Innholdsfortegnelse for 17-Jun-2017 i Amateur Photographer

Many technical skills can be taught in photography, but helping people develop an ‘eye’ for composition is much harder. Pros who run courses tell us it’s one of their main challenges: while they can advise on helpful techniques and approaches, effective composition is not an exact science. Mindful of this, we asked Michael Freeman, one of the world’s most prolific photography authors and a highly skilled shooter in his own right, to share some of his composition secrets. As you’ll see on page 12, it’s as much about thinking differently as it is about following the ‘rules’. Meanwhile top press photographer Edmond Terakopian tries out the Fujifilm GFX 50S on page 32, and don’t miss our unique competition to win a Sony GX10 Mark III on page 40. Another packed…

Round the Island Boat Race Join Carla Regler for a day photographing the largest race of its kind with around 16,000 professional and amateur sailors. You will have the best seats in the area with your own rib and skipper, so you can photograph the boats as they come past the most photogenic view of the Isle of Wight –The Needles. 1 July, www.lightandland.co.uk/photography-tours Industrial Society This exhibition looks at changes during the Industrial Revolution, specifically how the British working classes went from objects in photos, to heroic representations of industry and finally to photographers themselves. Until 5 November www.bradfordmuseums.org/venues/  bradford-industrial-museum Alastair Cook This exhibition at McArthur’s Store in Dunbar features a series of wet-plate collodion portraits created by Alastair Cook during his time as Artist…

GOOGLE has announced that it is ceasing development of its popular Nik Collection of photo-editing software. ‘The Nik Collection is free and compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 through 10.10, Windows Vista, 7, 8 and Adobe Photoshop through Creative Cloud 2015. We have no plans to update the Collection or add new features over time,' the company wrote on the Nik website. Google acquired the collection in 2012, at the same time as it bought Snapseed, and last year saw it do away with the $150 price. The software will remain available on the site, www.google.com/ nikcollection. See page 22 for our expert guide to using the collection.…

I know how those war heroes must feel – the ones who come back to the land they defended, only to be ignored. When the mighty ‘digital' world came upon us, I felt myself a casualty. I believed the stories that film had vanished, and I began to believe the digital replacement hype. I was almost forgetting my arguments that a 35mm frame of Kodachrome (a colour positive archival product) would resolve a few hundred lines per millimetre. Specialist films resolved 1,000, whereas digital is a few thousand pixels to 36mm. That's 55 pixels per millimetre. So digital 12MB sounds pretty appealing. My Fujifilm X-E1 software lets me dial in grain and has settings to copy the look of film – but why? We are only up to 40MB (60x60mm)…

You answered… A Yes – it’s not about the medium 39% B No, black & white film has unique tones and grain that will always look better 34% C In some cases, if you are skilled with Lightroom and Photoshop 18% D Yes, digital black & white looks better than film 2% E I don’t shoot black & white – either on film or digitally 7% What you said ‘Depends what you’re after. I’ve fallen in love with working with film, and I love the aesthetic of the experimental side. But if you’re after quick, clean and crisp – digital is great.’ ‘I did darkroom work many years ago and really enjoyed it. Depending on the paper, toners etc, the look is distinctive and it’s hard to replicate that digitally.…

Stack filters in Color Efex Pro and save as Recipes Color Efex Pro's filters are useful individually, but much more powerful when stacked in combination and saved as Recipes. This effect uses the Tonal Contrast, Detail Extractor, Reflector Efex, Levels & Curves, Colorise and Darken/Lighten Centre filters. Make your final crop before you add a frame The Google Nik frame effects can look terrific, but think carefully about how the image is going to be printed or displayed and crop it to the right aspect ratio in your host application before opening it in a Google Nik plug-in – they don't have crop tools. Use Control Points for localised adjustments Color Efex Pro's Graduated Filter, like all graduated-filter tools, also affects any buildings or other objects that jut up into…

Darren Rose, Marston Moretaine Darren first got into photography at college, before furthering his skills as part of a fine art degree. However, it's only in the past couple of years that he's returned to the medium. ‘I love working out how to interpret the landscape around me, rather than to simply document it,' says Darren. ‘This means that experimentation is often part of my workflow when out with the camera.' In the future he would love to exhibit more. For him the final print is an important part of his photography. www.winterrosephotography.com The Reader Portfolio winner chosen every week will receive a Manfrotto PIXI EVO tripod worth £44.95. Visit www.manfrotto.co.uk Lightweight and portable, the Manfrotto PIXI EVO boasts two different leg angles with a sliding selector enabling you to shoot…

DESIGNED for portrait and location photographers and videographers on the move, AEOS is a bi-colour, location LED light with a unique ‘ultra-thin' design concept. Weighing in at less than 1.5kg and just 2cm thick, AEOS is one of the most portable lights on the market. It delivers a powerful light output of 5,750 lux at three feet, but is also one of the most energy efficient LEDs on the market, able to run for three hours at 100% power on a single 95W battery – more than twice as long as the industry standard. Unlike most LED lights with limited tilt angles, the AEOS uses a pro-level ball head as standard Our bundle includes: • Rotolight AEOS light • Pro Aluminium Ball Head • Power adapter • 95 Wh V-Mount…

Digital victory ‘Yes, yes' to film instead of digital. Now, I'm just off to bin my microwave and look out my multiplication tables. The ‘resurgence' of film is nice; it's great to enjoy a bit of nostalgia. But the war is over, and film lost; digital won. Film is no more than a niche enthusiasm that, like vinyl, will fade to insignificance. For me, one reason is enough. On my first safari I took 11 rolls of 36 exposure film. By the time the duffers went in the bin there weren't many left. Now? I get lots of good photographs because I can see the problems and sort them out. Sloppy over-exposure? Just take another one and do it right – it's bliss! Now, can we start worrying about the…

John Gilbey is a writer and photographer based in west Wales. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the International New York Times, the science journal Nature, New Scientist, Times Higher Education and a host of other publications. An environmental scientist by training, he travels widely to research articles at first hand – adding to his extensive portfolio of landscape, ecological and technology images. He tweets as @John_Gilbey. 1974 Praktica VLC This eccentric chunk of East German technology was my constant companion throughout university. The M42 mount gave me access to a wide range of lenses, although the ‘Electric' Carl Zeiss Jena ones giving it open-aperture metering were harder to find. It survived two months on an Arctic expedition when some pricier offerings were failing. 1995 Nikon F3HP My first…

I have always enjoyed photographing plants, and although I very much consider myself to be a ‘generalist’ (in terms of nature photography) I have always had a soft spot for plants and fungi. Photographing flowers requires a very different mindset to shooting wildlife. In the case of wildlife, you need to be on your guard and prepared for the unexpected, whereas with flowers I find a more contemplative and slow approach is required. With wildlife, you are often dealing with what is in front of you at that moment in time with little control over where or when it will appear. With flower photography, on the other hand, you can experiment with viewpoints, lens selection and differential focus. You can take as much time as you want and even return…

1 Basic Adjustments Rather than using one of the Analog Efex Pro presets, we'll build our effect manually in the Camera Kit mode. The Basic Adjustments panel is a good place to start (it's also useful for fine tuning at the end). Pushing the Detail Extraction slider up to 70% makes the details much crisper, lightens the shadows and darkens the highlights. 2 Film Type To add an effect from the Camera Kit list, you click the ‘+' button alongside it. Here we're adding a Film Type – these are unnamed, as they're not meant to replicate existing analogue films. We've chosen one of the film types in the Warm category to give this picture a slightly faded vintage look. The default Strength of 50% is about right. 3 Frames…

If your original in-camera footage isn't up to scratch, you can use a number of tools/scopes to rescue it. Waveform monitor The waveform monitor shows the darkest and lightest points of your image, and is used to indicate the level of contrast in your footage. Basically, on a waveform monitor 0 (at the bottom) is black, and 100 (at the top) is white. So, for example, a waveform with the highest line above black can indicate a lack of contrast, while a value of 100 will indicate clipping in highlights that will need to be brought down in value. The RGB parade The RGB parade comprises three histograms that display the levels of red, green and blue channels in any shot. If your shot is over-tinted with one colour you…

In this age of modernisation, where smaller is better, does it make sense to go big? Fujifilm's proven range of APS-C cameras give great image quality in a small system, as do some very capable Micro Four Thirds cameras from Olympus and Panasonic with an even smaller sensor. However, when I showed some of the photographs I had made with the 51.4-million-pixel Fujifilm GFX 50S medium-format camera to a client, his eyes widened and he said: ‘Wow! Look at all that detail!' If this overjoyed astonishment is anything to go by, then perhaps its 51.4 million pixels, served by a range of great lenses, are put to good use. I shall answer that question fully later as I examine the GFX 50S in more detail. The GFX 50S is a…

• $56 (around £43) • zentilt.co At a glance • Z-type tripod bracket for adjusting shooting angles quickly • Works with most tripods and camera makers • Produced from lightweight but sturdy aluminium Tough but light The unit is reasonably lightweight at 382g Allen keys Adjustable legs allow you to shoot at different orientations after tightening allen nuts That’s the spirit A built-in spirit level is a neat extra to ensure everything lines up Knurled wheel A sturdy knurled wheel enables you to screw the ZenTilt to the tripod bush on your camera IF YOU'VE spent any time on Facebook recently you may have seen the ads for the ZenTilt camera head, an aggressively marketed Z-type bracket which, it is claimed, enables you to move your tripod-mounted camera from landscape…

‘Sony has used this technology for a faster way to get data off the sensor chip’ One of the innovations that has increasingly been found in mobile-phone sensors is stacked sensor technology. The newly announced Sony Alpha 9 introduces this technology to a full-frame sensor for the first time. This article explains what the technology can offer, how it works, its limitations and how Sony has worked within these to produce the performance gains of the Alpha 9. Rather than being made from a single silicon chip, a stacked sensor is made from a sandwich of two or more chips that can perform additional functions. The process is made easier if the sensor chip is of the ‘back side illuminated' type, meaning that the electronic circuitry is on the opposite…

Jessops #ShareYourSummer Jessops has brought back #ShareYourSummer, running until 2 August. Budding photographers should share their images via social media tagging @jessops and using the hashtag #ShareYourSummer2017 to be in with a chance of having their images showcased across 56 UK towns and cities, with the overall winner receiving £3,000. Historical photography online collection More than 50 organisations across Europe have shared their historical photography collections online to help form one big database. The newly formed archive, EuropeanaPhotography, led by PHOTOCONSORTIUM, contains over two million images. Prynt Pocket mobile printer Prynt has launched its latest mobile printer, Prynt Pocket. Users can print directly from their iPhone by inserting it into the device, taking a photo and using the Prynt app to make edits. The printer has a removable paper cartridge…

Leica for life? In Edmond Terakopian's article on the new Leica M10 (AP, 3 June), it was interesting to see a parallel drawn with the original M3. The M10 is supposedly designed with a ‘retro' feel to it and has a lot in common with the M3. However, I see some notable differences: First, the M3 does not rely on electricity, while the M10, like all digital cameras, is totally dependent on it. And, apart from TTL metering, the same is true of all Leica's film Ms. Second, the proud boast of the film Ms was that they were a ‘camera for life'. I'm not sure whether you can say that about any of the digital Ms. Another expectation with the film Ms was that they would hold much of…

The Google Nik Collection (www.google.com/nikcollection) has a long history. It’s a suite of plug-ins originally published individually by Nik Software, then amalgamated into a single – and expensive – suite. Google bought the suite, put it on sale at a much-reduced price and then added the Analog Efex Pro plug-in. Since then, it’s dropped the price tag altogether and made the collection free. The development has now stopped and there are no plans to update the collection, but photographers can use one of the industry’s best plug-in suites for nothing. There are seven plug-ins in the collection, and some are more useful than others. Analog Efex Pro 2, Color Efex Pro 4, HDR Efex Pro 2 and Silver Efex Pro 2 are powerful effects tools combining one-click presets with in-depth…

1 Start in Neutral Like other Google Nik plug-ins, Silver Efex Pro displays preset effects on the left of the screen and manual adjustments on the right. Start with no adjustments applied, and then choose the Neutral preset. This black & white landscape might look unpromising at the moment, but Silver Efex Pro can bring out unexpected depth and detail. 2 Soft Contrast Silver Efex Pro offers an entire sub-panel dedicated to contrast control. The Soft Contrast slider is particularly interesting. Positive values produce a heavy, moody appearance, while negative values, used here, brighten shadows and darken highlights. Combining this with a regular contrast produces quite a transformation. 3 Vignette Our last step is to add a strong Vignette from the Silver Efex Pro Finishing Adjustments panel. You can create…

Resolution Centre and edge sharpness improves by closing the lens down to around f/5.6 and f/8, which is to be considered as the ‘sweet spot’ of the aperture range. The lens resolves a similar level of sharpness in the corners at either end of the zoom when it’s used at f/8. The impact of diffraction does soften overall sharpness, and this is most obvious when the lens is stopped down to f/16 or f/22. Shading Shoot at the maximum aperture of f/4 and you will notice that the corners of images appear darker than the centre by approximately 1EV. Corner shading does improve by stopping the lens down, and by the time you reach f/5.6 you’ll be hard pushed to notice vignetting in real-world images. Curvilinear distortion The lens exhibits…

‘We have long been conditioned to the idea that grainy, blurry black & white images are somehow more “authentic” than technically excellent pictures’ It's another lazy teenager on his bed. Except that it isn't. And the colour, the muddy blue: that would be enough to be heavily criticised by the average online critic. Until, perhaps, they learn the story. Or look closely at the picture. There's a sticking plaster on his arm, in the usual place where they take blood samples. It's a hospital bed. And the windows are barred: elegantly barred, but nonetheless barred. Is this to stop people outside from breaking in, or to stop the people inside from getting away? Mohammed is13 years old and comes from Aleppo in Syria. This is Nizip in Turkey. He is…