Innholdsfortegnelse for 26-Jan-2019 i Amateur Photographer

This week in January is said to be the most depressing of the year, but this issue of AP is sure to keep the blues away. The first cause for cheer is to remember that winter is a great season for landscape photography, with or without snow. Our refresher should help to ensure that you get the best pictures. You’ll also need a decent backpack for carrying your kit to the most scenic locations – we compare six of the best in this week’s round-up. Once you’ve got your shots, you probably won’t want to spend an eternity in front of the computer, sorting and editing them, so we have a guide to speeding up your workflow with Lightroom. If you’d rather shoot your landscapes from your armchair, the whopping…

Sigma 28mm Art lens Sigma has released the price of its 28mm f/1.4 DG HSM wideangle lens, part of its Art line-up. The lens uses two low-dispersion and three special low-dispersion glass elements. It arranges three aspherical lenses, including a large-diameter aspherical lens, to correct magnification chromatic aberration. The lens costs £1,099, and is out now for Canon EF, Nikon F and Sigma mounts.See https://bit.ly/2RqiJZ7. Nikon Eye AF firmware update At the recent CES consumer electronics show, Nikon previewed firmware updates it is developing for the Z 6 and Z 7, including an Eye AF function. The company claims that this ‘will allow users to capture photos in which focus has been clearly acquired on the subject’s eye, which is useful for portrait, event and street photography scenarios’. Other updates…

I am a 28-year-old photographer and read your article about photography and mental health (Photography can save your life, AP 24 February 2018). First I would like to thank you for publicising this issue, because I have suffered from depression and photography has been my lifesaver. I now donate prints to mental health centres and charities, and it feels good to give some happiness in a photograph. But another issue that I wanted to shine a light on is that of chronic pain disorders. I suffer from fibromyalgia among many other problems and if I'm not with my camera, I'm at the hospital or having treatments at home. When I'm out with my camera you would think I'm fine, since it's one of those illnesses where people often say: ‘but…

Lightweight and portable, the Manfrotto PIXI EVO boasts two different leg angles with a sliding selector enabling you to shoot ground-level images. It’s adjustable, with two-section legs featuring five different steps that adapt the footprint to uneven surfaces. With a payload of 2.5kg, you can tilt the camera 90° to capture incredible images. Submit your images Please see the ‘Send us your pictures’ section on page 3 for details or visit www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/portfolio…

AP: When and why did you start taking photographs? Megan Bendall: When I was 16. However my images had no purpose other than to document family holidays. At university I began to understand where I could take my imagery. In April 2018, I dove into narrative-based documentary work. AP: What draws you towards documentary photography? MB: It’s always been the link to other people’s stories and how my own experiences can be told through them. I think the use of empathy and relationships in documentary is incredibly important and I’m often drawn to things that I’ve experienced or been through. AP: Tell us a little bit more about your photographic training. MB: I’m in my third year at the University of Gloucestershire. I didn’t know where or what I wanted…

THE BENQ SW271 is a high-end monitor meant for the most discerning image-editing professionals and it delivers on every front. Its overall image quality is essentially perfect, with it delivering accurate colours right out of the box in all of its many different modes. The 4K resolution also adds significantly to the ease of editing both images and video. The monitor offers plenty of features too, all of which are genuinely useful – there are no gimmicks here. One thing you don't get is an in-built colorimeter, but you can buy one of the several models recommended by BenQ for well under £200. If you've been hankering for an upgrade to 4K but don't want to compromise on quality, the SW271 is a great choice, though it doesn't come cheap.…

There's still time to enter this year's Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year, the world's biggest food-photo contest, of which AP is a long-standing media partner. As well as the accolade of Food Photographer of the Year, the overall winner gets £5,000 and two nights with breakfast at a five-star hotel in London. If the winner is from outside the UK, they also get a return flight up to £750 to attend the awards evening at the Mall Galleries. The contest now has over 20 categories, including Food Portraiture, Wine Photographer of the Year, Food at the Table, and more. You can enter your stills or movies at www.pinkladyfoodphotographeroftheyear.com, but all entries must be submitted by midnight on Sunday, 10 February. For the latest news visit www.amateurphotographer.co.uk…

The tweet: ‘Every time a white, male, middle-aged photographer gets hired a fairy dies, was posted recently by an established female photographic artist and senior lecturer of photography. I've killed a lot of fairies in my 20-year career and hope to kill legions more. The Me Too movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault, especially in the workplace, is crucial and necessary. Those who abuse their positions and commit criminal acts should of course be exposed and convicted. The consequences of #metoo have rippled far, and far into photography. I hope the core objective of #metoo doesn't get diluted. I've become part of a group now regarded as toxic. What, and the way in which we photograph, is under increasing scrutiny. I urgently required delivery of an exhibition and posted…

THIS week we go back to January 1981, with a bright and breezy cover. What the coverlines lack in elegance they make up for in gusto: ‘Flashguns which match many cameras' being a good example. Infrared photography was featured too which, you've guessed it, was illustrated by a model in a red swimsuit. Inside the magazine was a veritable smorgasbord of content, including a feature on simple indoor lighting penned by Dr David Williams. We're also covering the topic of indoor lighting in next week's issue, but unlike our predecessors in 1981, we won't illustrate it with a glass of booze and packet of fags, complete with yukky ashtray. Shame on you, Dr Williams – but maybe that was the editor's lunch that week? Another highlight was a paean to…

• £94.95 • manfrotto.co.uk/bwfilters FOR LANDSCAPE photographers, filters provide invaluable exposure control at the point of shooting. Despite huge advances in sensor and image-processing technology, graduated filters are still really useful for reducing the brightness difference often found between the sky and ground. Likewise there's no substitute for the visual effects of neutral density and polarising filters. If you're thinking of putting together a high-quality 100mm filter system, the breadth of choice can be overwhelming. Options start with relatively simple designs that resemble scaled-up Cokin holders, through to more sophisticated but relatively pricey alternatives from the likes of Benro, Nisi and Formatt-Hitech. At first sight, B+W's filter holder appears to sit at the lower end of this spectrum. But look a little closer and it sports a couple of handy…

Each week we choose our favourite picture on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Twitter or the reader gallery using #appicoftheweek. PermaJet proudly supports the online picture of the week winner, who will receive a top-quality print of their image on the finest PermaJet paper*. It is important to bring images to life outside the digital sphere, so we encourage everyone to get printing today! Visit www.permajet.com to learn more. Send us your pictures If you’d like to see your work published in Amateur Photographer, here’s how to send us your images: Email Email a selection of low-res images (up to 5MB of attachments in total) to appicturedesk@ti-media.com.CD/DVD Send us a disc of high-resolution JPEG, TIFF or PSD images (at least 2480 pixels along its longest length), with a contact sheet, to the…

EPSON has released a scanner which it says can scan 30 images in 30 seconds via an auto feeder. The FastFoto FF-680W can handle a variety of formats and shapes, including standard, square, panoramic and instant photos, from 9x13cm up to 21x91cm (panoramic). It's also intelligent, claims Epson, knowing when to scan both the front and back – automatically capturing handwritten notes on the back of photos. Another big selling point of the scanner is the supplied software. Automatic features include cropping; rotating; restoring colours in faded photos; and enhancing brightness, contrast and colour. There's also the option to auto save an enhanced and original version of the scan, which is handy if you want an untouched backup. Scanned images can be saved as JPEG or TIFF, and you can…

Incredibly, 21 July 2019 will mark 50 years since Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. Mission Moon 3-D: Reliving the Great Space Race celebrates this epic feat of exploration in a unique fashion, with a huge collection of photographs documenting the space race from both the American and Soviet points of view. But what's really special here is that they are presented as stereoscopic pairs that can be viewed in 3-D, using the ‘Lite Owl' viewer that's embedded in the back cover of the book. This brings literally a whole new dimension to some very famous photographs, along with a large number of stunning shots that aren't as well known. The images that take such a starring role in this volume have been assembled…

APS packaging We were clearing a desk at work and came across an APS film box, with prints and the APS cartridge. What struck me was how much room this one box took up; if you shot hundreds of pictures a week on APS, you would have a room full of these boxes. I realise that Kodak and the like thought the money was with the reprints, but did people really buy that many to justify the bulky boxes that your prints came back in? Thank goodness digital killed off this nonsense; at least a 4TB hard drive can hold my 100,000 pictures, with space left to fill! Andrew S Redding I too was sorting some boxes over Christmas and found some APS boxes, and I was also struck by…

Stephan Grixti, Malta Although Stephan was interested in drawing when he was young, more conventional studies took over. His parents noticed this, and, keen not to let his artistic side slide, bought him a camera. He hasn't looked back since. ‘I keep up to date with the work of professional photographers by reading magazines and looking on the internet,' he says. ‘I try to follow in their footsteps and improve on their work.' In the future, he plans to photograph the less-known parts of his home island. ‘This may seem strange, as Malta is a small island, but there are still areas that others have not explored or have simply ignored,' he says. Visit www.artfinder.com/focal-point.…

Dean Belcher has had a long and successful career as a portrait and commercial photographer based in London. But it was his personal project, aptly named 33rpm, that caught AP’s eye while visiting 2018’s Photo North festival in Harrogate. While at the show, a portable studio had been set up to capture similar portraits to those that you see here, with subjects clutching their first vinyl purchase – or indeed anything that they deemed to be an important possession. In between shoots, AP spoke to Belcher to discover the motivations behind the project, which seems to have resonated in some way with almost all who have seen it. It all started, as these things often do, with an off-the-cuff observation, made while in a record shop. ‘There were some young…

SHOULD you require greater reach than the Sigma 60-600mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports provides, it can be turned into an even longer telephoto zoom by coupling one of Sigma's teleconverters between the camera body and lens. The addition of Sigma's 1.4x teleconverter (TC-1401) or 2x teleconverter (TC-2001) produces an AF 84-840mm f/6.3-9 hyper-telephoto zoom lens or an MF 120-1200mm f/9-13 hyper-telephoto zoom lens, respectively. It's worth bearing in mind that when the lens is attached to cameras that support autofocus at f/8 via a teleconverter, Sigma claims focus accuracy is not ensured on the telephoto side at the focal length scale more than 300mm.…

I've got a bit of a soft spot for this Russian camera, after all we share a birthday, or at least we both first saw the light of day in1959. In 2019 I will turn 60, so I thought it would be appropriate to kick the year off by writing about a camera of the same vintage. The Zenit C is one of the earlier versions of the long-running Zenit SLRs, familiar to generations of Amateur Photographer readers. Seen alongside the more familiar Zenit B, it looks quite small and compact. The body looks more like a Leica rangefinder with a pentaprism housing bolted on, rather than the bulky angular later Zenit models. The hint of Leica is no coincidence – the body evolved from the first Soviet Zorki rangefinder…

It’s a food bank. Well, not exactly. Close enough, though. From October 1933 onwards, during the Great Depression, ‘surplus commodities’ were bought by the US government from farmers who could not otherwise sell their goods; sometimes processed to a greater or lesser degree; then given away, or sold on at heavily subsidised prices, to the impoverished and to schools for school meals. Admittedly they had tried another approach. In summer 1933 the government had paid farmers to plough crops back in, or let them rot in the fields, and to slaughter six million hogs and dispose of them other than for food. A public outcry forced them to consider the possibility that it might be a better idea to help the poor rather than to try to keep prices up…