Innholdsfortegnelse for October 26, 2013 i Amateur Photographer

MANKIND has proved itself pretty clever, and while perhaps we are not as sophisticated and intricate as Mother Nature, we are capable of designing and building some amazing views. Nature’s landscape might be more traditionally beautiful than a modern office block, but that doesn’t have to mean it is a more valid subject for our cameras. Nature has the appearance of a random way of arranging itself, while the human is likely to create a more limited number of variables, favouring simplicity, repeatability and practicality of manufacture. Natural and constructed views are just different, but both offer patterns, lines, shapes, atmosphere and the chance to be appreciated. As autumn passes into winter, the photographer looking for green and pleasant lands will have to search further afield, but if he instead…

Nightwatch By Noel Kerns Carpet Bombing Culture, £24.95, hardback, 280 pages, ISBN 978-1-908-21102-6 IN HIS book Nightwatch, Noel Kerns tours ghost towns and abandoned buildings across the USA, vividly bringing them to life with judicious application of a torch and a theatrical gel. A wistful melancholy pervades the book, most poignantly when an abandoned settlement is bisected by a traffic trail – a reminder of how life and progress have passed these places by. Kerns’ exposures vary significantly (the length of the stars is a clue), giving images of otherwise similar-looking structures a pleasing variety. One complaint is that the technical information is a little scant – it would be lovely to learn how Kerns achieved his shots. Luckily, you can learn more about light painting, and how to use…

GIVEN the time that DSLRs have been with us, it’s hard to believe that we still need sensor-cleaning equipment. It almost beggars belief that owners of digital cameras with interchangeable lenses still have to tolerate this messy and tiresome procedure or pay to have it done professionally. Considering the mind-blowing skills of DSLR designers, they have so far failed to address this niggling problem. They have concentrated instead on producing bigger, better and more specified models, while compact system camera makers seem obsessed with making their cameras ever more competitive with DSLRs. Either way, neither appears too fussed about curing a major headache like sensor dust. Photographers who use fixed-lens bridge or compact cameras have no fears of painstaking retouching sessions in Photoshop. Personally, I have no idea how to…

Andrew James offers some advice TO TAKE successful photographs of fireworks you need to overcome a few technical challenges, but it’s relatively easy once you know what to do. In fact, even if you’ve never tried to photograph fireworks before it’s possible to get good shots so long as you follow some simple rules. Fireworks photography requires you to take full manual control over the camera, so if you’ve never strayed away from auto before now is the time to do it. You’ll also be working in the dark, so it pays to do some preparation first. Ultimately, the dark night sky is going to be your backdrop and the camera will capture the fireworks as streaks of light painting themselves across the frame. So how can you make sure…

Third-party flashguns Callum McInerney-Riley looks at a selection of flashguns ranging from high-spec examples to models for photographers on a budget Metz Mecablitz 52-AF-1 £179 www.intro2020.co.uk The Metz Mecablitz 52-AF-1 is one of the more high-tech flashguns we have on test. It is billed as the world’s first hotshoe-mounted flashgun with an illuminated touchscreen display. This handles all the control functions, so it is very easy to change settings and navigate the menus. The design looks great and the build quality is very high. Also, it is the most widely compatible of the six flashguns on test here and the various versions will fit Canon, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax and Sony cameras. During this test, the flash had a recycle time of between 0.2sec at lowest power and 5secs…

TRICK OF THE LIGHT QCan you tell me what has happened to this shot of a BBMF Dakota, which I took as it flew over my bungalow in Lincolnshire? I have taken many shots of aircraft, but not like this, as the underside of the port wing looks as though it has been repainted. Karl Bacon AI’m not an aviation expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the simple answer here is that light is reflecting off the underside of the wing. The very distinct cut-off between the painted and bare-metal looking areas threw me to start with, but having determined that this is a Dakota ZA947 from the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, I had a look online to see what I could find. Entering…

1 Choose the raw file you want to use and open it in whichever raw file converter you normally work with – I favour Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) in Photoshop CS5. 2 Make any general adjustments to the raw file that you feel are necessary, then with the Exposure slider set to -2.00, open the file and save it with an appropriate name as a TIFF. 3 Go back to the raw file, set the Exposure slider to -1.00, then open the file and save it again. 4 Repeat this process three more times so that you end up with five copies of the raw file, with the Exposure slider set to a different value for each image: -2.00, -1.00, 0.00, +1.00 and +2.00 stops. 5 Open your HDR software,…

News I Analysis I Comment I PhotoDiary 26/10/13 DSLRs £136 cheaper than last year • Average UK price: £486 BRITAIN’S DSLR PRICES PLUNGE 22% IT MAY be good news for consumers with an eye on their spending, but not for camera makers. The average price of an SLR in the UK has plummeted by ￡136 – more than 20% – over the past year, according to official figures. The average selling price of an SLR was ￡486 in August, compared to ￡622 in the same month last year - a drop of 22%, according to figures seen by AP. This contrasts with a 5% increase in the average price of fixed-lens cameras, while compact system camera (CSC) prices rose by around 4%, according to market analysts at GfK. Commenting on…

● MADDIE ON THINGS by Theron Humphrey, £10.99 Maddie is a dog. A coonhound, to be specific. On a cross-country trip across America, her owner Theron Humphrey discovered she had an exceptional talent for balancing on things. This beautiful, triumphant book resulted. No fuss, no extraneous babble, just square Instagram photographs of Maddie standing on things. Things include: tortoise, horse, giant watermelon, plastic brontosaurus. A few come with captions that elucidate the details of the trip, but the pictures of Maddie are the deserved stars of the show. ● A BEAUTIFUL MESS by Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman, £12.99 Emma Chapman and Elsie Larson, proprietors of lifestyle blog ‘A Beautiful Mess’, have produced a book of 95 photographic ideas. The pair learned photography through producing images for their blog, and…

THIS image was taken at Rattray Head in Aberdeenshire, at the beginning of December 2011 during a particularly stormy day. A strong wind was blowing on the sand dunes and creating some very interesting effects. The wind-blown grass looked like flames of gold as it was illuminated by the rays of the sun. I wanted to create an ethereal mood, a kind of abstraction of the landscape. Dynamism was the element I was looking for more than anything else, and this wouldn’t have been present without the movement caused by the wind. This is why it’s essential to check the weather conditions prior to going out shooting. While there is no bad weather for taking pictures (unless it rains horizontally and the winds reach 200mph), there are certain climates that…

Wideangle World AP readers really excelled themselves in round 8 of APOY 2013, as we reveal the top 30 photographs from our Wideangle World round John Hall, from County Cork in Ireland, is the winner of our Wideangle World round of APOY 2013. John will receive a Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5 with Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f/4 Asph lens, worth a total of £1,749.98. The G5 is a digital single-lens mirrorless camera with a 16.05-million-pixel, micro four thirds, Live MOS sensor. It has 6fps high-speed continuous shooting, a 3in, 920,000-dot articulated LCD touchscreen and a 1.44-million-dot EVF. The compact and lightweight Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f/4 Asph is an ultra-wideangle zoom lens (14-28mm equivalent) with a 114° angle of view. Our second-placed winner is Ferdinand von Korff, from County Wicklow in…

ESSENTIALLY, the small LED light given away free with this week’s issue of AP is designed for finding your way around your kit in low light or at night. Whether it is plugging a fiddly cable release into the right port or rummaging for a lens lurking somewhere in the depths of a camera bag, this torch will certainly help. However, it can also be used – as well as other torches – as a fun way to achieve some brilliant lighting effects for a variety of still-life subjects. The fantastic lighting styles adopted by many professionals don’t always require a whole studio full of expensive flash heads and a range of light modifiers. By using a long exposure in a darkened room, it is possible to sculpt the light…

Your photo guides will be landscape photography expert Jeremy Walker and What Digital Camera editor Nigel Atherton Join us on a bespoke photo tour to Canada, accompanied by photo experts and a local guide for an opportunity to view and capture the breathtaking Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, and the Rocky Mountains’ natural wonders. This is a tremendous-value, interest packed, escorted photo tour. First, you’ll fly west to Calgary, gateway to the Rocky Mountains, and spend two nights in Banff. You will have time to capture images and benefit from inspiring advice for achieving amazing photos. There will be optional-extra excursions too! Then, you’ll journey by coach past beautiful Lake Louise and along the Icefields Parkway into Jasper National Park, to stay overnight in Jasper. From here, you’ll journey east…

WE WAS poor, but we was ’appy. It’s a perennial refrain. And, no doubt, there’s a degree of truth in it. If I think back to my university days, I was in many ways poor. One of my standard meals was Knorr packet pea soup with a couple of frankfurters sliced into it, and black bread. I had a bicycle with a Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub gear of variable reliability, and every now and then it would miss a gear, with coccyx-jarring results. And yet, I remember it as a sort of golden age, carrying my old Leica everywhere, shooting all the time, as much film as I could afford (which wasn’t much). Yes, a Leica sounds affluent, but my 1936 IIIa cost me ￡30 in 1969. Even going back 40-odd…

DESPITE Pentax releasing a number of excellent DSLR cameras over the past few years, there has often been little variation or any real standout features that would warrant existing Pentax users upgrading to the latest DSLR. The exception to this is the K-5 IIS, which has an increased resolution due to the decision to remove the anti-aliasing filter in front of the camera’s 16.3-million-pixel sensor. The new Pentax K-3 is very different. Significantly, the camera uses a Sony 24.3-million-pixel CMOS sensor, which is presumably the same sensor as that used in a number of other popular cameras, including the Sony NEX-7 and Alpha 77. The 24.3-million-pixel resolution is a big increase from the last four Pentax DSLRs – the K-5, K-30, K-5 II and K-5 IIS – which are all…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a 20-roll pack of 36-exposure Fujifilm Superia ISO 200 35mm film or a Fujifilm 8GB media card* STREET WILDLIFE The caption to this photograph is best read in a David Attenborough-style voice: ‘Here, in their natural habitat, the street, is a group of Nikon photographers, foraging for a street photograph. Just like their cousins the meerkats, they have one of their group standing guard, watching out to ensure they don’t get caught by a predator, while exercising their right to take photos in a public place.’ I was walking along with my Canon M in hand when I spotted these photographers. The Canon M’s focusing may be slower than some, but it was more than fast enough to catch this group of street wildlife. Ivor…

IT’S CLEAR that French photographer Eric Foyer is a man with a slightly obsessive nature. ‘I need to take photos, lots and often,’ Eric reveals early during his inquisition. His response feels urgent, almost as if we need to wrap up the interview quickly before he rushes off for a new encounter with a high-rise block. Eric’s imagery is striking, direct and graphic. Shapes, textures, angles and colours collide with and complement each other in equal measure. He works almost exclusively in the urban environment, but eschews the label architectural photographer. ‘I like to think that I photograph the city as a whole, not only its architecture,’ he adds. He is happiest in the city. It’s his muse. Living in Lyon also gives him an accessible canvas to work with.…

ONE OF Bert Hardy’s most famous pictures – and one of the most popular images to emerge from post-war Britain – was, ironically, taken on one of the cheapest and most rudimentary cameras he used in his professional career. Hardy (1913-95) was one of the main photographers on Picture Post, the photojournalistic magazine that was particularly popular during the war years. In 1951, Hardy was 38 and had been a professional since the mid-1930s. His work for Picture Post had included hard news stories such as the liberation of the concentration camp at Belsen in Germany and the Battle of Inchon in the Korean War. Hardy was also well known for his eyecatching images of ordinary people in their everyday lives. In 1951, with the Picture Post readership in decline,…

TO LIGHT an exterior building at night, the same principles apply as when lighting a flower or ornament. The shutter speed must be slow enough to allow time for you to build up the light level with a powerful torch, but the exposure time must also be short enough to ensure that your subject is not illuminated by any ambient light in the scene. The first thing you should do is take a shot of the scene to help you estimate the longest exposure that you can use. If you are lucky enough to have a moonless sky in the middle of nowhere, you may be able to use a time that extends to minutes, but on a moonlit night near an urban area your exposure will need to be…

ALTHOUGH I would never describe myself as a portrait photographer, whenever I find myself travelling through foreign lands I can’t help but photograph the local people. The fact that I tend to visit countries such as Cuba, Morocco and Zanzibar probably has a lot to do with it. Not only are these places slightly rough around the edges – which is what makes them so fascinating – but the people are, too! Stick me on a city street in the UK and the last thing I’d want to do is start photographing passers-by, but Havana or Marrakech – well, that’s a different story. The faces are just so full of character, and the people behind them are usually warm and friendly. Despite having the opportunity to photograph many fascinating faces…