Innholdsfortegnelse for 04-Nov-2017 i Amateur Photographer

It is hard to think of a more popular genre than landscapes. Many of us will faithfully trudge field, moor and beach with our camera on any given weekend. So it’s always fascinating to see the results of the well-respected Landscape Photographer of the Year competition. I am privileged to be a judge, and the final-round images this year were very impressive – and a reminder that there is more to landscape photography than sunrises, wet foreground boulders and milky water. Turn to page 14 for a visual feast, and some insightful tips from the winners. Another highlight is our exclusive review of the new Zeiss Milvus Distagon lens – if Santa is an AP reader, I’d love to see one turn up on Christmas morning. Don’t miss the chance…

Over the past six weeks I have introduced many students to the photographic darkroom. Most are unfamiliar with the idea of working in total darkness to load film, and under safe lighting when printing (‘Is that the red light you see on films, sir?'). At the other school, I am helping the art department reopen a darkroom that has not been used for several years, so have checked its blackout blinds for the tiniest holes, as the light they admit will degrade or destroy an unprocessed film's precious store of images. Even if you refrigerate or freeze film, background radiation will cause base fog. Digital photographers may think they are immune from the destructive qualities of light. However, watch an inkjet print fade in sunlight over time. And we have…

ZEISS has added a 25mm f/1.4 lens to its range of Milvus optics. Now boasting 11 different optics for Canon and Nikon full-frame DSLRs, Milvus lenses are characterised by superior optical design for ultimate sharpness. The Zeiss Milvus Distagon T* 25mm f/1.4 includes 15 elements in 13 groups, making it a much more complex design than its nearest Canon and Nikon equivalents. The Distagon name denotes that it has an array of special elements and glass types to keep aberrations in check. The lens is also treated with Zeiss's T* coating to minimise flare and ghosting. Boasting a maximum aperture of f/1.4, the lens is ideal for shooting in low light. Like other Milvus lenses, it is manual focus only and also features a weather-sealed construction. The lens will be…

Go(Pro) take a hike What has a GoPro Hero6 ( News 14 October) to do with photography? It's a self-security camera and nothing else. If you find you are short of items to advertise, how about sticking to your magazine title? Bob Cooper, Kent That must be news to the many professional photographers who also use GoPros on the side, such as wedding photographer Tom Harmon, for example. He put a GoPro on top of his main camera to capture the day in real time from his camera's point of view – see the video at bit.ly/ goprowedding. The Hero isn't attempting to take on SLRs or mirrorless cameras for stills, but many photographers find it a useful and fun extra, hence our story. And why would you only use…

Brian Griffin was an estimating engineer at the British Steel Corporation in his home town of Birmingham, when the combination of an unrequited love and the desire to escape factory life led him to photography. He reveals, ‘I put some pictures in a Boots photo album and tried to get a place at an art college. I got into Manchester Polytechnic. I was 21 and, to be honest, I wasn’t that interested in photography. It was a form of escape.’ In 1972, he graduated with a diploma and swiftly set about trying to build a career as a freelance photographer. He recalls, ‘I was a pretty confident guy. I thought I was very good but it’s debatable whether I was or not! I left college and started doing editorial photography,…

Train your focus Focusing on the subject's eyes helps the viewer to make a connection with them. Select an individual AF point and check that the aperture you have selected will deliver the desired depth of field. It can help to ask the subject to visualise something as you fire the shutter – it can change the expression in their eyes. Keep it relaxed Children will often freeze and pose as soon as you get a camera out, so try to pick a moment where they are feeling relaxed, and don't stop them if they are already engaged in an activity. Don't forget to observe the light too – it can make or break a picture. Think about the background Backgrounds can tell us a great deal about a person,…

Battery life The X-E3’s battery lasts for approximately 350 frames or 50 minutes of 4K footage. Spare NP-W126S Li-ion batteries can be purchased and cost around £50. Charging via USB is also supported. Electronic shutter The X-E3’s electronic shutter allows users to set a shutter speed as fast as 1/32,000sec. This can be beneficial when you’d like to use fast lenses at their maximum aperture in bright lighting conditions and can save the hassle of having to attach an ND filter. 4K movie The X-E3 supports high-quality 4K movie recording at 29.97fps with a quality of 100Mbps. Film simulation can also be selected during 4K movie shooting, allowing users to enjoy a variety of video expressions. Clip-on flash The X-E3 lacks an in-built flash, so Fujifilm supplies a clip-on flash…

The Shinkansen or bullet train is such an iconic symbol of Japanese modernity that this picture came as quite a surprise to me. The polished wood, the worn plush, the satin chrome, the beige walls, the hanging antimacassars: it all has a curiously vintage look, smacking of the 1970s or even the 1950s. On top of its surprise value, I love the textures. This led me to thinking about how I’d have tried to photograph it. My immediate thought was that it might be an excellent candidate for HDR, to make it even more like a rendered illustration from a brochure and less ‘straight’. Obviously, I couldn’t do that, but I could ‘fill’ the shadows in Adobe Photoshop. And guess what? My idea was nothing like as good as Christian…

HUAWEI has announced the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones, which feature dual-cameras that have been co-engineered with Leica. The two sensors – one 12-million-pixel RGB, and one 20-million-pixel monochrome – combine with lenses with a maximum aperture of f/1.6, the world's widest available on a smartphone. Other interesting features include Optical Image Stabilisation, and a digital zoom function. The Mate 10 features a 5.9in screen, while the Mate 10 Pro is fractionally larger at 6in. An onboard artificial-intelligence chip also facilitates scene and object recognition, as well as powering a bokeh effect. Prices start from £699.…

THE HOLIDAY season is almost upon us, which means it's time for Stir-up Sunday, sentimental TV adverts, and the Amateur Photographer Christmas cover competition. This year we have teamed up with Photocrowd, Billingham and PermaJet to offer you global exposure, and some great prizes to boot. The prizes The expert's winner (as judged by the AP team) will see their picture grace the cover of the AP Christmas Special (23-30 December). They will also receive a Billingham Hadley Pro bag worth £200, courtesy of Billingham (www.billingham.co.uk) and an A3 print of the finished design courtesy of PermaJet (www.permajet.com). There will be a second winner (chosen by a public vote on Photocrowd (www.photocrowd.com), who will receive £100 and an A3 print of their image. If the standard of entries is high…

An old buffer writes... Regarding your previous correspondence ‘Looking forward…' ( Inbox , 21 October) there are still a great number of us ‘old buffers' about who enjoy nothing more than lugging our conventional cameras around the towns and countryside in search of that great image. As for giving up the printed magazine – not likely! You can't beat getting comfy in that favourite armchair with a cuppa and the next edition of AP, and with no fear of that ‘battery-low' warning ruining your day. Thumbs up to all eccentrics and nostalgics! Sue Baker, Hampshire Well said, Sue. We are confident that our print, website and social media pages can happily co-exist for many years to come – Nigel Atherton, editor Win!  The EVO + microSD Card has added memory…

How to optimise sharpness BEN PIKE'S image combines creative skill with technical expertise and was shot using a Canon 7D with an EF 100mm f/2.8 lens. Captured at the widest lens aperture, the focusing is pin-sharp on the insect's head and renders the background in beautiful soft focus. When editing this I aimed to apply the same treatment as Ben. I rotated the photo 180° so that the insect appeared to be the right way up, and lightened the Exposure setting. Because the detail on the insect was important, I took care to apply the optimum sharpness settings here. 1 Rotate the image The first thing I needed to do was to rotate the image. I did this by clicking twice on one of the rotate buttons in the Tools…

James Paterson James is as skilled a photo editor as he is a photographer. His work has appeared in countless magazines and books, and in 2014 he was appointed editor of Practical Photoshop magazine. His subjects range from portraits to landscapes, architecture and underwater scenes. For James, Photoshop is more than just a work tool. Visit www.patersonphotos.com 1 All new Lightroom CC Lightroom CC is a new version of Lightroom. It's geared towards cloud-based photo editing across multiple devices – desktop, mobile and web – so you can access and edit your photos anywhere. Edits made on one device are synced to others (even to raw files) and the starting plan offers a terabyte of cloud storage for your photo library. 2 Organising your photos Importing and organising images in…

Our cameras and lenses are tested using the industry-standard Image Engineering IQ-Analyser software. Visit www.image-engineering.de for more details The image quality results from the X-E3 are identical to those from the X-Pro2, X-T2 and X-T20. This isn't a huge shock given that the X-E3 has the same X-Trans CMOS III sensor and X Processor Pro. As the detail recorded by the X-E3's sensor is comparable to that recorded by the X-Pro2 and X-T2 models, it is a suitable back-up camera for anyone who already owns one of these models but admires the X-E3's design and styling. The noise performance is impressive, too, with ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 being eminently usable when working in poor light. Resolution The X-E3 resolves a maximum of 3,400l/ph between ISO 100 and ISO 400,…

Resolution Tested on the 45MP Nikon D850, the lens delivers an excellent set of Image Engineering test results. It’s spectacularly sharp in the centre, even at f/1.4, and only gets better on stopping down. The corners register lower values, but examination of real-world images reveals that the lens can still resolve very fine detail, just at low contrast. The optimum apertures to attain best sharpness are f/5.6 to f/8. Shading Just as we’d expect for a fast prime on full frame, there’s considerable shading wide open, with an almost two-stop drop in illumination at the corners when set to f/1.4. Stopping down to f/2 reduces this considerably to 1.2 stops, and by f/2.8 only slight darkening is detectable in the extreme corners. Curvilinear distortion As is typical of wideangle lenses,…

Where has the port gone? Q My 10-year-old HP laptop is in urgent need of replacement. I am quite keen on the Lenovo Miix 510, which is a more affordable mimic of the Microsoft Surface Pro; basically a 12in tablet with a very thin keyboard that doubles as a screen cover. I think it's powerful enough to run Lightroom, which I intend to start using at the same time as my laptop upgrade. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a monitor port of any kind on the Lenovo, or a LAN port. I was thinking about using the latter to connect to a NAS drive, containing my Photoshop library, as Wi-Fi would be slower. Neither is there an SD card slot. I find all this rather perplexing,…