Innholdsfortegnelse for 07-feb-15 i Amateur Photographer

A week in photography ANY DOUBTS as to why black & white photography remains so popular should be answered after reading this week’s issue. From Billy Currie’s striking architectural images to Fan Ho’s beautifully observed street photography of colonial Hong Kong, there are numerous images that I would be happy to hang on my wall. Michael Freeman looks at the three main reasons why we would choose mono over colour, and Billy Currie reminds us that taking the picture is only half the story. Ansel Adams once said that the negative is the score, and the print is the performance. While for most people the darkroom may have given way to the computer, good black & white photographers still need to possess both a creative vision and all the technical…

Though many associate 20th century street photography with the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, over in the East, a young photographer called Fan Ho was also breaking new ground. Born in Shanghai, China, the man who became known as The Great Master moved to Hong Kong with his family in the late 1940s and, armed with his new Rolleiflex Tessar f/3.5 TLR, started to document the city in his own inimitable way. ‘At that time, in 1948 and 1949, Hong Kong wasn’t as prosperous as it is now, it was just a city,’ says Fan Ho, talking from his home in California, USA. Self-deprecating about his understanding and command of English, Ho speaks slowly and clearly. His love of photography started when he was a young boy in Shanghai, where he…

Black & white photography continues to become more and more interesting creatively, ever since its invention in 1935. You might disagree with the date, but surely not with the sentiment – that there’s a huge creative choice between shooting in colour and in black & white; hence the importance of 1935 and the invention of Kodachrome, otherwise known as the first integral tri-pack film. While the idea of photographing in the medium that we see by – colour – was there from the very start, early processes like Autochrome were impractical curiosities. There wasn’t a sensible choice, and a century of shooting had most people on all three sides of the camera (behind, in front and viewing the results) used to doing without colour. It didn’t mean that pre-Kodachrome photographers…

Fivedotsix Model 2 Michael Topham tests a stylish and practical shoulder bag from Swedish manufacturer Fivedotsix ● £300 ● www.fivedotsix.com At a glance ● Internal dimensions 330 x 160 x 230mm ● External dimensions 340 x 170 x 240mm ● Made from buffalo leather ● Smaller size available THEMODEL 2 from Fivedotsix isn’t just any shoulder bag; it’s a bag that’s been carefully designed for fashion-conscious photographers. Beautifully crafted from buffalo leather, with a standard of stitching that wouldn’t look amiss inside a Ferrari, the build quality is in a higher league than your average shoulder bag and has a custom-made feel and finish. Behind what looks like a buckle at the front lies a hidden push-lock for quick access to its deep, spacious interior that has a protective felt…

RAYMOND Collecutt, from New Zealand, was one of the first people to perform the ‘de-Bayering’ surgery on a Canon EOS 1000D in 2012. I asked him how he did it, and any advice he had to offer. What made you want to give the ‘de-Bayering’ a try? I’m an astro photographer and live in a built-up area, so using narrow-band filters was the main driving force behind it. These filters cut out most of the light that comes from light pollution, allowing only a narrow band of light from space to get through. Because of the small amount of light reaching the sensor, you have to get the most from every pixel, so removing the Bayer filters and removing the demosaicing process was an obvious solution. Besides this, it was…

The eyes, all but hidden under that dark ridge of brow, are haunting. It is as if he is staring directly at us, challenging us. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am doing? Do you know why?’ In each case, he could ask the same question of himself: ‘Do I know?’ His name was Franklin Corbin. He was a Yankee, in the strictest sense. He is wearing the uniform of a Union soldier – quite probably because he had just joined up. He might have booked this portrait for the day his uniform arrived. Over 150 years after this picture was taken, there is so little we can know. We do, however, know that he would die during the war. Not in battle, but in…

Billy Currie Scotland-based Billy Currie has long been a passionate photographer, and had always hoped to make it his profession. With a background in IT, he now runs photography and post-processing courses in Scotland and northern England. www.billycurriephotography.co.uk Once I had got over the initial beginners’ hurdles of photography, I decided I wanted to create a wide and varied collection of images – something more than a single-style portfolio. I felt it was important to become a well-rounded photographer who could ply his art regardless of situation, style or environment. I hoped it would ensure my photography would stay fresh, challenging and, above all, interesting. As my journey continued, I veered more and more towards black & white. While it wasn’t a conscious decision, the skew became increasingly obvious as…

THE NEW MAGIX Photostory 2015 Deluxe offers more than 300 freely combinable high-quality effects, animations and decorative elements. You can combine individual images to make panoramas or 3D photos, and travelroute animations allow you to create interactive presentations of travel images. With over 50 new music pieces and 500 effects, the program features more than 850 professional sounds and songs for audio dubbing. You can also add your own audio comments and music. If you don’t have a lot of time or much of a creative streak, you can use the Photostory wizard. With lots of thematic templates for birthdays, weddings, Christmas and other events, you can automatically create the right Photostory for every occasion. There is no need to upload photos and video to the internet, and everything can…

Scott Baldock, Essex Scott has been interested in photography since he was a child, when he used to try to capture the landscapes he found while on holiday. Due to the cost of developing film, it wasn’t until some years later – and the purchase of a DSLR – that Scott was able to reignite his passion for photography. Scott’s favourite subjects are architecture and seascapes, which is lucky considering he works in London and lives in Southend-on-Sea. In the future, Scott would like to photograph landscapes further afield and learn more about flash photography. SmugMug The two Reader Portfolio winners chosen every week will receive a SmugMug Power account, worth £35 each, on which to host their images SmugMug is the world’s leading independent cloud-based photo website for a…

Back in the days of film, shooting monochrome was a very specific choice. You loaded your camera with a roll of black & white film, and for the next 24 or 36 exposures you had no choice but to run with it. Of course, you couldn’t see how your pictures were coming out while you were shooting, so you had to try to learn how the colourful world in front of you would translate into greyscale. If you were really serious about the process, you’d carry around a set of colour lens filters for contrast control. You’d probably also set up your own darkroom for developing and printing your film. Indeed, to get the best results, you’d spend hours under a dim red safelight, dodging and burning your prints. These…

EXPERT ADVICE TIPS TRICKS HACKS KNOW-HOW Email your questions to: apanswers@timeinc.com, Twitter @AP_Magazine and #AskAP, or Facebook. Orwrite to Technical Support, Amateur Photographer Magazine, Time Inc. (UK), Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU Plate for tripod QI am studying photography and have been given a Miranda tripod, but it doesn’t have a plate to hold the camera in position. Could you tell me which plate I should buy to fit it? My camera is a Canon EOS 400D. Marie Amey AI’m afraid that it’s a bit difficult to help you with this question, as there are almost as many different sizes and shapes of tripod plates as there are tripods. This brings me to the problem that if you don’t know what your camera plate is meant…

Email amateurphotographer@timeinc.comand include your full postal address Write to Inbox, Amateur Photographer, Time Inc. (UK), Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU In AP17 January, we asked… How much Photoshop manipulation do you consider to be acceptable? You answered… A Anything goes – photography is an art form and there are no rules in art 47% B Layers, masks, filters etc are fine, but cloning and image combining are not 15% C Only basic image enhancements (colour, contrast etc) are OK 34% D It shouldn’t be used at all 4% What you said ‘Art is capturing a vision in an artist’s mind. Photography is capturing the moment, so any manipulation other than exposure correction is deception’ ‘Using Photoshop is just an easier way of creating an image than…

The original ‘Black Is My True Love’s Heart’ Bob Carlos Clarke ‘Black Is My True Love’s Heart’ is perhaps one of Bob Carlos Clarke’s most famous images. This striking mono nude study comes from his third book The Dark Summer (1985), with the naked body contrasting with the black rubber gloves. Rubber and vinyl would be an ongoing theme of Carlos Clarke’s imagery, with him commenting that he liked using it because of ‘the way it contained a body, concealing imperfections and defining contours beneath a gleaming synthetic skin’. FURTHER READING Shooting Sex £108, Bob Carlos Clarke, 2002 Now out of print and quite rare to find, this beautifully produced book offers a fascinating insight into the way Carlos Clarke worked, with practical advice and high-quality reproductions of his photographs.…

Autumn at Gibson Mill Mark Hepples Sony Alpha 580, 17-50mm, 1.3secs at f/11, ISO 11 I HAVE an issue with people wearing backpacks standing in my pictures. They have an astonishing capacity to devalue almost any scene. Mark has kindly provided me with a picture that clearly demonstrates my point – a beautiful sloping woodland view with a snaking waterfall, destroyed by people wearing neon-blue anoraks and backpacks. They stand out as much as they would if they were playing drum and bass at full volume in church, and the blue channel conversion shown here illustrates just how much they jump out from the warm-yellow surroundings. Beyond the obvious, Mark’s biggest problem is that he believed his lightmeter. The camera saw a dark scene and recommended an exposure that would…

There have been a few attempts at producing a black & white-only camera, but the Leica M Monochrom is perhaps the most famous. This Leica model is based on the M9, but only records monochrome, greyscale images. In theory, any manufacturer could produce a version of one of their cameras to shoot in black & white only, by issuing a version with no colour filter array (CFA) on the sensor (see ‘How a sensor records colour’ for more information). Why convert a camera to black & white? When a full-colour image is created, various fine details can be lost. Digital images are usually demosaiced, as without this process images would just be made of red, green and blue pixels of various shades, devoid of any other colours. Demosaicing is a…

Tony Worobiec FRPS Tony Worobiec is a fine-art photographer who specialises in landscape and travel work. He has published 14 books on subjects such as night and low-light photography, toning and handcolouring photographs, and digital photo art. His latest book is The Complete Guide to Photographic Composition, published by F&W Media (£17.99). It is available via Amazon or any good book store. To see more of Tony’s work, visit www.tonyworobiec.com. 1974 Zenit-E After leaving university, I trained to teach art. I had never owned a camera, but I wanted to start each project with my students by showing them places they could sketch locally, so I bought a Russian-made Zenit-E. This allowed me to project 35mm slides at the beginning of each assignment. Built like a tank, and with a…