Innholdsfortegnelse for 07-jun-2014 i Amateur Photographer

A FORMER winner of the Prix Pictet photography award was among those paying tribute to photographer Michael Schmidt (pictured above right), who died three days after being named the 2014 victor. A serious illness had prevented Schmidt, 68, from attending the announcement of the prize at the V&A Museum in London on 21 May. It was the first major international award for the German-born photographer, who died in Berlin on 24 May and was described as one of the most important artists of our time, according to organisers. Schmidt won 100,000 Swiss francs (just over £66,000) for his project ‘Lebensmittel’ (roughly translated as ‘foodstuff’), which documents food’s journey from source to table. Paying tribute, Luc Delahaye, who won the prize in 2012 and was one of this year’s judges, said:…

TO CELEBRATE its centenary, Leica has launched 101 units of a special M Edition 100 camera kit, which includes a new film-camera called the Leica M-A, based on the Leica MP, and a Leica M Monochrom digital rangefinder. Made of stainless steel – the first time this has been used for ‘visible metallic elements’ of Leica products – the kit comes with three Summilux-M lenses. A kit engraved with serial number ‘1914’ fetched € 144,000 at an auction in Austria. The kits will be available from June, priced € 40,000, from Leica stores and boutiques. Visit uk.leica-camera.com for more details.…

A PORTRAIT OF HACKNEY by Zed Nelson, £12.95 Zed Nelson knows Hackney well. In fact, he’s lived there all his life. While much of his childhood was spent developing an escape plan from the borough, his adult life has found him developing something of a love affair with the area. Zed’s beautiful imagery revels in the contradictions of Hackney: beautiful and ugly, old and new. The characters he encounters on his journey are typical of the diverse borough and, as such, the book acts as a lovely tour of an area most will do their utmost to avoid. EAST LONDON SWIMMERS by Madeleine Waller, £12.95 Coming from the same publisher as A Portrait of Hackney (Hoxton Mini Press), here we find Madeleine Waller focusing her attentions on the various lidos…

DIFFERENT KINDS OF LIGHT The point of this round is to get you working with different forms of natural light in order to create beautiful portraits, whoever your subject may be. This means working with sunlight, firelight and even moonlight. One of the most interesting ways of achieving a natural-light portrait is by working with window light. The tip here is always to remember to expose for the brightest areas of your subject to avoid blowing out the highlights. Also remember to shut off any artificial lights in the room, particularly when you’re working in colour. The reason for this is the colour balance. Attempting to correct varying colour temperatures can be a nightmare for any photographer. Plus, under the rules, you will be disqualified. COLOUR AND MONOCHROME Colour and…

THEY SAY that you never have to venture beyond your doorstep for a good photograph. In much the same way that it’s the photographer and not the camera that takes a great picture, it’s the photographer and not the subject that makes a great picture. So while it is certainly nice to load up the car and head off to somewhere like the Lake District, it is worth remembering that a great and memorable photograph can always be found by looking just outside your house. Of course, this is more literally true if you actually do live in the Lake District, like AP reader Rob Howell. That helps. A full-time firefighter by trade, Rob has been making use of what spare time he can find to thoroughly and comprehensively photograph…

Joby Action Clamp and GorillaPod Arm Around £25 joby.com JOBY is well known for its flexible camera supports, which help photographers mount cameras in difficult places. Best known for the GorillaPod, Joby has now adapted this to a clamp intended for use with action sports cameras. It is specifically designed for GoPro, Contour and Sony Action Cams, although it is also suitable for lightweight compact cameras. The kit is made up of two parts. The first is a clamp that attaches using a sliding locking arm and is secured by tightening a thumb screw on the bottom. The second part of the kit is the GorillaPod arm. This consists of five flexible joints that can be bent to position the camera in a variety of angles. On either end of…

Last week’s glossary took a look at high ISO noise, but there’s another cause of this unwanted texture that can degrade the fine detail in our images – long exposures. Unlike high ISO noise, which is largely a result of signal amplification, long-exposure noise is a result of heat. Whenever your sensor is actively recording an image, it generates heat. The longer the exposure, the greater the heat build up is, and there will come a point when ‘thermal noise’ starts to have an adverse effect on your images. However, the good news with long-exposure noise is that it’s consistent, so it is easier to identify and – if not eradicate entirely – at least reduce. In this case, the answer comes in the form of ‘dark-frame subtraction’, which you…

• The British Heart Foundation has appealed to photographers to donate unwanted cameras and accessories to help raise funds for the charity. ‘We’re in urgent need of cameras, lenses, camcorders, carry-bags and other accessories,’ said a spokesman. Donations can be made to a BHF Furniture & Electrical store, details of which can be found at www.bhf.org.uk/shops or by calling 0800 915 3000. • Voters in the European and council elections who tweeted photos of their ballot papers could face large fines and even jail time, the Electoral Commission has warned. It stressed that voters who posted photos of themselves with their ballot papers could find themselves breaching vote secrecy laws. Such a crime could incur a penalty of £5,000 or up to six months in prison. Do you have a…

ERNST LEITZ II, who ran the Wetzlar-based optics business after his father’s death in 1920, risked his life to help around 80 Jews and other persecuted people flee Hitler’s regime. Many Jews were helped to leave Germany before war broke out in 1939, when the country closed its borders. Leitz – dubbed a photographic industry equivalent of Oskar Schindler – helped Jews find jobs outside Germany, securing immigration visas and paying the travel expenses of refugees bound for the US. They fled Germany under the guise of Leitz employees, until they could find work overseas. Such was the Nazi reliance on Leica optics for military purposes that officials largely turned a blind eye to Leitz’s activities. In 2011, AP revealed that more refugees had come forward after research led by…

• Jessops is hiring out photo booths designed to hold six to eight people, for those organising parties, weddings and corporate events. The chain’s creative team says it can also provide props and branded backgrounds, along with one of their photography experts. Package prices for the service, which is currently only available for functions in central London, start at £499. Further locations are due to be announced soon. For details visit www.jessops.com/services. • The UK’s Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers has joined forces with the US-based Wedding and Portrait Photographers International to provide mutual money-saving benefits. SWPP members will now, for example, will be able to enter WPPI competitions, gain 30% discounted entry fees on other contests and reduced rates on trade shows, including one held annually in Las…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Wins a great shockproof, waterproof and dustproof 5-Proof Technology 16GB Samsung SDHC Plus memory card offering up to 48MB/sec transfer speed.www.samsung.com/memorycard WONDERFUL WORKHORSES As an AP subscriber and retired wedding photographer, I have recently found myself turning my attention back to my collection of old film cameras. Over the past few months, I have added a Pentax Takumar M42 screw-fit lens for my Pentax SP500 (my very first SLR) and a Minolta MC/ MD lens for my old Minolta XG-M to my collection. So far, I have not run a film through either, despite having them serviced and refurbished by the renowned repairer Ed Trzoska. However, having purchased some adaptors from eBay, I have been testing these lenses on my Fujifilm XE-1 and getting some amazing…

MARTIN EVENING Martin Evening is a London-based 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 5 Book, Adobe Photoshop CC for Photographers, as well as the Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop series, which he co-wrote with Jeff Schewe. THE CLONE tools in Photoshop have become…

IF PURE , unadulterated patterns are your goal, then consider converting your shots to black & white. By removing colour, far more emphasis can be placed on the patterns and textures within a subject or scene. Often it is possible to reveal powerful patterns that weren’t obvious in reality, simply because the colour provided too much of a distraction and the eye couldn’t see beyond it. Black & white is a very graphic medium, because it reduces everything to a bare minimum and reveals the bones of a scene. Lines, shapes, and the play of light and shade suddenly become far more important, and the viewer no longer finds a picture appealing because they can identify the subject, but because of the visual strength created by the elements within it.…

The Editor’s Choice will be printed onto a high-quality canvas with UV-resistant inks and mounted onto a sturdy wooden frame 1.2in thick. For HelloCanvas ‘each happiness of yesterday is a memory for tomorrow’, and we think your best beloved pictures deserve the best service. Our dedicated team is renowned for its attention to detail. 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…

1 USE A GOOD FORECAST SERVICE Rob uses the Mountain Weather Information Service, which can be found at www.mwis.org. uk and provides information specific to the mountains in the Lake District. 2 DONÕT BE DISCOURAGED BY ÔBADÕ WEATHER Cloud is key to producing dramatic skies and interesting scenes, and can often make the light much easier to work with, acting like a giant softbox for the sun. 3 GET AWAY FROM THE ROADSIDE As Rob says, the most popular locations in the Lake District are closest to where people can park. Move away from the car and you might stumble on scenes no one else has found. 4 TRY CAMPING OUT If Rob wants to catch both the sunset and sunrise in a particular location, he sets up a wild…

HANDS up if you want to own a Leica M-system digital rangefinder camera? OK, hands down again. Hands up if you can afford one? What about the lenses? Buy a Leica M, or even the less expensive Leica M-E, factor in two or three lenses, and you could easily spend £10,000. Leica cameras cost as much as they do due to the use of high-quality materials and German construction. There is little expense spared. Yet Leica cameras are designed to be functional. They are not just pretty, well-constructed cameras, but tools that could last a lifetime. That’s not to say the Leica M system is perfect. Some of us prefer the convenience of autofocus, and some would rather not have to remortgage our homes to own one. So why doesn’t…

ALTHOUGH the Minolta Vectis S-100 is barely a teenager, it is already less usable than most cameras in my collection, including those nearing 100 years of age. The reason is that the APS format, which the Vectis uses, was a short-lived innovation, and it was swept away by the advancing tide of affordable digital cameras at the turn of the millennium. APS (Advanced Photo System) boasted a range of features, not all of which could be exploited by all APS cameras. The entire film was coated with a magnetic layer, on which the camera could write digital information, that was later read by the processing equipment and used to set different aspect ratios for the prints. Information could also be printed on the back of the photos. In common with…

AP How much will production increase at the new Wetzlar plant? AS Everything I say would be speculation, but we can expect at least a 50% higher production capacity… maybe even 70% or 80% because you can restructure the manufacturing differently… but we don’t have a specific target, we just do it step by step. Solms had its limitations in terms of climatisation [sic]. For optics, you always need a certain humidity. When it got hot in the summer, you couldn’t manufacture any more, so all this kind of stuff was rather difficult to handle in Solms. AP Are you better able to monitor quality at the new Wetzlar plant? AS Not only that – we can even improve the steps of the [manufacturing] process. For a lot of things…

IMAGINE the scene when unique films exposed under heavy enemy fire are rushed from the Normandy D-Day beach landings in France to London for rapid processing. The expectations surrounding the results are building nervously and senses are on edge among waiting Life magazine editorial staff. Now try to imagine the crisis that followed when a teenage lab assistant discovers he has set a hot drying cabinet too high in haste, causing delicate emulsions to melt. The result? Of four complete rolls covering 106 exposures, just 11 frames were usable. Apparently, Robert Capa never said a word to his bureau chief about the loss of his pictures and ‘The Magnificent Eleven’ group (as they were termed) of surviving shots were given dominant space on the pages of a following issue. Capa…

1837 Born in Edinburgh on 14 June. He is the eighth of nine children and his father is a tobacco spinner c1850s Apprenticed to an optical and scientific instrument maker; studies chemistry and mathematics 1861 Becomes a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts 1862 Travels to Singapore, where his brother William lives, and sets up a photographic studio 1862-66 Travels in the Far East, visiting Malaya, Sumatra, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Bangkok and Cambodia 1866 Comes back to Britain and publishes his first book, Antiquities of Cambodia 1867 Returns to the Far East, staying in Singapore and settling in Hong Kong. Spends four years photographing the people and culture of China 1872 Returns to the UK and lives in Brixton, London. 1876-7 Works with journalist Adolphe Smith on…

Moscow rain Max Saprykin Fujifilm X20, 28-112mm, 1/40sec at f/2.2, ISO 1600 THERE’S a lot going on in Max’s atmospheric picture of a rainy evening in the Russian capital, and it is easy to see what caught his eye and made him take his camera out to get this shot. I think the subject is the couple under the umbrella, but Max is giving us other powerful things to look at too, which make me question whether the couple are the subject or not. Of course they are, but the man in on the left is trying to grab our attention – first by being well lit and exposed, and second by looking towards us. He is better exposed than the couple, who don’t have eye contact with us. There…

30 SUMMER ESSENTIALS We round up 30 pieces of essential kit for your summer travels, from waterproof equipment to image back-up solutions that will help you capture great holiday shots ON TEST TAMRON 16-300MM 18.8X ZOOM We test one of the widest ranging zooms on the market, the Tamron 16-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD Macro LANDSCAPES CAMERAS FOR LANDSCAPES Six Landscape Photographer of the Year competition winners talk about the cameras they use to take winning images HANDS-ON PENTAX 645Z FIRST LOOK We take a first look at the medium-format Pentax 645Z with new imaging sensor and processor…