Innholdsfortegnelse for 25-Nov-2017 i Amateur Photographer

Our cameras and lenses may be the stars of our photographic kit, but it’s the accessories we buy to go with them that are the unsung heroes, the backstage guys that make everything run smoothly. They enhance our photography in many different ways and some are quite ingenious. This week we celebrate Lee Filters’ 50th anniversary with a guide to using ND and grad filters, while our tripod masterclass tells you all you need to know about buying and using this essential support. With Christmas around the corner we’ve also picked 50 top accessories that we would love to see under our own Christmas trees. If you’re stuck for ideas, either for yourself or someone else, take a look at our list. Of course the best Christmas gift of all…

The documentation of the American landscape is a firmly established practice in American photography, both past and present. The city of New York, for example, has found itself subject to the scrutinising eyes of many artists, including Helen Levitt, Richard Sadler and Matt Weber. Equally, Stephen Shore and Walker Evans have amply documented the often mundane suburban and rural slices of life that make up large swathes of the country. The most famous of these figures is, of course, Ansel Adams whose images of California have become influential to generations of artists. However, within the state of California there lies a city that despite its fame remains largely unexplored through the eyes of contemporary photographers. It may seem odd to suggest that Los Angeles is photographically under-represented, but a look…

Set up the camera Long exposures need your camera to be perfectly still, so a sturdy tripod is essential. Set it up, then compose the image and focus the lens. You may be able to use AF with the filter in place, but often (especially with the Super Stopper), you need to focus without it and then switch to MF to prevent focus altering. Noise control Because the imaging sensor heats up during a long exposure, it's advisable to activate your camera's long-exposure noise-reduction system. This makes a second blank exposure immediately after the imaging exposure. It enables the camera to detect where noise will appear within the image and extract it for you. Take a reading Without the filter in place, set the camera to manual-exposure mode and set…

Robert Maynard, West Sussex Robert's father was a professional wedding photographer for more than 25 years. After growing up around photography and developing a passion for the medium, he decided to follow in his father's footsteps. When Robert was younger he often took a camera out with him on their family fishing trips. He would spend a lot of time taking photographs from the bank of the lake and learnt a lot from his father. Now Robert spends much of his time exploring and shooting landscapes, especially during the golden hours and enjoys capturing the magic of sunrises and sunsets. Robert hopes to have more travelling adventures in order to capture beautiful scenes all over the world. Felpham Beach 1 This was taken during the winter at one of Robert’s…

Power The NEO 2 provides 85,000 full-power flashes on six rechargeable AA batteries. Connection You can also physically connect to your camera via a flash lead. Simple controls Power and colour temperature are easily controlled via these buttons, which also bring up the more advanced options. Attaching The unit fits on to hotshoes and can be easily stand or tripod mounted. At a glance £299 inc VAT • Zero recycle time in flash mode • 85,000 full power flashes on six AA batteries • Built-in Elinchrom Skyport HSS wireless flash receiver • www.rotolight.com The past few years have seen some genuinely innovative LED solutions for working photographers, and keen amateurs, who don't have bottomless pockets or big trailers in which to cart all their gear around. There's the Westcott Ice…

A NEW instant digital camera, the Polaroid Pop, has been launched. It is capable of producing 3.5x4.25in Polaroid prints, and is priced at £199.99. With an integrated printer that uses zero Ink printing technology (ZINK), the camera can produce colour and black & white sepia prints, each with a traditional Polaroid-style border. The inbuilt camera features a 20-million-pixel CMOS sensor, built-in flash and a 3.97in touchscreen LCD. You can edit photos in-camera before printing them. With Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity you can also print photos from other devices (e.g. smartphones). Prints are produced in just under a minute and designed to be both long-lasting and smudge-proof. A 40-pack of film costs £34.99. For the latest news visit www.amateurphotographer.co.uk…

Not everyone is happy about Brent Stirton's butchered black rhino winning Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017. It's not a pretty picture in the style of past winners, depicting wild creatures thriving in their surroundings. Instead, we are bearing witness to a crime scene. Many on social media were quick to voice their disapproval: ‘Sorry, this is not art.' ‘For the judges that picked this picture and for the photographer taking it, shame on you.' Even Facebook deemed the image too graphic to show without covering it with a mask and a ‘graphic content' warning. (Ironically, that feeble display of moral responsibility served only to provoke more people to share it.) Despite the denial of many people to acknowledge the brutal reality facing so many wildlife species, the competition judges…

So who’s the van Winkle fan? Ok, so who's gonna own up to this travesty, on the cover of your 4 November issue: ‘Nice Zeiss, baby'? Are you kidding me? I tried to come up with some of my own and failed miserably, so well done to the culprit responsible. I'm more of an M&M man myself (my best effort, sorry). David Richards, Shropshire Guilty as charged m'lud. I'm not a fan, but I can't resist a good pun. You deserve Letter of the Week just for knowing Vanilla Ice's real name! – Nigel Atherton, editor Win!  The EVO + microSD Card has added memory capacity and multi-device functionality. This UHS-I Speed Class 1 (U1) and Class 10 compatible card is perfect for capturing photos and video recording. www.samsung.com…

The purpose of an ND grad is to reduce the amount of light that reaches the sensor in one area of the image, making it appear darker than it would otherwise. Typically, it's used to darken a bright sky so that the exposure it requires comes close to that of the land and is well within the dynamic range of the camera. Let's take a look at the steps in detail. Measure the exposure range With the camera in manual-exposure mode, set the ISO value and select the aperture that gives you the depth of field you need. Then, using your camera's general-purpose metering (often called Evaluative, Matrix or Multi-zone), measure the exposure required by the land. Then do the same thing for the sky. Choose strength and type If…

There are few things more frustrating for a photographer than visiting a spectacular landmark, only to be surrounded by hordes of tourists preventing you from getting the great shot you’ve been planning for so long. Every time you find the perfect angle, it seems a new tour guide appears, umbrella in hand, leading a troop of brightly dressed sightseers. Thankfully, Lee’s Stopper and ProGlass IRND filter ranges can come to the rescue and enable you to blur out the milling throng. The key to preventing others from appearing in your shots is to select an exposure that’s long enough for them to have only been in the same position for a very small proportion of the time the shutter is open. Before you take your shot, spend some time observing…

Lee Filters Field Pouch • www.leefilters.com • £38 Keeping all your filters safely in one place is a good idea, to prevent any getting damaged or lost. The Lee Filters field pouch is one of the best examples and its lid covers the entire pouch to prevent inclement weather reaching your kit. It's big enough to hold 100x150mm graduated filters and stores up to ten filters. If you'd like to store your filter holder and adapter rings, note that a couple of compartments will need to be sacrificed. It has a strap to sling it over your shoulder and also comes in a sand/ tan colour. It would be a perfect gift for any serious photographer working with 100x100mm or 100x150mm filters. Manfrotto Xume magnetic filter adapters • www.manfrotto.co.uk…

THERE'S a lot more to the NEO 2 than its portable design, impressive build quality and simple arrangement of twin dials. One of the key features I was keen to try out was its flash capability, and though it's no substitute for the best speedlights when it comes to maximum power output, the fact it supports high-speed sync flash with sync speeds of up to 1/8000sec with zero recycling time will be of great benefit to photographers who'd like to freeze subjects in their tracks and shoot continuously without power loss, light loss or any form of interruption. I tested the NEO 2 with the supplied Elinchrom Skyport 2.4GHz HSS wireless flash receiver, which offers wireless control for up to 10 lights in four groups up to 200m (656ft). Having…

‘My own few successes with double exposures have been the result of pure luck’ It’s always tempting to attribute the success of others to their membership of some sort of mafia – surely you’ve heard of the art mafia – or to funny handshakes, or friendships formed at school or university. As the saying goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. So why is Didier Villette published here? Well, Frances and I met him at Arles a couple of years ago. But we meet lots of people at Arles. By the time he sent me a friend request on Facebook, I’d lost his card and half-forgotten his name. Sorry, Didier! To remind myself of who he was, I visited www.didiervillette.com. One word: Wow! For this column, I…

DXO HAS given the newly launched iPhone X its highest ever rating for smartphone stills photography. With a sub-score of 101 for photos, the iPhone X has been lauded as the best phone for stills that photographers can buy. While it performs better for photos than any other smartphone, a score of 89 for video sees it awarded an overall score of 97, placing it one point behind the Google Pixel 2 and tying it in second place with the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. The iPhone X features a dual camera set-up, with a wideangle and telephoto lens. Both the front and rear-facing cameras include background-blurring ‘fake bokeh' modes.…

Anyone with a passing interest in street photography should check out this updated edition of a classic work. It is compiled by curator Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, one of the most famous documentary photographers to come out of the USA. The book serves as a who's who of big names in street photography, from early exponents such as Atget and Cartier-Bresson, through to more modern champions such as Martin Parr. Westerbeck and Meyerowitz are something of a dream team, so this hefty tome is packed with good advice. But what soon becomes clear when reading the book is how meaningless the term ‘street' is. Some of the earliest photographs ever taken, in the early19th century, were of urban scenes. Indeed the rise of photography coincided with the rise of…

Sony DSC-RX10 IV Full test of Sony’s impressive high-tech bridge camera: can it replace a DSLR? Shoot the supermoon With the next supermoon only days away, here’s how you can capture it Canon EOS M100 Is the EOS M100 an ideal mirrorless camera for beginners? We find out…

Buying a tripod Buying a tripod is just as important as buying a new lens – you have to make sure you select the best option for you and your photography. Maximum and minimum height, head, weight, features and budget are all variables that you need to take into account. No two tripods are the same. The best tripods have removable heads and the two are often purchased separately, although manufacturers do create leg and head kits. Then there are different materials. For example, carbon fibre weighs less but costs more than aluminium. As always, your budget is an important part of the purchasing decision, and with tripods the more you pay the better they are. Full-size tripods ‘Full-size tripod' is a rather loose term, but in this instance we…

Lee Filters called the first of its Stopper range the Big Stopper because it stops a great deal of light (10EV) from entering the lens. Using it would take a 1/60sec exposure to 15 seconds, for example. Because a 10-stop reduction can be overkill in twilight, the next filter in the line-up was the Little Stopper, which cuts out 6EV. This allows a 1/60sec exposure to be extended to one second, but it’s more commonly used in fairly low light levels when the base exposure is likely to be a little longer. The most recent introduction to the range is the Super Stopper, which cuts out 15EV to enable extremely long exposures and allows the use of wide apertures with long exposures in bright conditions. With this filter in place,…

WhiteWall ultraHD Photo Print www.whitewall.com £10.95 (40x30cm print) Online photo lab WhiteWall’s ultra HD photo print service is its latest gallery-standard offering. If you’d like to create sharp, punchy prints on high-gloss paper, we recommend it Camera pencil sharpener www.game.co.uk £15 A TLR-shaped sharpener with a built-in drawer to collect shavings Camera cufflinks www.amazon.co.uk £13 Look sharp with these stylish Rolleiflex-inspired retro cufflinks Tamrac Arc Compact filter case www.tamrac.com £16 Neatly carry three filters up to 77mm diameter Think Tank Photo CF/SD + Battery Wallet www.thinktankphoto.com £8 Handy small pouch that holds a battery on one side and a memory card on the other Op/Tech rain sleeve www.intro2020.co.uk £5.95/pair An inexpensive way to protect your camera and lens from rain and dust Magnum Photos: Poster Book www.thamesandhudson.com £20 With 20…

Batteries bite the dust Q I use an Olympus FL-50R flash and recently I have been having trouble getting it to work. Despite using sets of rechargeable NiMH batteries that were only recently charged, when switching the flash on, instead of getting a steady flash-ready light it sometimes flashes and the gun won't fire. The characteristic whine of the unit as it charges up is also a lot more muted. It's as if the batteries are flat, even though they are fully charged. I know they are charged because I checked them with an LED-display battery tester. I don't think the flash unit is faulty, because if I put a set of alkaline batteries in it, there is no problem. Can you help? Aidan Threlfall A How old are your…