Innholdsfortegnelse for July 6, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

VALUE for money is a complicated concept that requires measuring with care and personal requirements in mind. Just because something has a high price does not mean it is poor value, even if it is beyond our own financial reach. Many people confuse ‘costly’ with ‘expensive’ – ‘cost’ is a numerical fact, while ‘expensive’ is a term with its roots in our own relative experiences and options. We need to appreciate these differences when we consider how we feel about the price of the Leica M (see pages 49-54). At more than ￡5,000, there can be no doubt that it is costly, but it is more relevant to determine whether it presents good value for all that money, or if it’s simply overpriced. I think we can all comprehend that…

● 101 TOP TIPS FOR DIGITAL LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY by Carl Heilman II, £14.99 Carl Heilman II’s top tips for shooting digital landscapes are heavily based around his personal experience, and as such they get quite specific. He’s an advocate of using partly automated settings such as aperture priority, and admits he only uses manual to put the shutter on bulb mode. If you can overlook such cardinal sins, there’s good writing and decent photography here. ● PURIENNE. by Henrik Purienne, £29.99 Henrik Purienne provides a sun-drenched collection of holiday photos, featuring many images of models in gorgeous locations. The near-voyeurism of these images won’t appeal to everyone, and even with the technical skill of Purienne’s approach to lighting and form, some will simply find it too much. ● I BELONG…

BRINGING YOU ESSENTIAL EXPERT ADVICE EVERY WEEK DAVID WARD David Ward is one of the UK’s finest landscape photographers. With more than 20 years’ experience in largeformat photography, he has photographed extensively throughout the UK and in countries such as Canada, Iceland, Norway and France. He has also led workshops for Light & Land. David has written two books on his photographic philosophy called Landscape Within and Landscape Beyond. Each month, he will discuss the story behind one of his fantastic landscape photographs To see more of David’s images or to book a place on one of his workshops, visit www.into-the-light.com THIS image was taken on the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. I was there with a group and we’d been photographing the boat sheds – there’s a whole row…

Your chance to enter the UK’s most prestigious competition for amateur photographers R ound 6 of this year’s Amateur Photographer of the Year competition is People at Work (a single frame to tell a story). Documentary photography is a diverse genre. It is also one of the most difficult to get right. It isn’t enough simply to point and shoot – you have to be able to identify a story, understand how to represent it through a single image or series and then shoot it in an interesting way. In this round we want you to photograph people at work. What that work entails is up to you. Turn to page 29 for some tips and ideas. We have thousands of pounds’ worth of fantastic Panasonic camera equipment up for…

1st EISA MAESTRO COMPETITION WINNERS This week we showcase the first, second and third-placed winners in the UK round of the EISA Maestro Photo Contest 2013. Entrants were asked to create a picture story exploring the theme ‘Macro/Close-Up’. The first-prize winner goes through to the international final, with the results announced in August. AP is the UK representative for EISA on the photographic panel. Tony Cooper Leicestershire Tony started taking photographs in 1970, as a geology student taking pictures of rocks. When he was tasked with photographing fossils, he discovered a love of macro that has remained with him ever since. Tony’s favourite photographic macro subjects are insects – he loves how viewing them close up reveals a world unseen by human eyes. ‘Creeping up on insects and getting a…

MacWet Short Mesh Gloves ￡27.99 www.macwet.com ‘ALL GRIP, no slip’ claims MacWet of its signature gloves, and we’d have to agree. While this pair of thin, high-grip gloves was originally designed for sport, their functionality lends itself very well to photography in rough or wet conditions. The thin polyamide and polyurethane material allows the user to retain both dexterity and a sense of touch – you can feel when your finger runs across different textures. Operating physical buttons on a camera while wearing the gloves is a breeze, and you can even use a touchscreen through them. The gloves are cooling rather than warming – they won’t help much in chilly conditions, but will ensure that your hands don’t sweat and overheat in the middle of delicate operations. If you’re…

THE NEW live-view mode in the Leica M is more useful than we first expected. Since it has a through-the-lens view, it avoids the parallax problem inherent in rangefinder-camera design and offers a preview of depth of field, white balance and exposure, with a live histogram. Focus peaking outlines in-focus areas with a subtle red colour and an automatic enlargement of the central part of the frame activates when the focus ring is adjusted. The degree of enlargement can be adjusted from 5x to 10x. An electronic viewfinder can be added, too. The 1.4-million-dot accessory (an optional extra) hinges up through 90° to allow shooting from awkward angles, and features a button to switch between the EVF and the screen. It would have been nice to see this automated via…

PentaxManiac asks Why should I shoot both raw+JPEG? Isn’t a JPEG contained in the raw image, because surely that’s what I see on the rear screen when I shoot in raw? I’ve also been told that’s the reason my Epson P-3000 storage device/image viewer (and similar models) can show any raw image, even from cameras made recently. Also, if I really want a JPEG as well as a raw file, I can make one and do a ‘Save as’ in-camera or later, which saves both that and the raw original. There are even high-end cameras with two card slots, on which people save raw to one and JPEG for all the same shots to the other. P_Stoddart replies Shooting raw+JPEG means you have access to the full image immediately, whereas…

THE NIMSLO 3D isn’t the first stereo camera that I’ve used, but it differs significantly from all the others in the way in which it is designed to yield a three-dimensional image. Generally, stereo photography works by presenting the left and right eye with slightly different images, and allowing the brain to do the work of reconstructing a stereo scene. Technicalities vary, but some kind of device is required, be it a viewer held up to the eyes or polarised spectacles to see a projected image. The Nimslo process, on the other hand, results in prints that are held in the hand and viewed without any additional apparatus or tricks of the eye. Probably most familiar as novelty postcards, these lenticular prints, as they are called, have a ridged surface,…

News Analysis Comment PhotoDiary 6/7/13 “Very limited supplies have started to arrive in the UK” Leica admits M shortage, page 6 NX Galaxy has 4.8in screen • 3G and Wi-Ficompatible SAMSUNG REVEALS FIRST ANDROID SYSTEM CAMERA SAMSUNG has unveiled the first interchangeable-lens camera to house an Android operating system, the Galaxy NX, which is designed to give photographers smartphone-like connectivity. The Galaxy NX should allow photographers to edit images on its 4.8in (HD TFT Super Clear) LCD screen before using Android software applications to quickly upload them to Flickr, for example. ‘People don’t always want to just take pictures with their smartphone,’ said Todd Tieman, a Samsung digital imaging sales and marketing manager, who hailed the Galaxy NX as ‘the whole digital-imaging process in a single device’. The camera is…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 8GB media card* SENSOR UPGRADES With the recent tie-up between Olympus and Sony, I’m wondering why Sony cannot offer Olympus camera users a sensor upgrade for owners of, say, E-620 or E-5 DSLRs. It would be a lot quicker and cheaper than getting a new camera, and I think the demand would be there. For example, I own an E-620 and would quite happily pay ￡200 or so for such an upgrade. I think the E-620 is a fantastic camera. Checking the second-hand columns in AP, you hardly ever see one for sale. With the 12-60mm professionally weatherproofed zoom lens, autofocus is very fast indeed – and closest focus is only…

KEEPING IT SUBTLE WITH HSL MARTIN EVENING Martin Evening is a Londonbased advertising photographer and noted expert in both photography and digital imaging. As a successful photographer, Martin is well known in London for his fashion and beauty work, for which he has won several awards. In 2008, he was inducted into the NAPP Photoshop Hall of Fame. Martin has worked with the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom engineering teams over many years and is one of the founding members of Pixel Genius, a software design company producing automated production and creative plug-ins for Photoshop. His recent books include The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book, Adobe Photoshop CS6 for Photographers, as well as the Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop series, which he co-wrote with Jeff Schewe. THE PHOTOGRAPH…

At its inception, photography was seen as a truth-telling device. Finally, people could see images of the world as it was rather than through the subjective representations of the day’s painters. Of course, now we are not so trusting of photography’s capacity to offer us a slice of reality. Yet what we can all be sure of is that photography allows us to, at the very least, tell a story through a single frame. For round 6 of APOY we want you to get out into the world and show us people at work. There are a few things to consider here. The first is, what constitutes work? Work can take many forms, such as sport, business, retail and dance. Any of these things can be a viable subject. The…

YOU PROBABLY know the feeling. You have the date for shooting marked indelibly into your calendar. The forecasts promise clear skies. Your alarm is set and your kit is ready to go. Nothing is going to stop you from taking that picture. Of course, you bounce from your bed to find roiling clouds and howling winds making a mockery of Met Office predictions. There’s no sign of any lovely golden light and the picture you envisioned is hidden behind the deluge. Sure, you could throw on the wellies, but the windows are rattling and your stillwarm bed seems awfully inviting. That conditions have to be just-so for landscape photography is a pervasive mentality, and one that John Gravett seeks to change. With his new exhibition There’s No Such Thing as…

Valencia David Cantrille Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm, 15secs at f/11, ISO 100 I DON’T have many details about David’s striking night shot, other than the Exif data, but I’m fairly certain it’s the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. I’m not sure that the location matters, though, because this is a great example of long-exposure photography. In this instance, David utilised a 15sec exposure to create his reflected image, and giving equal weight to the building and its reflection really works well. I’d be tempted to take the notion of symmetry a step further with a crop that loses the bright (and asymmetrical) path on the left of the frame. The focus is then distinctly on the beautifully curvaceous architecture, although it admittedly changes the shot…

RESOLUTION & NOISE These images show 72ppi (100% on a computer screen) sections of images of a resolution chart, captured using the 50mm f/2 Summicron lens set to f/5.6 . We show the section of the resolution chart where the camera starts to fail to reproduce the lines separately. The higher the number visible in these images, the better the camera’s detail resolution is at the specified sensitivity setting. Noise is extremely well controlled, especially colour noise. This image was shot at ISO 3200 and shows virtually no noise…

The ‘miniature’ 110 film format was launched by Kodak in 1972, and is effectively a smaller version of the company’s 126 film format that appeared almost a decade earlier. Like 126 film, 110 film is cartridge-based, so loading a camera typically requires nothing more than opening the camera back and dropping a pre-loaded plastic cartridge in. The self-contained nature of the cartridge means the film doesn’t need to be rewound when it is finished, either. This ease of use is what made the 126 format – and Kodak’s Instamatic cameras – popular among ‘happy snappers’. The 110 format improved on this in a number of ways, as it allowed cameras to be made smaller, lighter and even more convenient for pointand-shoot photography. Indeed, some cameras actually use the plastic 110…

EXHIBITION Elisabeth Blanchet: Prefabs – Palaces for the People Until 2 August. Photofusion, 17a Electric Lane, London SW9 8LA. Website: www.photofusion.org. Tel: 0207 738 5774. Open Mon-Wed, Fri-Sat 11am-5pm, Thu 11am-7pm. Admission free. OUR MORE venerable readers may remember the rise of the post-war prefabricated homes – boxlike steel bungalows designed to combat the great housing shortage. Despite their squat, almost ignominious design, something about these little houses seems to have endured. What exactly that is remains hard to define, but Elisabeth’s Blanchet’s project now being exhibited at Photofusion may provide some clue. Eleven years spent engaging with the people who still live in these houses, and are currently fighting to save them, has given Blanchet the tools to create intimate and touching portraiture. A lesser photographer might have been…

WHEN I was a child, our television was a black & white model. Colour sets were on their way – room-filling pieces of furniture with triple-pronged cathode ray tubes. A family friend visited when a talking head was being broadcast. He wound me up, which was easy to do to a naïve child with plenty of imagination. He told me about colour television. ‘Did you know,’ he informed me, ‘ that you can change the heads over? To anyone you like?’ I was amazed, which only fuelled his storytelling. ‘Oh yes,’ he went on, ‘you can change the hair style and colour, and the clothes…’ I took in all in, open-mouthed. I had no idea the family friend was kidding. Some time after that we did acquire a colour television,…

THE AMERICAN comedian WC Fields once famously maintained that you should never work with animals. It is perhaps fortunate, then, that naturalist and BBC broadcaster Chris Packham ignored this advice, for wildlife photography is somewhat his obsession, and certainly no laughing matter. While the majority of us will know Chris for his enthusiastic and endlessly knowledgeable presenting on such BBC staples as Springwatch, he is also garnering a name for himself as a serious wildlife photographer. Chris’s obsession with photography took off in the early 1980s when he traded in his music gear (he had, until then, been an avid musician) for a camera, lens and 30 rolls of film. ‘My girlfriend and I drove to the South of France and lived out the back of the car for six…

THE ELEMENTS OF THE STORY When creating a photo essay (telling a story through a series of images), you will often look to include a number of elements. Environmental and establishing shot – where does the story take place? Portrait – who is involved? Detail shot – getting a little closer in to the story. Action shot – events unfold in front of the camera. Of course these elements are malleable in the final product, but it just goes to show that there are many ways to tell a story. But then you may even find yourself combining all these things into one image. Take a look at Filipe Sarmento’s photograph (above) from APOY 2012’s On the Streets round. Here we have portrait, context and action all in one. It’s…

Amateur Photographer’s… ICONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHER I CAMERA I PHOTOGRAPH TODAY’S debate about digital manipulation of images and the extent to which it is acceptable has recurred throughout the medium’s history. In 1889, Peter Henry Emerson’s groundbreaking book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art argued that true photographic art must be made from a single image without retouching. However, prior to this time it was not unusual to combine several negatives in making photographs that had similar style and subject matter to paintings of the period. One of the foremost exponents of this approach was Henry Peach Robinson. Unlike the ‘gentleman photographers’ who practised photography in its early years, Robinson (born 1830) was not from a wealthy background. His father was a schoolmaster and he was initially apprenticed…

LEICA’S traditional approach to camera design means that its M-series of rangefinders are simple, basic machines that strip photography back to its fundamental principles, and Leica’s fans love them for that. Such cameras are as far from DSLRs as you can get, offering optical viewfinders and rangefinder focusing, which requires the user to match up a split image while turning the focus ring. Because of their size, Leica M rangefinder cameras have traditionally been favoured by travel photographers and photojournalists, although these days many DSLRs, and virtually all compact system cameras, are just as portable, if not more so. Rangefinders are pretty discreet, though, making them ideal for street photography, and are built to exacting standards. Leica M-mount lenses also offer superb optical quality. The newest Leica rangefinder is simply…

PRINT HEAD NEEDED Q I have an Epson Stylus Photo RX640 printer, which may need a new print head. Epson no longer has any in stock, so could you tell me where I could obtain one? L Croucher A First, what makes you think that the print head needs replacing? If it will print but the quality is compromised, it could just be a stubborn blockage. Have you tried a dedicated head-cleaning kit? Assuming you’re certain that the print head needs replacing, the Supplies Shop has replacements listed on its website, but at ￡82.80 plus delivery, you might want to consider your options. Should you prefer to repair, rather than replace, you can order online at www.thesuppliesshop.co.uk or by calling 0844 4141 567. Chris Gatcum PRICE DIFFERENCE Q I would…

TILT-AND-SHIFT lenses feature the film-plane-movement control normally associated with large-format monorail or studio cameras. They are considered to be very specialist kit designed for architectural and landscape photography where adjustment of the plane of focus and distortion control are key elements. Traditionally, tilt-and-shift lenses have been so expensive that the casual snapper hardly dare touch them. However, at under ￡1,000, Samyang’s T-S 24mm f/3.5 ED AS UMC is the most inexpensive of its type currently available, and includes features comparable with the benchmark Nikon and Canon tilt-and-shift lenses. Available in a range of mounts, it brings tilt-and-shift capability to a wider audience of DSLR users. FEATURES In common with all other Samyang DSLR lenses, the aperture on the T-S 24mm is set manually on the lens ring in 1⁄2 stops…