Innholdsfortegnelse for 24-Feb-2018 i Amateur Photographer

Photography brings many benefits: it enables you to express your creative side, gets you out of the house and helps you make friends via camera clubs or workshops. Less well known are the psychological benefits that accrue from our hobby/vocation. Increasing evidence suggests that image making can help with common mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression, and even help those who’ve attempted suicide to find a new meaning in life. This is a serious topic and our cover story (page 20). Staying with the theme of calming and meditative photography, we’re thrilled to have Tim Clinch share his still-life skills on page 14. We also feature Panasonic’s brand new Lumix GX9 and Lumix TZ200 (page 6) – perfect cameras to take out and about this year. JOIN US…

With his images of everyday life in the UK taken on large-format field cameras, Simon Roberts is not to everyone's taste. While his approach can add an almost epic gravitas to everyday scenes in British society, I've heard otherwise open-minded nonbelievers mutter ‘I could have taken that on my phone' as they shake their head and walk away. While some compare him to Martin Parr, Roberts sees his work as following in the tradition of Joel Sternfeld, who explored America's cultural landscape in the1970s via extended road trips. Merrie Albion curates photos from the last decade, and focuses on events and places that define recent British history. These range from the hugely newsworthy, such as general elections or the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to the more parochial and banal. Flicking through…

Black and right As a regular film user I was thrilled to read the article ‘Black & white film essentials' in AP 10 February. The article fully extolled the merits of film as still being a serious medium rather than something considered a bit quaint by today's megapixel-obsessed digital fanatics. How refreshing to have a photo mag in this age of (admittedly, astounding) digital technology that harks back to photography's beginnings. Black & white photography – both analogue and digital – remains popular. But AP is still the only photo publication that salutes film. I own a DSLR (a Nikon D3200) and I love it. But nothing beats popping a 36-exposure roll of Ilford HP5 into my battered old Minolta X-300 and setting out on a shoot, determined to make…

Tripod A good, sturdy tripod stops your camera wobbling and aids your concentration. Keeping your camera in a fixed position will give you time to work on the set-up in front of you to make any necessary changes. Reflector/diffuser I use two or three of these on almost every shoot I do. The best are the ones with a removable cover with gold/silver/white and black, and inside is the all-important diffuser, which gives you so much control over the light. Light source If it’s a window (my favourite) try to leave your set-up in place so that you can see what happens as the light changes throughout the day. An alternative is a small LEDGO light put through a diffuser to achieve the same result. Standard or medium telephoto lens…

AP What are the biggest ways in which photography can help people with mental health issues, particularly those with depression and anxiety disorders? SC Photography makes us stop and observe for that period of time – being present in that current moment. The encouragement to focus on the here and now is facilitating mindfulness, which can be successful in stress and anxiety reduction. Photographs can also be a way of communicating. Sometimes it is difficult to verbalise or even find the words to represent how we feel. Traditional talking therapy may not be something someone with mental health issues feels able to engage with. Photographs can be a means of showing our internal world. Through exploration in a therapy session, photographs can be used to reflect on emotional wellbeing. AP…

‘For me, this is the perfect balance of the craft, the craftswomen, and the setting in which they work’ Photochrom (now Photoglob Zürich, www.photoglob.ch) was founded in 1889 to exploit a process invented by HansJacob Schmid (1856-1924). The company grew out of Orell Geßner Füßli, a printing company dating back to the 16th century. Photochrom used up to 20 – yes, 20 – lithographic stones to reproduce colour images. Each stone was contact printed from an individual separation negative, and the colour image built up by sequential printing: the degree of precision required was truly Swiss. As far as I know, the pictures were hand coloured, but they could also be derived from separation negatives of original scenes. The original is roughly 165x225mm, near enough whole-plate, which is important. A…

Built-in flash A small flash pops up from the top-plate, with a hotshoe beside it for more powerful add-on units. Power save mode The DMW-BLG10E battery is rated for 900 shots per charge with power save enabled, compared to 250 shots without. USB charge The battery can be topped up through the micro USB port, which sits behind a clever sprung retracting door. Tilting viewfinder Like the GX7 and GX8 before it, the GX9’s viewfinder tilts 90° upwards. PANASONIC has experimented with making mirrorless cameras in a wider range of shapes and sizes than any other manufacturer, exemplified by its flat-bodied GX line. The GX1 was a box-shaped camera with no built-in viewfinder and a fixed LCD, while its successor, the much-loved GX7, was a slightly larger design with a…

The Englishman & the Eel By Stuart Freedman, Dewi Lewis Publishing, £29, 224 pages, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-911306-20-7 It's been a bumper week for excellent documentary photography books at AP, and this latest collection from Stuart Freedman also makes the cut. As with Palaces of Memory, this is a beautifully shot ‘love letter' to a unique kind of eatery though this time Freedman focuses on London's endangered pie, mash and eel joints, rather than Indian coffee shops. He had a battle raising the necessary funds to get The Englishman & The Eel published via crowdfunding, but the effort was well worth it. These are wonderful images, capturing the unique establishments and their clientele, as well as the careful preparation behind this archetypal cockney cuisine. As Freedman points out, ‘These simple spaces…

For years the ‘big guns' (Canon and Nikon) have been giving us merely incremental enhancements, and it has been the mirrorless manufacturers (Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony) who have been taking much bigger steps to put themselves on a par with them or, in certain respects, even ahead of them. None, however, has come up with what I consider the ‘holy grail': a solution to the one problem that all detachable lens cameras have had since we moved away from film – that is, dust getting onto the sensor when changing lenses. The ability to change lenses to suit our needs is the reason why we bought a DSLR in the first place. Even though I am a full-frame Canon user, I like a lot that I read about mirrorless…

Resolution The lens produces good sharpness in the centre of the frame wide open at f/2.8, which gets better as the aperture is stopped down. The solid red line that indicates centre sharpness peaks very close to f/5.6, with edge sharpness (indicated by the dotted red line) improving gradually as it’s closed from f/4 to f/6.3. To acquire optimum sharpness, use the lens between f/4 and f/8. Push past f/11 and diffraction reduces sharpness quite dramatically. Shading Corners appear approximately 0.5EV darker than the centre of the frame when the lens is used at f/2.8. This is a very low shading figure and I found it neither disturbing nor intrusive when I inspected my close-up shots. Closing the lens down to f/4 reveals the edge of the frame is just…

Flash adapter problem Q I have a Nikon D90 and a Metz MZ 1 flash unit on the flash; I also use a Nikon adapter 32002. The problem is the flash and camera are not working together. What am I doing wrong? I've put the camera on auto mode and set the flash to easy mode, but to no avail. It just overexposes. Help! Pat Sexton A I’m having trouble researching your problem based on the supplied information. If you can provide more precise details of the flash unit model name and the adapter I would be delighted to help. Metz model names and numbers are confusing at the best of times, but so far I have been unable to identify an MZ-1 model that pairs with a 32002 adapter.…

Mindfulness is the art of paying attention. It sounds simple, but the reality is quite different. Let's take reading this week's issue of AP, for example. Having secured your copy from a newsagent, supermarket, dog's jaws – you sit down for a quiet read when numerous thoughts come rushing into your head. ‘Why are Digestives considered the best biscuits for dunking?' ‘Where is that awful draught/smell/noise coming from?' The human mind loves distractions and will happily lurch from one thought, feeling or emotion to another without pause. The trouble is when our minds are full of monkey chatter we fail to experience, or really appreciate, the present moment. Going back to our AP example, we might find ourselves at the end of an article only to realise we haven't taken…

Tim Clinch Tim Clinch is an award-winning professional photographer with over 40 years’ experience. He has worked in most areas of the profession, with his work appearing in magazines worldwide. He has also published more than 30 books featuring subjects as varied as interiors, travel, food and portraits. To find out more about his work, visit www.timclinchphotography.com. What do we mean by still life? There are a number of dictionary definitions but they all, pretty much, come down to the same thing: ‘The depiction of inanimate subject matter, typically a small group of objects.’ This encompasses several photographic disciplines, but sums it up pretty well. The true skill lies in the ability to take something mundane and everyday out of its normal habitat and transform it into something of beauty…

Sharpness On the 42.4MP Sony Alpha 7R II, the lens gives a stunning set of MTF50 measurements in our Image Engineering tests. It’s impressively sharp in the centre at f/2.4, and gradually improves on stopping down, reaching its peak around f/5.6. The corners start off some way behind but sharpen up more quickly, such that, at the optimum aperture of f/8, they very nearly match the centre. Diffraction softening becomes noticeable at f/16. Shading Not unusually for a full-frame prime, vignetting is quite obvious at maximum aperture, with almost two stops’ fall-off in the corners when the lens is set to f/2.8. At f/4 this decreases to 1.2 stops, then settles at a value of almost exactly one stop at smaller apertures. If you consider this problematic, it’s easily suppressed…

The twin lens reflex (TLR) was once one of the most popular types of camera for amateurs and professionals alike. Most conform to a rigid body design made for120 film with two fixed lenses, one above the other. The lower lens takes the picture, and the upper one reflects a same-size image onto a focusing screen under a hood on top of the body. The lenses are coupled to focus in tandem. Exceptions to this style include some that allow interchangeable lenses and others made for 127 or even 35mm film. Photographic history has also seen TLRs that had viewfinder images smaller or larger than the film image, a few folding designs, and a small number that placed the lenses side by side. The most popular TLR design began life…

In recent years, there has been a run of camera releases featuring high-pixel-count sensors. The least pixel-rich of these is the Sony Alpha 7R Mark III at 42MP – somewhat overshadowed by the 45MP Nikon D850 and the 100MP and 400MP releases in the Hasselblad H6D range. Whenever such a release occurs, it is accompanied by comments on web forums that these high megapixel counts have restricted usefulness owing to a phenomenon called ‘diffraction limiting'. The thesis put forward is the small pixels cause such cameras to perform worse at large f-numbers. I think this particular meme started on a very popular photographic website, which even has an interactive calculator to let worried photographers predict when their camera will become ‘diffraction limited'. While the internet is a wonderful and rich…