many beginners’ guides to photography. While there’s not a great deal to recommend this book above any of the others, it is still a light and accessible introduction to the basics of image making that could, perhaps, have done with a little more in-depth knowledge. ● MICHAEL FREEMAN’S PHOTO SCHOOL: STREET by Michael Freeman, £17.99 In yet another addition to the Photo School series, Michael Freeman tackles the still-popular genre of street photography. Freeman’s style is perfectly accessible without ever dumbing down, so if you’ve read any of his previous titles you’ll know you’re in safe hands. ● SHOOTING YOURSELF: SELF-PORTRAITS WITH ATTITUDE by Haje Jan Kamps, £9.99 ‘Turn the camera on the world’s most fascinating and attractive model…

JIM BRANDENBURG For more than 30 years, Jim Brandenburg travelled the world as a photographer with National Geographic magazine. His work has been published in The New York Times, Life and Time, among others, and he has won numerous awards, including Kodak Wildlife Photographer of the Year by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine. He is the chair of this yearÕs competition. Every month Jim will share the story behind one of his nature images SOME readers may be familiar with the location in which this image was taken, but many people in Britain will not know where it is. This is surprising because it is one of France’s most recognisable landmarks and as a tourist destination is second only to the Eiffel Tower in popularity. The place…

IF YOUR PICTURES ARE FEATURED YOUÕLL RECEIVEÉ £50 PLUS The Editor’s Choice wins a Vanguard GH-100 3-in-1 pistol grip ball head worth £129.99* Combining the smooth precision of a ball head with the impressive ergonomic control of a pistol grip, the award-winning GH-100 enables you to position your camera exactly where you want it. The ball head has an anodized centre ball and friction-control switch, while the pistol grip enables you to position your camera or spotting scope effortlessly. The GH-100 also has 360° of panning movement, with 72 clicks of 5°. www.vanguardworld.co.uk How to submit your images Please see the ‘Send us your pictures’ section on page 3 for details or visit www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/spotlight George Edwards Berkshire George bought his first ‘proper’ camera in 2011, and was inspired to take…

A GOOD photograph almost always has a good story behind it, and Saljic’s exploits on the Matterhorn have been no exception. He recalls a night in January 2012 when things just seemed to go his way. Having driven more than 1,100km from Split in Croatia to Zermatt in Switzerland (the Matterhorn’s location), Saljic was ready for a good night’s sleep. However, he remembers a strange feeling of anticipation before he went to bed that caused him to leave his camera outside on its tripod, ready and waiting. ‘I woke up at around 3am. I checked the sky, and saw this magical image in front of my eyes,’ he says. ‘Frankly, I think the Matterhorn woke me up just in time to give me the chance again after three years of…

MOST cameras find it difficult to meter through a dense ND filter, and many won’t be able to expose the image correctly. It’s best to take an image normally and obtain a precise exposure without the filter. From this, the correct exposure for the ND filter can then be calculated. All you do is double the exposure time for each exposure value. For example, for a standard exposure of 1/8sec, the correct exposure with an ND2 filter will be 1/4sec. With an ND4 filter this becomes 1/2sec, and 1sec with an ND8 filter. With a 10EV ND filter, the 1/8sec standard exposure becomes 2mins. Of course, it is easier to print out a chart of shutter speeds at different EV strengths. Also, there are smartphone and tablet apps, such as…

During the day, moving clouds can create interesting ÔstreaksÕ across an image Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 16-35mm, 30secs at f/11, ISO 100 YOU CAN take long-exposure images during the day using a 10EV ND filter. With this filter, it should be possible to take images with exposures of 30secs or even longer, depending on how bright the light is. Although subjects are perhaps a little more restricted when shooting long-exposure images during the day, there are still plenty of interesting photo opportunities. For one of the most striking longexposure photographs, try capturing the movement of clouds. Over the course of a 30sec exposure, clouds will appear to bend and stretch as they move across the sky. This works particularly well with white fluffy clouds against a bright blue sky,…

Twice a month we test of six of the best accessories on the market. Here we take a look at ND filters Lee Filters Big Stopper Around £99 www.leefilters.com Square with rounded edges, the Lee Filters 10-stop Big Stopper is designed to fit into Lee’s 100mm adaptable filter holder, giving it more of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ quality than circular filters. We were surprised by the results from the Big Stopper. Although there was an even split as to whether the filters warmed or cooled the image’s colour temperature, the cool cast was strong with a vivid blue hue to the end result. There was, however, little additional vignetting. So long as you bear in mind that the colour cast may not behave quite as you expect it to, this is a…

bREEMmachine asks I have a Nikon D7000 that I used to shoot a friend’s wedding. I was asked if I had a back-up camera ‘just in case’, and it has left me thinking that maybe I could do with one. It will be an emergency camera, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money, but I would like it to have 8-12 million pixels. Looking on eBay, there are some Nikons for around £100, so can anyone recommend a camera model that’s good but relatively inexpensive? thornrider replies My first thought, given your mention of eBay, is a Nikon D90, but if this won’t come down to £100 then the D80 is nearly as good. Both would be compatible with AF-D lenses, as is your D7000. El_Sid replies…

EVEN with technology moving as quickly as it does, 150-million-pixel-plus cameras aren’t readily available at a consumer level – and nor will they be for some time. An image from a camera with such a high resolution will show superior levels of detail and make a fantastic large-scale print to hang on a wall, without any pixelation. For now, though, by using photo-editing software, it is possible to stitch together a sequence of images to achieve a single, super-high-resolution shot – and all with a humble DSLR. Rather than using a wideangle lens to capture a scene in one frame, take a series of close-up images of different parts of the view with a telephoto lens and merge them together using Photoshop. For example, nine close-up images of a scene…

Professor Newman explains... A COLLEAGUE recently asked me why a 24-1,000mm equivalent lens cannot be made for a DSLR, while it can for a ‘superzoom’. The answer I gave was along these lines. The superzoom compact has a 1/2.4in sensor, which is physically 6.17x4.55mm, giving a diagonal of 7.66mm. The diagonal of the 24x36mm 135 fullframe format is 43mm, so this gives a crop factor for the 1/2.4in sensor of 5.6. Recently, Canon published a patent for a 44x superzoom lens. This is Japanese patent number 2012-98699 and is for a 24-1,060mm 35mm equivalent, actually a 4.3-190.43mm focal length zoom, with an f-number range of 2.87-7.07. The other statistics given in the patent give the reason why a lens of this specification would not be feasible coupled to a full-frame…

News Analysis Comment PhotoDiary 8/6/13 “The incidents have been reported and dealers informed” ‘Thieves strike twice at Leica UK, page 7 Serial camera thief on the prowl? • High-street stores on alert THIEF ON LOOSE, DEALERS WARNED A MAN suspected of stealing £6,000 worth of Leica gear from a London camera shop may have struck other stores across the South East, dealers have been warned. The thief escaped with a Leica M-E, a 50mm f/2 Summicron lens and a filter from Red Dot Cameras in Old Street, London, on 16 May during normal opening hours. The Metropolitan Police are scouring CCTV footage, but no arrests have been made. Police say they are looking for a white man in his 50s or 60s, around 5ft 5in tall with receding grey hair…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 8GB media card* MISCHIEF IN OXFORD On a hot summer’s day, my friend and I visited Oxford and found ourselves in a very old public house. Most of the furniture was old and I noticed a chair in the corner that had been inscribed with the letters ‘OCC’. I asked the landlord about his furniture, and he told us that he bought the chair from Oxford County Council when it refurbished the law courts. Not long after, an American couple walked in. I couldn’t keep my eyes off all his camera gear that included a Nikon D300 and number of lenses. The lady asked, ‘What does the OCC stand for on…

LONDON’S South Bank is the perfect setting for a street photography Masterclass. Littered with famous landmarks that are perfect backdrops to your compositions, you can easily walk between several shooting locations in a day. We decided to challenge two AP readers to use the South Bank locations to capture angles, lines and shapes in their images. This meant they had to use buildings, stairways and tunnels within their frames. Guiding them on their photographic tour of London was Cathal McNaughton. Cathal is a Reuters photographer based in Ireland. He began his career in 1994 working at The Irish News in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he covered the civil and political unrest for several years before going freelance and working for various international publications and agencies. He has also won the…

THE IDEA of taking your photography to its limits will mean different things to different people. Living as we do in a temperate climate, with access to editing software, for many of us our most extreme experience might be persistent British drizzle or a slightly blown-out JPEG. Pushing the limits has a different meaning for landscape photographer Nenad Saljic. For his high-contrast monochrome images, scaling mountains and delving deep into caves is only half the battle, as a lot of work is still required in post-processing even after the physical challenge is over. This hard work, however, has paid off dividends. Saljic’s photography has received prizes and accolades internationally, most recently in the Professional Landscape category of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards. The images for which Saljic won his…

Tottenham Court Road Tube Station Henry Yau Nikon D7000, 10-20mm, 1/30sec at f/4, ISO 400 HENRY’S shot of a deserted stairway in London’s Tottenham Court Road Tube station has two very strong components: the composition and the colour. The composition really drags you in, thanks to the dramatic wideangle view offered by a 15mm (equivalent) focal length. Henry’s got the right idea by putting the end of the tunnel dead centre, and with such strong leading lines at the bottom, sides and top the viewer is whisked down the corridor. However, the lines of the tiles at the bottom of the shot aren’t quite horizontal. Although this is forgivable given that the shot was handheld (tripods being forbidden on the Underground), it does jar when the shot relies on such…

THE VAST majority of cameras will have a maximum shutter speed of only 30secs, and this is fine for many types of long-exposure images. However, shooting star trails will require far longer exposures, and this is where the bulb, or B, setting comes into play. When in bulb mode, the camera’s shutter will remain open for as long as the shutter button is held down. This will require the photographer to time the duration of the exposure, but extreme precision is less important when the exposure time is minutes rather than a fraction of a second. That said, it is very important to keep the camera as still as possible, so be sure to avoid all contact with the camera as even the faintest camera movement could blur the image.…

SHOOTING at night offers the chance to get very some long exposures. The classic night-time long-exposure shot that most people try is shooting traffic trails winding around a road. A relatively short exposure is all you need to capture these trails, and in a town or city where there is a lot of ambient lighting an exposure time of as little as 30secs may be all you need to capture a traffic trail. Out in the countryside, where there is less ambient light, a far longer exposure will be needed to capture both the traffic trail and the surrounding landscape. The length of the exposure will depend on the level of ambient light. Under a full moon, an exposure of 1-2mins may be enough, but if it is a new…

HIGH dynamic range imaging techniques have generally been based on trying to compress extreme tonal ranges and the use of soft-edged masks to balance exposure differences. However, this leads to the ‘halo look’ that characterises so much HDR photography. Yet even film users have to contend with wide tonal ranges, and resort to tricks like ND grad filters, or dodge and burn techniques, to balance the exposure. With much HDR-processed imagery, photographers use software to compress everything in the scene evenly without giving thought to whether this is necessary or not, or if the end result actually looks any good. It is possible when working with programs such as Photomatix Pro, or Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop, to produce natural-looking results, so we shouldn’t blame the software. It is…

Filters have been used to protect the front element of lenses for many years, and there’s a very good argument for having an additional protective layer on the front of an expensive lens – it’s certainly far easier (and cheaper) to replace a damaged filter than it is a damaged front lens element. Of course, there are equally valid arguments for not fitting such a filter, as it increases the risk of unwanted artefacts. It’s also worth remembering that an unbranded ‘bargain’ filter is not going to be as optically refined as your lens, so even without any artefacts you may be compromising image quality. However, if you want to protect the glass on the front of your lens, a filter is the only option. There are a number of…

OCCASIONALLY, when there is a lot of subject matter in the foreground of a scene, the multiple close-up images will fail to merge accurately. This is because the sequential images do not have the same point of perspective – known as parallax error/parallax distortion. To better understand this phenomenon, close one eye and hold up a finger. When you turn your head, you will notice that the alignment between your finger and the background changes. This is what happens with a camera. As the alignment changes, the images no longer match where they overlap Parallax error can be corrected by shooting all the close-up images from the same perspective. This is achieved by rotating the camera round the optical centre point of the lens, known as the ‘point of no…

THERE are two ways to look at the money you spend on books. First, there’s education: books to learn from; go back to; reread, reinterpret; use as a reference source. Second, there’s entertainment. The price of a paperback is comparable with the price of a cinema ticket, and even a fast reader like me is unlikely to read any but the most inconsequential book in the time it takes to watch a movie. More likely, for my £7.99, £8.99 or £9.99, I’ll have several hours’ entertainment. What is more, once I’ve read it, my wife can read it – I usually read things first because I read faster – and unless I particularly want to keep it I can then pass it on to my friends. Some of them do…

BOOK Sony World Photography Awards 2013 By various photographers World Photography Organisation, £29.95, hardback, 216 pages, ISBN 978-0-9572010-2-6 THE SONY World Photography Awards represent some of the finest examples of contemporary photography in all fields, and 2013 was no exception. Andrea Gjestvang deservedly won the top prize, with her poignant images of survivors of the 2011 terrorist atrocities on Utøya Island in Norway. Elsewhere, the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award went to William Eggleston, whose acceptance video at the awards consisted entirely of him wordlessly playing the piano. Winners and runners-up of all categories are given ample space in this gorgeous book, and some of the images are unforgettable. To hear from the winner in the Professional Landscape category, Nenad Saljic, turn to page 38. BOOK The Grey Line By…

IAN SHORE really rubbed up fellow AP readers with his Backchat specifying his dislike of Photoshop-enhanced images (AP 9 March). I love everything about Photoshop. The makers of photographic equipment often receive a slap on the back for their brilliance, but I think companies like Adobe, who make excellent photo-editing software, are hugely underrated. And wouldn’t digital imaging be dull without it? I owed a friend a favour, which he decided to call in by having me check out a DVD of photos taken at his mum’s 70th birthday party. I’d volunteered my own services as photographer, but a bout of flu had ruled me out. So my pal had asked a workmate, who owned a ‘professional’ camera, to do the honours. It turned out that the guy had a…

FOR A man who spends his professional life capturing those small, millisecond moments in nature, Brazilian photographer Hudson Garcia is surprisingly happy to take things slowly when preparing to take his stunning wildlife images. Indeed, while you’d think the high-speed photography he expertly practises was all about living for the moment, he says the real key to the art is taking your time. ‘Sometimes you have to wait for a long time to get the shot,’ he explains, ‘and sometimes you have to set up a small studio carefully and precisely, which also takes time. If the equipment is working well, then an idea can easily take weeks to come to fruition. The wait from concept to result is a long one!’ That willingness to wait weeks for a fraction…

SALJIC uses a Nikon D700, which he says seemed like the logical upgrade from the Nikon FM2 he had been wielding previously. The nature of the equipment, however, is not his overriding concern. ‘The equipment helps me to materialise my emotions, imagination and vision. However, this is just a tool,’ he says. This is perhaps the nub of Saljic’s photography, and the reason why he is willing to go to such extreme lengths to get the images right. A tool is used only for presenting a straight representation of what’s directly ahead, and Saljic is aiming to use his camera to do more than that. ‘I am not interested in documenting things,’ he says. ‘Photography is the way I see reality, what I feel about the place. It is an…

MOST of us are familiar with longexposure images. Whether it is the swirling lights created by traffic in a city at night, or the water of a flowing river, long exposures have been used by photographers to capture patterns and movement over a greater-than-usual period of time. When talking about long exposures, we generally mean images that have been exposed for longer than 1sec. However, it is not uncommon to use exposures of minutes or even hours to capture a subject’s movement. The length of time used to create the exposure is one of the key considerations for the photographer, and it can sometimes be difficult to work out. In this article, we will explain the principles, techniques and equipment needed for long-exposure photography. It is not simply a matter…

ND filters Neutral density filters come in different strengths that block different amounts of light, and therefore affect the length of the required exposure. The strongest filters increase the necessary exposure time by 10EV. Different manufacturers have different ways of naming their ND filter ranges, so we have included the table below as a reference: Stacking filters By stacking ND filters together, their strengths can be combined. For example, two ND32 (5EV) filters will combine to produce the same result as an ND1000 (10EV) filter. This is useful when a precise exposure duration is required, or if one 10EV ND filter is too strong. Two 10EV filters can also be stacked to create a 20EV filter, for a very extreme result. For example, our 1/8sec original exposure, which becomes a…

INSPIRED by long-exposure seascapes, Richard Carter has become something of an expert at taking these images himself. ‘There’s nothing better than standing on a deserted beach at dawn or dusk enjoying the moment,’ he says. Richard’s kit bag consists of a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a range of L-series lenses, but for long-exposure work he only ever uses the 16mm end of his Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM. To facilitate the long exposure, he uses a third-party timer release and a Heliopan 10-stop ND filter. To get the sea perfectly smooth, Richard says it’s a case of ‘the longer the better’. He explains that he always keeps the camera’s sensitivity at ISO 50-100, and ‘the lens in its sharpest range, which is around f/9. However, this depends…

LOW-PASS FILTER REMOVAL Q Is it possible, or even advisable, to have the low-pass filters removed from a sensor assembly in order to obtain sharper images? Moiré doesn’t bother me, but I find the possibility of getting sharper images from my Canon EOS-1D Mark II N intriguing. Richard Bushby A With some cameras it is possible to have the low-pass (antialiasing) filter removed, but your Canon EOS-1D Mark II N is not one of them. According to the manufacturer, the filter is ‘non-removable’ (it is an integral part of the sensor), and I can find nothing to suggest that anyone has been successful in modifying it in this way. Even if it were possible, it’s not something I’d recommend. For a start, anything that involves working on an imaging sensor…

ON TEST PANASONIC LUMIX DMC-G6 Improved noise reduction and a 16.05-millionpixel sensor are just a few of the key features of Panasonic’s sleek new CSC. We put it to the test PROFILE HOOK, LINE AND SINKER AP’s new technical writer Callum McInerney-Riley explains how his love of angling led him to a career in photography DOCUMENTARY THE ORDER OF WAR Anne Wilkes Tucker looks at the role photography has played in conflicts around the world ON TEST CANON IXUS 255 HS We test Canon’s compact camera with 12.1-million-pixel sensor and 10x optical zoom…

1 Select the sequence of images to be merged and place them in a folder, naming it appropriately. Repeat this for every new Photomerge so that no other images are accidently imported into the final photograph. 2 In Photoshop, select File>Automate>Photomerge. In the Photomerge box that appears, keep the Layout set to Auto and make sure that the Blend Images Together box is ticked. Vignette Removal and Geometric Distortion Correction can also be selected if required 3 Now click Browse and select all the images in the relevant Photomerge folder prepared in step 1. Click Open. 4 Once Photoshop has finished processing the images, they should all be nicely aligned. In my example, the clouds failed to match so I will need to clone this area back in. 5 I…