Innholdsfortegnelse for 28-Jan-2017 i Amateur Photographer

Photographing amusing expressions or juxtapositions can be challenging because often the moment when everything comes together is short-lived. Also, what makes one person laugh may not appeal to the next. Thankfully, there are some instances that make everyone smile, such as wildlife that seems to exhibit human behaviour and images that play on the idea of contrast (a great dane next to a Chihuahua, for instance). For maximum impact these pictures need to be simple with an uncluttered composition. Consider Elliott Erwitt’s dog images, where the ‘joke’ is communicated instantly. Erwitt once said: ‘The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.’ Similarly if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny. 1 Amusing moments are often fleeting, so try to…

Shooting snowdrops Light & Land is offering a workshop that offers the opportunity to visit the Forde Abbey Gardens in Dorset, where photographer Sue Bishop will get you on your way to capturing the beauty of snowdrops. It’s not as simple as it seems. 7 February, www.lightandland.co.uk Shipbuilding Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s exhibition Shipbuilding captures a moment in history at the Kvaerner shipyards in Govan. It offers an insight into the monumentality of this industry, and the people who drove it and the foreboding of its loss. Until 19 February, streetlevelphotoworks.org North: Identity, Photography, Fashion Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery is celebrating its 40th birthday, and as part of that celebration it is hosting a new exhibition exploring the influence of the North of England on fashion and visual…

Import and tonal adjustments I use Lightroom for developing single images and cataloguing Raw files, but I dip into Photoshop when I'm layering two or more frames. You need to develop a workflow that works for you. When it comes to settings, the highlight and shadow sliders are my most frequently used adjustments. Select the frames In Lightroom select all the frames that you want to consider for layering. This might include a clean, base exposure without light painting or even light-painting frames from other sessions. Blend the layers In Photoshop, copy each frame to a new layer in the same file and blend with ‘Lighten' layer blend mode. Adjusting the opacity can bring a more cohesive feel across the whole image but straying too far from 100% opacity on…

‘Something that’s not well known about Nikon’s menu system is that the purpose of the last tab can be altered’ Matt Golowczynski Matt Golowczynski is a London-based journalist and photographer. A former technical editor for What Digital Camera, he has contributed to a range of magazines over the past 10 years and graduated from the University of Westminster with a BSc in Photography and Digital Imaging. You can see more of his work at www.mattgolowczynski.com. THE VAST majority of customisation options on a Nikon DSLR are located within the Custom Settings menu, which was the subject of one of our earlier features (AP 7 January). These settings cover everything from AF and metering operation right through to the function of specific buttons. If you dig around the remainder of the…

Photo printing problems after PC change Q I have recently changed to a laptop after my PC broke. I use Adobe Elements 14, the laptop computer runs Microsoft Windows 10, while the PC used Microsoft 7. When printing I get better results with Epson Easy Photo print and from Microsoft files than from Elements. The colours are close to screen colour and the image is sharper. I use an Epson Stylus Photo P50 printer and Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper that automatically adjusts to the laptop. I have tried all sorts of adjustment in Elements to no avail. Any suggestions to correct this? John Farebrother A This sounds like a classic case of a computer setup that needs the screen to be calibrated. Unless the screen is properly calibrated, if…

LAUNCHED 1981 PRICE AT LAUNCH £400 GUIDE PRICE NOW (WITH CANON F/1.8 LENS) £250 THE CANON F-1 was launched in 1971, upgraded in 1976 and again in 1981. The third version is usually known as the New F-1. Of the three, this one is the best. The focal plane shutter gives a faster-than-normal 1/2000sec. Speeds of 1/60sec and below are electronically controlled; 1/125sec and above are mechanical. The basic camera features match-needle, through-the-lens CdS metering with speed and aperture indicators shown in the viewfinder, which also incorporates a split-image rangefinder. Replace the standard viewfinder with the AE version, set the speed dial to ‘A' and the camera is converted to aperture priority. Add the AE power winder or motor drive to the base, set the lens to its ‘A' setting…

Kate by Alina Liubko Canon EOS 100D, 50mm, 1/200sec at f/1.8, ISO 4000 This rather beautiful and ethereal portrait was taken by Alina Liubko from Belarus and was uploaded to our Flickr page. ‘I specialise mainly in portraits but recently I started to feel that all my works were all very similar to one another,' says Alina. ‘That was when I decided to create something a little bit different. Since we're now in the winter season, it's difficult to endure long photo shoots outside. I therefore decided to take myself out of my comfort zone (by which I mean taking photographs outdoors) and try something indoors. ‘We chose a bath as a place for the photo shoot together with the model and we made the water a green cast so…

Words & numbers “I don’t want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of an edge”Lord Snowdon British society photographer and filmmaker, 1930-2017 While wildlife photographers are often only on site for a short time, there are occasions when they can visit locations time and again. This can lead to people documenting a particular animal's life over several years. Such is the case with this shot taken by wildlife and travel photographer Ryan Green, from Ireland, which was commended in the 2016 Travel Photographer of the Year competition. It was taken in Mombo Concession, Chief's Island, Okavango Delta, Botswana. The female leopard is known as Pula, and Green has spent years photographing her. In this image Pula bathes in the delicate light of day while relaxing on a…

AFTER a year's worth of #WexMondays photo contests and more than 17,000 entries, amateur photographer Neil Burnell has been crowned Wex Photographer of the Year. Each week over the past year, photographers have entered their best shot from the previous seven days, using the #WexMondays hashtag on Twitter. Wex Photographic's expert panel then selected the best of the week and awarded points to create a league table, which is hotly contested throughout the year. The result at the end of the year is a collection of images of a range of subjects and locations. Neil, who lives in Brixham, Devon, is a self-taught photographer with a passion for landscapes, and a first-time entrant. ‘There are so many wonderful photographic opportunities near to home,' he says. ‘I have always enjoyed photography…

Magnify button Users are given the option to reposition the magnified view around the frame to inspect focus outside the centre. SD card slot The M10 features a single SD card slot that’s accessed via the removable metal baseplate. The battery is changed in the same way. At a glance ■ £5,600 (body only) ■ 24-million-pixel CMOS full-frame sensor ■ ISO 100-50,000 ■ Leica Maestro II processor ■ 5fps continuous shooting for up to 30 frames (DNG) and 100 frames (JPEG) ■ ±3EV exposure compensation control OVER the past couple of years we've seen Leica announce some sublime cameras, with the Leica Q being just one example of a model that many photographers aspire to own. Now we've been given reason to get excited again with the release of the…

IN MANY ways light painting can be likened to an extension of shooting traffic trails, with the head- and tail-lights of traffic replacing handheld lamps as the source of illumination. In fact, so similar are the approaches that I often recommend traffic trails as the best starting point for newcomers to nighttime long exposures: again, use the aperture setting to control the brightness of vehicle lights and dial in a shutter speed that gives you the ambient lighting you're looking for. As complex as this shot appears, it actually came down to timing. Having reached the vantage point a few minutes before sunset, I waited for those perfect few moments when ambient light levels dropped enough to balance the glow of fixed and moving lamps across the scene. I knew…

‘I always work around the light and allow that to dictate my images’ With smartphones so prevalent in our everyday lives, you would expect that most of us would have all but embraced the notion that great photography can be captured easily with these pocket-sized devices. However, there are a large number of people out there who are still troubled by the idea that the images produced by smartphones can be considered ‘real’ photography. That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are plenty of people who refuse to class digital as ‘true’ photography. You just can’t keep everyone happy. If you can get past the idea that smartphone photography simply exists to serve the insatiable appetite for selfies, photographing your lunch or surreptitiously photographing a celebrity with no…

‘Today’s era of LED light panels have been a game changer in the way we illuminate our subjects’ In 1889, artist Georges Demenÿ created the first known light-painting photograph, ‘Pathological Walk from in Front, by securing incandescent bulbs to his assistants' clothing before asking them to move in front of a camera during a long exposure. Little did he know at the time, this groundbreaking discovery of the way light is recorded as it moves through the frame would turn into one of the most popular techniques ever attempted by photographers. Over the past 125 years or so, we've seen many famous photographers try their hand at painting with light. Some of the best known include Man Ray, Gjon Mili and Henri Matisse, all of whom experimented with light and…

CANON has announced an update to its G9 X slimline zoom compact, in the form of the PowerShot G9 X Mark II. The new model maintains the same basic design as its predecessor, with a 20.1-million-pixel 1-in sensor. The lens is the same 28-84mm equivalent zoom, with a maximum aperture range of f/2-4.9. It also includes an ND filter. As on the G9 X, this lens employs Canon's Image Stabilizer, which works with Dynamic IS to stabilise videos. The control ring around the lens, used to change settings, is also included. The big update, however, is to the processor, which was a stumbling block for the original G9 X. The new model has upgraded from the DIGIC 6 to the newer DIGIC 7, which has previously featured in the G7…

FUJIFILM has confirmed that its popular high-end rangefinder-esque X-Pro2 and SLR-style X-T2 models will be made available in special colour editions: graphite for the X-Pro2 and graphite silver for the X-T2. The two cameras, which sit jointly at the helm of the X-series models, were released last year in black finishes. This move, however, echoes the release of the previous X-T1 in graphite finish back in 2014, although the original graphite finish was considerably darker than the X-T2's silver. Fujifilm will supply the X-T2 graphite silver edition body with a handful of accessories as standard. These are a premium leather strap and an aluminium hotshoe cover, together with a matching EF-X8 flashgun. The X-Pro2 graphite edition, meanwhile, will include the Fujinon XF 23mm f/2 R WR and LH-XF35-2 lens hood,…

Andrew Whyte Andrew Whyte specialises in shooting long exposures at night. His light painting tools have included a rollercoaster and someone abseiling within a 90ft waterfall. You can see a display of Andrew’s light painting images on 2-metre light cubes in Regents Place, London until 17 February 2017. Visit www.LongExposures.co.uk or find him on twitter @LongExposures. EACH variable you adjust affects different elements of the scene. In this example (above), a 30-second test shot at ISO 200, f/4 gave me a pleasing ambient light, but the light transmitted through the aperture would have left any light painting trails with extensively clipped highlights. ADJUSTING the aperture to f/8 is a two-stop decrease of light sensitivity that primarily affects my own light sources and can be offset by a two-stop increase in…

With an ever-increasing range of cameras offering video shooting at 1080p HD resolutions and upwards, the choice of which memory cards to use is more crucial than ever – especially as shooting video eats up much more memory than shooting stills. Here we take a look at the different types of memory card, what the classes of card mean, and their speeds. Card formats and slots The two most common card types are Secure Digital (SD) and CompactFlash (CF). SD cards are used in all types of camera, with the smaller microSD cards now often utilised in HD camcorders and aerial cameras. CF cards are more robust and durable, and are often used in pro-spec DSLRs and digital cinema cameras. Many of the current cameras that record digital video offer…

• £549 • www.fjwestcott.com At a glance • 1740-lumen output with 96 CRI • Colour temperature (5500K) • 18-step dimming from 5% to 100% • 1/4in-20 threads for easy mounting • Supports Bluetooth control The light source you choose to illuminate your subject during the hours of darkness is completely up to you, and it all depends on the type of effect you're trying to create. If you fancy illuminating a large-scale subject, you might think that a torch with a high power output might be best; however, one problem you may encounter is that the beam of light is too directional. The trouble with torches is that they usually create a spotlight rather than a nicely diffused spill of light. You're often better off using an LED panel to…

For a generation of young photographers, their smartphone is their first, and often only, camera. The reduction in image quality, thanks to the smaller sensors in smartphones, seems to matter little to those for whom portability and instant results are more important. Another limitation is the lens. Or, at least, it was. Although there are already numerous conversion lenses that convert the fixed focal length lens on a smartphone to achieve a wider or narrower field of view, most of these reduce the image quality even further. The ExoLens range, with optics by Zeiss, is set to change all this. Yes, you read correctly: you can get Zeiss lenses for your smartphone. Three conversion lenses are available. The first is a 0.6x wideangle, which converts the 30mm lens of an…

Richard Peters Having always had a natural creative streak and interest in wildlife, Richard Peters has gone on to develop a body of work that often favours dramatic use of light. As well as being a Nikon Ambassador his work has also been recognised twice in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year as well as seeing him named the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Richard runs workshops at home and abroad as well having written his own eBook, Back Garden Safari. 2004 Nikon D100 After a brief spell with the F80 film camera, the D100 was revolutionary for me because the onset of digital made it far easier to learn from mistakes, experiment and understand how different settings would have an impact on exposure. I still remember the thrill…