Innholdsfortegnelse for September 7, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

A COPYRIGHT row has broken out after the winner of an online photography competition was accused of stealing the winning image from another photographer and disqualified. Hengki Koentjoro, a fine-art photographer from Indonesia, says his image was digitally manipulated and flipped horizontally when entered into Samsung’s ‘Live in the moment’ competition, which is giving away an NX300 camera to four category winners. The controversial image had seemingly been entered by an Instagram member using the online name ‘bogdhan’, who has since been attacked in comments made by other users of the image-sharing website. The photo was submitted to the ‘MyCommute’ section of the contest earlier this summer. Koentjoro, whose work was featured in AP last year, says he was only made aware of copyright theft following a tipoff from a…

I HAVE had the pleasure of attending a few weddings – as a guest, I hasten to add – and the variety never ceases to amaze and thrill me. There is such a wealth of detail, pretty fabrics, flower arrangements, people wearing – and acting – their best. Such a wealth of beauty to fill a camera with for someone such as me who loves taking photos and can find inspiration in the most mundane of surroundings. So you might find this a little surprising but about half the time I do not even take along a camera to such events. I wonder how many have stopped and thought about the differences in how you view and experience an event (depending on whether you have a video recorder, camera, pencil…

A QUICK glance through the portfolio of landscape photographer Mark Littlejohn and you instantly grasp that this is a man who understands the most important element of capturing stunning images – great light. His work shows a connection with nature and is underpinned by solid camera technique. All this may seem relatively unremarkable until you realise that Mark hadn’t even picked up a compact camera until four years ago. This makes him a relative newcomer, yet his images display a maturity and creativity that many might struggle to emulate after a lifetime behind a camera. A Scotsman who has been based for the past 30 years in Penrith, Cumbria, in the heart of the Lake District, Mark picked up a compact camera in 2009 as a way of recording what…

Adrian Osmond Torfaen Adrian, 46, first discovered photography as a teenager, but his interest faded until the advent of digital imaging tempted him back. His favourite subjects are natural history, landscapes and people. ‘I like to make a record of my surroundings, but aim to produce something a little different,’ he says. To see more of his images visit www.flickr.com/photos/39987542@N08. Flower in green 1 By isolating a single flower, Adrian has created a simple but beautiful image Canon PowerShot G9, 22mm, 1/80sec at f/3.5, ISO 80 Structure of lily 2 The addition of a tripod allowed Adrian to slow down his shutter speed and thus use only natural light for this image Panasonic Lumix DMCLX3, 5mm, 1/25sec at f/8, ISO 100, tripod Otherwordly poppy 3 This is macro photography at…

THE KEY to a successful shoot is the planning. The event, especially where landscapes are concerned, is not all about taking the picture, but rather the work that goes into arriving at the location at the correct time, in the right conditions, fully prepared. Some planning and a little homework – days, weeks or even months in advance – go a long way in helping to prepare for a successful shoot. Getting to know the location as much as possible before you even arrive not only allows you to get a sense of the place, but can also save a lot of wasted time when you finally get there. So, let’s look at the preparations you should make before each trip, so you are rewarded with successful images every time.…

DOUBLE TROUBLE Q In my innocence, I would have expected an unintentional double exposure to be impossible on a DSLR. The picture above is proof that I was wrong. There are two completely different exposures on this single frame (look for the damselfly) taken with my Nikon D300 and 18-200mm Nikkor lens. As far as I am aware I did nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly nothing deliberate, so how can this happen? Clive Brown A I’m not sure I can answer this conclusively, Clive, but looking at your image the elements clearly appear twice in the shot, which suggests a multiple exposure. As the D300 has a multiple-exposure option, this is definitely something the camera is capable of, but you would need to perform several button presses to…

WEBSITE www.strobist.blogspot.co.uk THIS site’s statement of intent is ‘Learn how to light’, and its introductory post clarifies that the specific focus is offcamera flash. You might have to dig a little before you get to the teaching material, but you’ll be sifting through a lot of good content. News posts, reader profiles, gear announcements – it’s all here and makes for a diverse site. The ‘On Assignment’ posts are standouts, with photographers taking readers through portrait sessions and explaining the various challenges and what they learned from them. Sometimes the focus drifts away from lighting, but never so far that it seems rambling or irrelevant. The site has built up a solid community, with more than 100,000 members on Flickr. Pierdom By Simon Roberts Dewi Lewis Publishing, £35, hardback, 160…

BRINGING YOU ESSENTIAL EXPERT ADVICE EVERY WEEK ANDREW SANDERSON A renowned photographer, tutor, author and Ilford Master Printer, Andrew Sanderson offers practical tips on working with film and traditional darkroom techniques Andrew Sanderson was talking to Debbi Allen THIS shot is called ‘The dip’. It was taken in the late 1990s in Meltham, West Yorkshire. I was out on a walk that day, exploring the local area where I had recently bought a house. Meltham is a small town and you don’t have to walk far before you are in open farming country. I wandered up Mill Moor Road and soon found myself at Leygards Lane, looking south-west. I set up my camera on a tripod, and decided on a suitable composition using a Pentax ME Super and an 80-200mm…

Round eight ENTER TODAY! APOY 2013 In association with Panasonic LUMIX G WWW.PANASONIC.CO.UK Round 8 of this year’s Amateur Photographer of the Year competition is Wideangle World (wideangle and pan stitch). It should go without saying, but choosing just the right lens for your scene is perhaps the most crucial factor in producing a successful image. The appropriate focal length can serve to obscure as much as it can reveal. For example, a telephoto lens can hone the viewer’s attention into the subject by removing any extraneous details that may serve to distract the eye. However, for this round we want you either to restrict yourself to using a wideangle lens or try your hand at producing a panoramic view. Any subject will do – so long as it is…

Amateur Photographer’s… ICONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHER I CAMERA I PHOTOGRAPH BRUCE Davidson’s work is concerned, in his words, with ‘penetrating a world or a space that I fear, or that I don’t know, or to which I’m attracted’. In exploring his subjects, whether teenage gangs, circus performers or residents of inner-city ghettos, he has created his own distinctive style of documentary photography. Davidson’s approach is to immerse himself in his subject, often for years at a time. His personal involvement with the often marginal social groups he photographs sets his work apart from those who dispassionately record a scene. In that sense, he says, he doesn’t consider himself a documentary photographer. ‘The term “documentary photographer” suggests you just stand back, that you’re not in the picture, you’re just recording,’…

Delkin Fat Gecko Triple Mount Around £90 www.delkin.com DELKIN’S Fat Gecko Dual Mount camera support has been upgraded to include a third arm for extra stability. Three legs, each with a suction cup, form a stable triangle to support up to 8lb (3.6kg) of kit, which attaches via a standard 1/4in tripod mount. Realistically, the Triple Mount is best used with compact and compact system cameras. There is a great deal of flexibility in terms of how the three arms can be arranged, thanks to the six adjustable points that allow the angles to be customised. This means the mount can be used on a variety of surface shapes, provided they are smooth and non-porous. The cups lock in place with a two-part system that uses the suction-cup button and…

THE INSTAMATIC, or 126 film format, is 50 years old this year. I’d like to be able to wish it a happy birthday, but it’s been dead and buried for nearly a decade. Of course, many of the cameras live on, although they are hardly enjoying a fulfilling life, being more akin to zombies – living dead deprived of their source of sustenance. Unlike the 126’s little brother, the 110 Pocket Instamatic, which has returned from the grave, those of us who wish to use our 126 cameras have to rely on long-expired stock, picked up sporadically at car-boot sales and charity shops. Or perhaps you can find something on eBay, where occasionally one of the legion of Instamatic cameras listed comes in its box complete with unused film. Few…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 8GB media card* MASS PRODUCED MEANS BETTER QUALITY Professor Bob Newman’s recent article on build quality (AP 10 August) was certainly food for thought. I have always thought the term ‘build quality’ to be a strange one, and I am not even sure if it is grammatically correct. I prefer to use the term ‘well made’ rather than ‘good build quality’, and to my mind they both mean the same thing, although I am sure that some will disagree. If we have to use the term, however, my understanding has always been that mass-produced items generally exhibit the best build quality, because all the parts have to fit together first time,…

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 PHOTOMERGE feature in Photoshop allows you…

Selecting the right lens to capture your scene is one of the most vital choices you can make. Finding yourself wielding the wrong lens can mean you lose out on a potentially great shot. Knowing when to use a wideangle lens as opposed to a telephoto engages the creative and logistic portion of your brain. While a telephoto lens will well work outdoors, it may not offer you enough space to frame your subject. With that in mind, we want to see what you can achieve using either a wideangle lens or by producing a panoramic stitch. Our world contains some absolutely breathtaking landscapes that are just begging to be photographed. A wideangle lens can help to convey the sheer vastness of the scenes you find. However, a wideangle lens…

Flower close-up Charlotte Williams Samsung PL150, 27mm equivalent focal length, 1/60sec at f/3.5, ISO 80 THERE are times when we’re all inclined to blame our equipment for our photographic failings, rather than accept that we could have done things slightly differently to get a better result. Yet sometimes the camera we are using is at least partly to blame for things not coming out as well as they could. Charlotte’s macro shot, taken using a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera, is an example of this. It’s obvious that the central flower isn’t sharp, and because the petals in the lower right corner are noticeably sharper, this suggests the camera moved slightly between the focus locking on and the shutter firing. Obviously, this movement can be put down to ‘user error’, but the camera…

AT A GLANCE ● 20.3-million-pixel, APS-C-sized CMOS sensor ● 4.77in, 1280x720-pixel HD LCD ● Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system ● 800x600 electronic viewfinder ● ISO 100-25,600 ● 3G connectivity ● Street price around £1,200 body only THERE is a whole generation of photographers who have found a passion for photography through the use of a smartphone. Looking at statistics of the most popular cameras used to upload images to Flickr shows that the top three are all different generations of the iPhone. This highlights the rapidly growing trend of smartphone users for whom a phone is their main camera. When the time comes for these people to upgrade to a camera with more manual controls, the leap from smartphone to camera will be quite radical. Many will be looking…