Innholdsfortegnelse for 16-Mar-2019 i Amateur Photographer

Samyang debuts its first Canon RF mount lenses New MF 14mm f/2.8 RF and MF 85mm f/1.4 RF lenses have been announced by Samyang. Marking the first third-party lenses available for the Canon EOS R or RP models, the lenses will be available soon, but pricing has yet to be announced. Both lenses are manual focus and feature weather-sealing. New long-lasting Fotospeed photo paper Fotospeed’s new Legacy Gloss 325 offers high archival properties, the company says. The 100% cotton fine-art paper promises to be ideal for both colour and black & white prints. When used in conjunction with pigment inks, more than 85 years of print life is claimed. Prices start from £37 for 25 A4 sheets. 35mm lens added to Leica SL range A new APO-Summicron-SL 35mm f/2 ASPH…

In1975 Chris Killip photographed the gigantic hull of Tyne Pride – one of the last super tankers built by Swan Hunter Shipbuilders Ltd – looming over a row of houses in Gerald Street, Wallsend. The vessel could carry 119,821 tonnes of cargo and measured 343.5 metres in length, but despite its impressive credentials it sold for less than it cost to build. The shipbuilding industry was in decline and when Killip returned to the same street two years later, the houses had been demolished and the industrial cranes had vanished. Killip didn't set out to become a photographer of the de-industrial revolution in England – in fact he didn't show the shipbuilding pictures to anyone at the time for fear of being pigeonholed – but his acute powers of observation,…

DIY tips AP 2 February is much like waiting for a bus, when three arrive at once: A DIY article, SLRs vs mirrorless and repairing bellows. Regarding DIY, here is a photo of an easily made diffuser for pop-up flash using a 35mm film cassette. John Wade's advice to replace damaged bellows is sound, but if only pinholes are seen then here is an old recipe for filling pinholes in bellows, which I'm sure I gleaned from an AP in the 1950s. It is made from lampblack, rubber cement – the kind found in cycle puncture repair outfits – mixed into a paste with petrol. The lampblack can be collected from a piece of glass held over the smoke from a lighted candle. The glass makes a useful mixing palette…

Sharpening is a crucial part of the image-editing process. Not only does it allow you to crisp up details and enhance the important areas of an image, it also lets you optimise the image for specific types of output, such as a particular print size or for viewing on screen. Likewise, noise reduction is another important step for images captured with a high ISO. With the right noise-reduction techniques, you needn’t worry about pushing your camera’s ISO to its upper reaches. When it comes to choosing your sharpening and noise-reduction tools there are plenty of options out there, from the powerful Detail Panel in Lightroom (and identical panel in Photoshop’s Camera Raw) to the advanced noise-crunching algorithms in DxO PhotoLab or the excellent sharpening controls in Affinity Photo. There’s also…

Photographers have always obsessed about getting technically perfect images. Many factors contribute to this, including lens sharpness, correct focusing and setting the optimum exposure. Those who shoot film also prize fine-grained emulsions that are capable of recording the maximum detail. In the digital sphere, the closest equivalent is image noise, but while it's one of the topics that photographers worry about the most, it's also widely misunderstood. In this article I'll be explaining the real sources of noise in your image files, and looking at the relationship with sensor size, pixel count and ISO sensitivity. In particular, in the light of the current buzz around full-frame cameras, I'll be exploring whether it's really true that cameras with larger sensors always give better results. I'll be illustrating my findings with comparison…

Sometimes it's not until you look back that you appreciate quite how far things have come. A few weeks ago while editing and inspecting some high-ISO images I'd taken in low light, it hit me just how lucky we are to be able to push the sensitivity on modern cameras so high, and achieve plausible results using settings we could have only dreamed of dialing in a decade or so ago. Many of us, myself included, are guilty of forgetting just how far sensor technology and noise response has come, to the point that we often take our camera's high-ISO values for granted without a second thought of how things used to be and where the limitations used to lie. In an AP issue that's dedicated to the subject of…

It is hard to think of Larry Burrows as a photographer from another age: he is one of those legends who belongs in the present as well as in the past. Yet he died 48 years ago. He had left school at 16; worked his way up from the art department of the Daily Express via the darkrooms of Keystone and LIFE; become a LIFE staff photographer in 1961 (still only 35 years old, remember); worked in Lebanon, Iraq, the Congo and Cyprus as well as Vietnam; and was killed when the helicopter in which he was travelling was shot down in Laos, over the Ho Chi Minh trail, in 1971. He was 44: a year older than my father, and a quarter of a century younger than I am…

This sunset scene was uploaded to our Twitter page using the hashtag #appicoftheweek. It was taken by photographer Chris Mitchell. He tells us, ‘Castlerigg Stone Circle is one of the most photographed places in the Lake District in Cumbria. Determined to do something different, I used my Nikon D5300 and got in close with a 10-24mm lens. I decided to use one of the stones as a prominent foreground interest. Despite a lack of drama in the sky, the sun set nicely behind one of the stones, allowing me to stop down the aperture and capture a sun star.'…

VOTED for by 16,000 nature fans, this photograph was chosen from a shortlist of 25, selected by the Natural History Museum from over 45,000 photographs submitted. ‘Bond of Brothers', by London-based photographer David Lloyd, will be displayed at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum until it closes on 30 June. The two adult males, who are likely to be brothers, greeted and rubbed faces for around 30 seconds before settling down - it's unusual for lions to nuzzle for so long. Four images were also selected as ‘Highly Commended'. You can see them all at wildlifephotographeroftheyear.com.…

PERFECTLY suited for wedding and events photographers, the Sony FE 135mm F1.8 GM is the ninth super-sharp ‘G Master' lens to be made for Sony's full-frame mirrorless models. Fast, precise and quiet autofocus is promised thanks to the use of four XD Linear motors which work in pairs driving two focus groups. This allows the use of a floating focus design to ensure high image quality across the full range of focus distances, while minimising focus breathing during movie shooting. The minimum focus distance is 0.7m, which affords 0.25x magnification for close-ups. The lens uses a brand-new optical formula with 13 elements in 10 groups. Nano AR coating suppresses flare and ghosting, while a flourine coating on the front element is designed to repel water or grease. An 11-blade diaphragm…

IT'S ALMOST four years since Leica revealed its original Q (Typ 116), a lovely full-frame compact camera with a fixed 28mm f/1.7 optically stabilised lens, 3in touchscreen, and 3.68-million-dot electronic viewfinder. Now it's time for an update, and Leica has come up with the Q2. At first glance, it appears almost identical to its predecessor, with the same rangefinder-style body design and corner-mounted electronic viewfinder, alongside analogue controls for shutter speed, aperture and manual focus. But it has some major updates that help justify its stratospheric price. The biggest change is a significant boost in resolution, which has almost doubled from 24.2MP to 47.3MP. Leica says that it has tweaked the way the lens is built to meet the tighter demands that this imposes. It's also included a new Auto…

BOOK Dublin Salt By Peter Gordon, Explore Light, € 35, hardback, 120 pages, www.explorelight.com The result of three years of intensive photography around the waters of Dublin, Dublin Salt came to fruition thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018, in which 233 backers came together to break the € 22,500 goal. Peter Gordon is the photographer behind the project, and his aim was to create what he calls a ‘new visual dynamic' around Dublin's coast. Both text and images are minimal. The book is introduced with the words ‘Fleeting moments, of a rare old sea, by a rare old town.' It's a lovely book, and if you're a fan of long-exposure photography executed well, you'll enjoy its contents. We are treated to some 50 images shot in the softest,…

TIM USES two main cameras for his animal work. Much of Endangered was shot with a Canon EOS 5DS, which he favours for its 50MP files – as a lot of his work is made into large prints for exhibitions – and ability to shoot at ISO 2000 (although he prefers not to go above ISO 1600). His lens of choice is a 100mm, as it gives a good working distance between him and his subject. ‘With animals, you can't go with a wideangle because you can't pressurise them,' he says. When not shooting with the 5DS, Tim will be using a Hasselblad H6D-100c medium-format camera with 50mm, 100mm and 150mm lenses. He describes using it as a ‘different discipline. At only 1.5fps, it slows you down, so you think…

WHEN understanding how ISO impacts noise, it's important to understand exactly what this control actually does on the camera. Crucially, it has no impact on the sensor's sensitivity to light, which is fixed. Instead, it merely instructs the camera's image-processing to render a lower level of light as middle-grey in its JPEG output; no more, no less. This process usually involves amplification of the analogue signal that's read from the sensor before it's digitised to either a raw or JPEG file. Historically, this approach prevented any noise introduced by the camera's analogue-to-digital converter from swamping the signal recorded in low light. But if the camera can read and digitise such a low-level signal perfectly without adding any noise, this amplification is unnecessary and the process can instead be entirely mathematical.…

NOW IN its 62nd year, the World Press Photo competition celebrates the best photojournalism in the world. An independent jury from a wide range of photography backgrounds and from six global regions has selected the 2019 competition nominees. This year, the jury has also comprised an equal number of men and women. A new award, World Press Photo Story of the Year, has been announced and is set to honour photographers who have captured an event or issue of great journalistic importance in 2018. The three nominees for the new award are Marco Gualazzini from Italy for his coverage of The Lake Chad Crisis, Pieter Ten Hooper from The Netherlands/Sweden for his story titled ‘The Migrant Caravan', and Lorenzo Tugnoli, also from Italy, for his story on the Yemen Crisis.…

A NUMBER of lenses have been announced by Sigma as part of the L-Mount Alliance. Designed for full-frame cameras which use the L Mount, such as the Panasonic Lumix S1R and Leica SL, the 11 prime lenses come from Sigma's high-quality ‘Art' line and cover focal lengths from 14mm to 135mm. The lenses are already available in other mounts but Sigma says that the new range has been optimised to work with L-Mount cameras. That includes compatibility with in-camera image stabilisation, tuning of AF drive control for AF-C support and pre-loaded data for compatibility with in-camera aberration correction. In addition, Sigma says that creating a native lens mount provides a much more rigid and stable feel to the lens than using existing lenses with an adapter. The brass bayonet mount…

1 What is ISO? Originally ISO related to film speed; it refers to the sensitivity of the emulsion to light. Digital sensors work in a similar, but different way. With digital sensors, when shooting at lower ISO settings the sensor appears to be less sensitive to light and image quality is better, while at higher settings noise becomes more apparent as the sensor becomes more sensitive to light. The reality, however, is that digital cameras have a single base ISO setting, which is often ISO 100, and when increased or decreased, a software algorithm simulates an effective sensitivity of the sensor. 2 Test your camera’s ISO performance The best ways to identify the highest ISO setting you're happy to use is to do an ISO test. Set your camera up…

When was the club founded? The club was founded in December 1889. The Maidenhead Advertiser has reports on the exhibition held in 1891. What does your club offer to new members? We have a varied programme of events from September to June, some 38 evenings in total, covering respected external speakers on a wide variety of topics and internal speakers sharing their expertise. There are competitions for all levels, development, intermediate, advanced, print and digital. Entry is encouraged, as it is inspirational to see the different entries as well as informative to get feedback on your own and others' pictures. Our 7pm session runs before the main event at 8pm. It covers core elements such as the mounting of prints, picture composition and Photoshop basics, as well as feedback on…

ONE INTERESTING technology that's appeared on smartphones over the past year or so is the handheld night-shot. This effectively slices up a long exposure into a series of short ones to avoid hand-shake blur, then aligns and adds them together to produce a composite image with good detail and remarkably low noise. The in-camera processing is even clever enough to suppress blurring and ghosting with moving subjects. While first introduced by Huawei, perhaps the best implementation is currently found on the Google Pixel 3XL, thanks to its image-stabilised lens. It's a glimpse of the kind of approach that camera makers could adopt in the future.…