Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-Apr-2019 i Amateur Photographer

We begin this issue with sad news. Roger Hicks, a long-time contributor to AP, passed away on 7 April after recently being diagnosed with terminal cancer. As well as being a true gentleman, a fine writer and photographer, Roger did a lot for AP over the years, and was determined to keep writing his Final Analysis as long as he could. Roger was also a stalwart of the AP forums, which are now ringing with tributes to the great man. Our deepest sympathies go to his wife Frances, and family and friends. Roger was passionate about AP and would want us to continue making a great magazine. This week’s issue is a second-hand special, filled with buying advice, money-saving tips and inspiration. We hope you enjoy, and Roger is up…

PANASONIC has also announced a stabilised zoom lens for Micro Four Thirds, the Lumix G Vario 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 II Asph. Power O.I.S. The dust- and splash-resistant lens, which provides a 28-280mm equivalent focal length range, incorporates three aspherical elements and a pair of extra-low dispersion elements to minimise chromatic aberrations and distortion. A rounded seven-blade diaphragm produces smooth and attractive bokeh, and the lens also features a stepping motor for fast and quiet AF performance. Its AF system is compatible with Lumix cameras' high-speed contrast-detection systems for focusing speeds up to 240fps. The relatively light and compact lens weighs 265g and is 67mm deep by 75mm long. UK pricing and availability is to be confirmed. See www. panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-…

There are multiple artists in photography's history whose imagery is so ubiquitous it can often seem an ineffectual feat producing a large public exhibition. Popular as the work may remain, seeing the same old images yet again fills the gallery visitor with a wearying sense of déjà vu. It's enchanting then when one of these renowned photographers is subject to a show that reveals images that are either little-seen or, in the case of ‘Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, never before published. The images that form this show were first displayed in New York's Breuer Museum back in 2016 and they find a temporary home now in London's Hayward Gallery. The photographs themselves were unseen during Arbus's lifetime. In fact, they were only found in her studio following her suicide…

Urban beauty Techniques on how you can capture the charm in seemingly mundane spaces Panasonic Lumix S1R Michael Topham reviews Panasonic’s impressive first full-frame camera Where the wild things are Paul Hobson explains the ethics and laws surrounding wildlife photography Like father, like sons Find out about the Gandolfi family, which made cameras for some 100 years CONTENT FOR NEXT WEEK’S ISSUE MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE…

In the Buying Guide in AP 6 April, the price of the Samyang 14mm f/2.8 ED UMC is quoted as £279. The retail price is actually now around the £350 mark, so we apologise for any inconvenience caused to readers or advertisers. The prices listed in our Buying Guide are generally recommended retail prices at the time of launch. However, prices do change over time, so we recommend double-checking prices, along with any crucial specifications or requirements, with a reputable retailer before making a purchase.…

Maybe I am biased as I live there, but Somerset is one of the most interesting, diverse and beautiful counties in the UK, spreading from the sprawling suburbs of Bristol and Bath down to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Exmoor. From a photographer's perspective, it's particularly interesting as the modern and the traditional, the conventional and alternative, happily coexist side by side. So it's not surprising that Matilda Temperley, a well-regarded fashion and documentary photographer and RPS medal winner, has kicked off a major photography exhibition and book project on her home turf. On the level ‘The Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury asked me in 2017 if I wanted to do an exhibition on aspects of the county I found interesting,' Matilda explains from her base on the…

MPB is the quick, easy and secure way to buy and sell used camera equipment. They trade hundreds of cameras, lenses and accessories every day. Based in Brighton, MPB has expanded rapidly in the past ten years and now employs more than 100 people in the UK, USA and Germany. Most of the MPB staff are camera enthusiasts themselves. In a vast 18,240 sq ft warehouse in Brighton, MPB product specialists check, photograph and catalogue each item before adding it for purchase on the website. Following a rebrand in January 2019, MPB’s website is attractive and user-friendly. Photographers who are looking to buy, sell or trade camera equipment can visit MPB at www.mpb.com. More women than ever are taking up photography, and AP's female readership is growing rapidly, so we…

Expose to the left Do not expose to the right! I know this goes against the rules, but if you do you will struggle to separate the highlights in the image later in post-processing. My rule is never to allow the histogram to enter that last quartile. Avoid sunshine Contrary to popular belief, avoid bright, sunny days with green foliage. While this is often advised as the best conditions for infrared, if you break the rules and head out on a cloudy day the results are far gentler. Narrower apertures Try not to stop your lens down too much. If you do you may get ‘hot-spots', which is a pale circle in the centre of your image, like this example here. This is common with infrared and if it happens,…

● £99 ● www.intro2020.co.uk WHILE most entry-level SLRs and mirrorless cameras have built-in flash units, they're low-powered and usually limited to pointing directly forward. At the other end of the scale, many high-end cameras don't have a built-in flash. And while the continual advances in high-ISO image quality might appear to make flash increasingly redundant, even the best cameras can struggle with low colour-temperature artificial lighting, which tends to result in poor colour rendition. It's possible to buy large, sophisticated flash units with extensive manual control, but these are a poor match to small cameras, and often frankly an overkill. Sometimes all you want is a simple flash that's easy to carry around, and that's where the Metz mecablitz M360 comes in. Measuring 64x100x80mm and weighing just 190g, it's one…

New firmware updates are now available for the Leica SL and CL cameras, enabling current and future L-Mount lenses from Panasonic and Sigma to be used with them (Leica is one of the founding members of the L-Mount Alliance, along with the other two companies). To access firmware version 3.5 for the Leica SL and details of how to install it, go to bit.ly/lmountsl, while firmware version 2.2 for the Leica CL is available at bit.ly/ leicaclupdate. No specific information about future L-Mount lenses is available at this stage, but you can keep up to date with Leica developments at uk. leica-camera.com. For the latest news visit www.amateurphotographer.co.uk…

A matter of perspective In the Zeiss Batis Distagon T* 40mm f/2 CF (AP 23 February) lens test, Andy Westlake describes lenses of 40mm focal length as ‘bringing an extremely natural perspective' on full-frame 35mm. Ultimately, perspective may be a matter of personal taste, but readers might like to conduct their own experiments. Recently, I've found that the 85mm focal length produces some very pleasing landscapes, in spite of being regularly dismissed as a ‘portrait' lens. Peter McKenzie It's very much a question of personal taste; I've seen 35mm often described as having the most ‘natural' perspective, but as you say an 85mm lens is also an excellent focal length for portraits, especially when you want to defocus the background. It's interesting that you find an 85mm useful for landscapes…

IN THIS 1961 issue, AP was getting very excited about the possibilities of colour photography. It wasn't until the 1970s when falling prices made colour output a truly mass-market phenomenon. This issue features some gorgeous early examples of mainstream colour photography. There's an interesting article by Kenneth Scowen which discusses how to make the best use of colour in photography, and many of its points are still relevant today – these guys were coming from a very monochrome world, remember, rather than our colour-saturated age. ‘Of all the many thousands of photographs in colour taken each year, colour is just another factor which has been added to the monochrome version. Many of the resultant photographs are all the better for this addition, but they are not truly colour photographs. Compare…

● Canon EOS-1D X Mark II ● Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM ● Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM ● Fujifilm X-T3 ● Fujifilm XF35mmF1.4 R ● Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm f/4G ED VR ● Nikon D750 ● Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II ● Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm 1:2.8 Pro ● Sony Alpha A7 III ● Sony E PZ 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS ● Leica Q (Typ 116)…

Canon EOS 60D with Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM Pancake £293 AT A GLANCE Sensor 18MP APS-C CMOS Sensitivity ISO 100-12,800 Continuous shooting 5.3fps Video 1080p Full HD at 30fps Rear display 3in, 1.04m-dot vari-angle LCD Viewfinder Pentaprism, 96% coverage at 0.95x Released in 2010 and positioned as an enthusiast-grade DSLR, the 60D is now available second-hand in ‘good' condition with a lens for a fraction of its original £1,100 launch price. Built around an 18MP APS-C sensor and Canon's DIGIC 4 image processor, the 60D further benefits from a pin-sharp vari-angle rear display, a nine-point AF system that uses all cross-type sensors, and a water- and dust-resistant protective shell. While it lacks built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, the 60D is compatible with Eye-Fi cards, which provides a usable workaround for the…

Second-hand ratings system In order to help you with your purchase, second-hand camera dealers employ a grading scale that indicates the condition of the cameras they have for sale. While the terminology does vary a bit between the various retailers, the most commonly used terms to describe used equipment are: ‘Mint' or ‘Like New', ‘Excellent', ‘Good' and ‘Well Used' or ‘Fair'. Some companies – Wex Photo Video, for example – use a numerical grading system instead. Either way, ‘Mint', ‘Like New' or ‘10' is used to describe a camera that is scratch-free and in perfect working order – essentially the same condition as it was when new. ‘Excellent' describes a camera in perfect working order, but with minor cosmetic marks. ‘Good' describes a camera that has been well looked after,…

The Sigma Mark I holds a significant place in my history as an amateur photographer, in that it was the first single lens reflex (SLR) that I owned from new. I'd cut my teeth on an old but serviceable Praktica Nova, and as I had demonstrated a commitment to the hobby, my parents helped me to purchase the Sigma as a treat at the end of sitting my O-level exams in1975. At that time, Sigma was mainly known for producing third-party lenses to fit popular models, but at a lower price than the big-name versions. The Mark I was the first camera to bear the Sigma name, although it was actually made by Ricoh, being a cosmetic variation on the Ricoh Singlex TLS. The specifications were a step up from…

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 address on page 14. Via our online communities Post your pictures into our Flickr group, Facebook page, Twitter feed, or the gallery on our website. See details above.…

IF YOU get your skates on there is still time to enter the UK round of the EISA Maestro Photo Contest 2019 – EISA being the Expert Imaging and Sound Association, of which AP is a long-standing member. The competition, which always attracts strong entries and is prominently featured in the magazine, is open to UK residents and is based on the theme of ‘Power' this year. So it's quite a wide brief, and an interesting and challenging one. Unlike competitions that are based on a single image, you need to submit a portfolio of five to eight images that demonstrate your interpretation of what power is and what it means to you as a photographer. This contest is hosted online by our partners Photocrowd, and your portfolio will be…

THE LUMIX G90 takes what we liked about the Lumix G80 and adds some of the advanced features and functionality from the Lumix G9 to make it even better. It doesn't offer everything you get on the Lumix G9 though and lacks an informative top-plate LCD, PC socket, 6K photo modes, high-resolution mode, dual card slots for backup purposes, a large battery and an all-important joystick. It might not have the same flair or retro design that some of its rivals offer, but its SLR-styling is good from a practical perspective and it handles very well indeed. We can see it being a popular choice with videographers, movie creators and bloggers who want to create high-quality footage from a body that costs less than the GH5. All in all, the…

Fashion and portrait photographer Rankin recently took a series of pictures of teenagers and asked them to edit their portraits until they felt they were ‘social media ready. Most participants slimmed down their noses, enlarged their eyes, pumped up their lips, and added make-up. These retouched images have an odd, cartoon-like quality and highlight the gap between what we look like and our notions of what we feel we should look like. The series, Selfie Harm, is part of an initiative led by Marine Tanguy, founder of the MTArt Agency, and entitled Visual Diet. Tanguy's team (which includes artists Adelaide Damoah and Clemence Vazard as well as Rankin) say we are force-fed thousands of images daily, and this ‘diet' of retouched images harms our mental health. Through the campaign they…

Sorry to be blunt but a lot of the people shots winning big competitions at the moment are just really poor. Take the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, for instance. You can almost do a checklist for the kind of image that gets through: basically a quirky-looking person, often wearing unusual clothes, standing there stock still as if in front of a firing squad. There seems no attempt to pose the subject or to vary the lighting or anything. It's becoming really boring. Good portrait photography is about more than a flatly lit shot of some ‘character' in a wacky outfit or trendy street clothes staring straight at the camera, and magazines like AP should be calling out this arty tosh, which seems to wilfully ignore any kind of portrait…

How many and what kind of exposure modes does your camera have? Program, shutter priority, aperture priority and manual; portraits, sport, landscapes, night and macro photography… maybe even more? What about metering? Does your camera offer average, spot, centre-weighted, matrix, multi-segment? How about autofocus? Single, continuous, automatic, manual, hybrid, dynamic? Can you change the sensitivity from shot to shot or have it automatically changed for you? Now imagine you have none of these aids. Welcome to the world of second-hand manual film cameras. Using a second-hand film camera is a great way to learn, or relearn, the fundamentals that newer photographers have never needed to know, or others who have been around a few years more might have forgotten. Using a manual film camera with no automatic functions can be…

DEPTH of field is the zone of acceptable sharpness in front of and behind the point where the lens is actually focused. Wide apertures, coupled with fast shutter speeds, give a shallow depth of field, suitable for portraiture where you want to isolate a sharp subject against a blurred background. Small apertures, coupled with slower shutter speeds, give a deep depth of field, best for landscapes where you need everything sharp from the foreground to infinity. Camera-to-subject distance is also a factor: the closer you shoot, the narrower the depth of field, so use a small aperture with slow shutter speeds when shooting close-ups. Telephoto lenses appear to constrict depth of field because, as far subjects are seemingly brought closer to the camera they bring their apparent depth of field…

Few can boast such a large and wide-ranging archive of British life than the Canadian-born photographer Homer Sykes. Such is the breadth of his collection that he has published numerous books and has been exhibited countless times – including at the 2007 Tate Britain exhibition ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’, the prestigious gallery’s very first major photographic show. His photographs were included among some of the UK’s finest – and certainly most famous – names in photographic history, such as Bill Brandt, Julia Margaret Cameron, David Bailey, William Fox Henry Talbot and more. new generation inspired by Homer’s unique eye for storytelling. Homer’s career began in earnest in 1968, with a degree at what was then called The London College of Printing, but is now known as the London College…

The LED range from Rotolight offers a variety of intelligent features, some of which create lighting effects, while others help to speed up your workflow. For example, True Aperture Dimming™ is a clever function that calculates the exact f-stop required for any subject on the basis of its distance from the camera, shutter speed and ISO. Rather than displaying the brightness value as a percentage, it instead gives us a correct f-stop. The process is very easy. After positioning the light, we measure the distance between it and the subject in feet, then set up the camera and choose an exposure. These details are input into the True Aperture Dimming™ (F-DIM) menu on the Rotolight, then the light determines the correct aperture setting on the basis of the distance, ISO,…

Panasonic Lumix GF1 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH Mega OIS £124 AT A GLANCE Sensor 12.1MP Live MOS Sensitivity ISO 100-3200 Continuous shooting 3fps Video 720p HD at 30fps Rear display 3in, 460k-dot LCD Viewfinder None While a brand new GF1 would've cost you around £700 upon its release in 2009, it's possible to pick up a second-hand example in ‘good' condition along with a 14-45mm kit zoom for about £125. Given its age it comes as no great surprise to find that it lacks many modern conveniences such as built-in image stabilisation, Wi-Fi connectivity or 4K video capture. That said, there's still plenty to like about it. Not least the fact that owning one gives you access to the extensive range of lenses available for Micro Four…

CANON'S full-frame EOS 5D range has been in production since the release of the original 12.8MP EOS 5D in 2005. While subsequent models in the line have evolved greatly in terms of their core hardware and technology, the 5D range as a whole remains committed to providing photographers with the same professional-grade image quality, features and build quality of Canon's flagship full-frame DSLR models but in a smaller and less expensive body. For this reason the 5D series has long been one of the most popular DSLR ranges on the market for both professionals and advanced enthusiasts alike. Features Released in 2012, the 5D Mark III was launched as the successor to 2008's multi award-winning 5D Mark II model that was notable at the time for being the first DSLR…

Artists create art. Critics create labels. It is, after all, hard to imagine Picasso waking up one morning and deciding, ‘I think I’ll be a Cubist’ or Doisneau deciding, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll become a Humanist Photographer.’ Art comes first. Only later is it crammed into a category or movement. Symbolism is one of the sloppiest, vaguest and most desperate of these categories, invented in 1886 by the Greek-born French critic Jean Moréas. Originally for poetry (Mallarmé, Verlaine), it was soon extended to the visual arts as well. It proposes a dreamlike message behind the content: something beyond mere representation. Perhaps the best Symbolist photograph of all time is Roger Fenton’s ‘Ivory Tankard with Fruit’, made in 1860, more than a quarter of a century before ‘Symbolism’ was…