Innholdsfortegnelse for 29-Oct-2016 i Amateur Photographer

We all know that shadows occur when an object comes between rays of light and a surface, but few of us stop to consider the vast creative potential of this everyday occurrence. We can use shadows to reveal form: when the sun is low, it casts long shadows across the landscape, accentuating dunes and hillocks. We can use them to add contrast, or to direct the viewer’s eyes around the frame, drawing attention to what is important and concealing areas that are less crucial. Shadows also help us to reveal texture, and you can even make them the main subject of a photograph, cropping everything else out of the frame. Alternatively, you can leave a small section of the object/person creating the shadow in the composition. The possibilities are endless.…

Foxes Forest photo walk Explore Portsmouth’s northern edge where Hilsea Lines meet Foxes Forest. This photography ‘walkshop’ will cover an often forgotten location, with wildlife and nature in the woodland and on the water. You will also explore the bastions that form Hilsea Lines, once Portsmouth’s last line of defence from the north. 12 November, www.photowalkshops.com In Solution While communities in South Wales are redefining themselves for a new future, old traditions and institutions persist. David Barnes’ exhibition captures some of the particularities and peculiarities of South Wales life. Until 3 December, www.ffotogallery.org Scottish architecture The Festival of Architecture is a year-long celebration showcasing Scotland’s achievements in innovation, architecture and design. Out of their Heads: Building Portraits of Scottish Architects is part of this programme of…

Wedding There’s a prevailing belief that in order to shoot a wedding you must always shoot raw. Neale James begs to differ THERE’S almost a sneering disbelief from some in the photography world – including the wedding photography industry – that JPEGs can even be considered a viable file format by a professional photographer. Actually, in terms of weddings, I’ve had more than a handful of similar conversations with DSLR-toting guests. They’re interested in my personal workflow, but quickly recoil with abject incredulity when they hear that I’ll be working the JPEGs in post-production. But then again, it really is down to what one shoots. If I were shooting ad campaigns or indeed anything being retouched by an agency for that cause, I’d probably shoot a different format. Historically, when…

Street photography has always been one of our most popular rounds of APOY, second only perhaps to black & white, which is round 8 of APOY 2016. Street photography is a genre that at times seems almost magical. Walking through a town, city or village with our cameras at the ready, we can find multiple scenes that cry out to be photographed and we'll see a wide variety of these over the next six pages. The overall winner of round 7 is Sudipta Dutta Chowdhury from West Bengal, India. Sudipta wins a Sigma 24-35mm f/2 DG HSM lens, the world's first large-aperture full-frame wide-angle zoom lens offering a wide open aperture of f/2 throughout the zoom range. Sigma has developed the new 24-35mm f/2 DG HSM for 35mm full-frame sensors.…

CANON cameras generally produce good-looking JPEGs, with strong colours and well-judged auto white balance and exposure (especially from its compact and mirrorless models). Its built-in colour modes include some that are designed to be used directly, and others optimised for further post-processing. Its most recent cameras now include advanced sharpening controls to give cleaner rendition of fine low-contrast detail. Picture Styles Canon's core colour settings are called Picture Styles, and offer a variety of different processing and colour looks. Standard, Landscape, Portrait and Monochrome are all designed to give output that's ready to use, while Neutral and Faithful are both somewhat muted with low levels of sharpening, and assume the user will do further post-processing on them before use. All these picture styles can be fine-tuned with respect to sharpness,…

OLYMPUS has a strong reputation for giving good-looking JPEGs with extremely attractive colour reproduction. This is reinforced by consistently well-judged auto white balance, which gives appealing warm colours to liven up the dullest of days. Not all photographers are as enamoured of the firm's approach to fine-detail reproduction, though, and many prefer to tone down the noise-reduction settings. All Olympus models include numerous additional settings for experimenting with generating different looks for your images. The recent Pen-F goes furthest of all, with a vast array of creative control over colour placed at the user's fingertips. Picture Modes Olympus's default Natural picture mode gives attractive images that are colourful and saturated without being overblown. Meanwhile, Vivid and Muted modes allow you to pep up or tone down the colour if you…

LIKE Panasonic, Sony didn't get off to the strongest start with its JPEG processing, with overly destructive noise reduction tending to smear fine detail. However, it has upped its game recently, and its current cameras are much better at making use of the firm's high-resolution sensors. Yet while its noise reduction and sharpening algorithms have improved tremendously, Sony's cameras can still be prone to auto-white-balance errors giving undesirable colour tints at times. The good news is that even simple editing software can often remove these with a single click. Both of Sony's most important JPEG processing settings – Creative Styles and Dynamic Range Optimisation (DRO) – are easily accessible from the on-screen Fn menu, alongside white balance. Creative Styles Sony's basic colour modes are called Creative Styles, and this gives…

OLYMPUS has a strong reputation for attractive colour rendition, and this is backed up by reliable auto white balance that tends to keep images attractively warm. Shoot in the default Natural mode and you'll get good-looking, colourful JPEGs even on dull, grey days. Compared to Fujifilm, Olympus's colours tend to be a touch richer and more saturated, but without looking unreal. Olympus also excels in more creative areas. Features such as its special-effects Art Filters and Color Creator mode positively encourage you to experiment with how your JPEGs will look, and crucially everything is previewed live in the viewfinder while you shoot. More recently, Olympus has taken this idea a step further in the Pen-F, with completely new colour and monochrome creative modes that place lots of control over how…

Capacity wod-17 by Tiggsy Canon EOS 550D, 70-200mm, 1/200sec at f/3.5, ISO 200 This image was uploaded to our Flickr page and is a good example of a photograph that not only stands alone in its own right, but also functions as part of a larger series. Shot by Tiggsy, it forms part of a growing body of work looking at CrossFit, a physical exercise and competitive fitness sport. As you can see, one element of this discipline involves weightlifting. In this particular image, Tiggsy has taken a rather different angle from that which we would normally see. We're close in, bringing us into the world of the subject. Tiggsy has used the form of the weights and bar, as well as the posture of the weightlifter, to create a…

YOU CAN turn any image format into a JPEG via image-editing software and, unlike shooting, you can preview any adverse compression effects before you commit to save. Lightroom users can create JPEGs through the File>Export command and choose a range of quality options on a simple 0-100% scale. For Photoshop CC users, there are three methods available, each with increasing levels of sophistication. In addition to the usual File>Save As command, the File>Export As function provides a larger dialog with options to resize and remove metadata from your file. The File> Export>Save for Web (legacy) dialog offers the best range of tools for packaging up your work as JPEGs. Images can be previewed in a two or four-up window, so different quality settings can be compared to each other. Current…

With its full HD 1080p capability, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II was a trailblazing DSLR in terms of its video-shooting capabilities when it was launched in 2008. Fast forward eight years, and the array of cameras offering the much higher resolution 4K shooting – and even cinema 4K (4096x2160 pixels) – is astonishing. So how should you choose the best camera – whether it’s a DSLR, compact system camera, compact or bridge – for your needs? As with any equipment purchase, start with a budget. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you have £500 to spend on a camera body, try to keep to that and examine the best options at that price point. Ask yourself whether you want an all-in-one camera with a built-in lens, or…

OF ALL the firms making digital cameras, only Fujifilm has experience in colour reproduction dating back to the film days. To highlight this, it calls its colour modes Film Simulations, and it's no surprise that these give arguably the most appealing colour of all brands. Yet there's also a good range of additional settings to fine tune the output to your own preferences. Fujifilm's auto white balance has a certain tendency towards the cool side, but not unpleasantly so. Indeed, it often has the effect of making skies and water look a deeper blue, which can work well in landscape scenes. Film Simulation Fujifilm names its colour modes after some of its most iconic film emulsions. So, in addition to the standard Provia mode, there's also a punchy Velvia option…

PANASONIC'S older Lumix models had something of a poor reputation for JPEG quality, with a tendency to give odd-looking colours, for instance with skin tones under artificial light. But more recent ones do much better, and can produce attractive-looking results under a wider range of conditions. But auto white balance can still sometimes go askew and over-neutralise to give dull-looking colours, which then need to be corrected in post-processing. So it still makes sense to shoot raw files alongside your JPEGs. Photo Style Panasonic calls its colour modes Photo Styles, and they're found at the top of the main menu, and in the on-screen Q Menu. Each can be individually adjusted for contrast, saturation, sharpness and noise reduction, giving users plenty of control over the look they want to achieve.…

‘All cameras can come up with perfectly good-looking output, but some have more magic than others’ Having reached this point in this week's special issue, hopefully by now you have a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of shooting JPEGs. You may have decided that they are the perfect fit for your photography, or perhaps that they are not for you at all and you would prefer to use raw instead. Either is fine. The key point is that, like most of the choices photographers are presented with (such as zoom vs prime or DSLR vs mirrorless) there is no right or wrong answer; there are just different options that suit some users and shooting situations, but not others. More realistically, just as you would choose different lenses for…

CALLING Fujifilm and Olympus the class-leaders is all very well, but neither of them makes a DSLR or a premium zoom compact with a 1in sensor. If you want the best-looking JPEGs from either of these types of camera, then personally I'd choose a Canon. In truth, when it comes to DSLRs there's not a lot in it. But I find Canon to be more consistent than either Nikon or Pentax when it comes to metering and white balance. Its colour output is attractive too, with an especially fine rendition of skin tones. Nikon comes a very close second, with Pentax benefiting more from shooting raw. When it comes to its 1in sensor compacts and mirrorless models, much the same applies, but here Canon's exposure and white balance consistency becomes…

Richard Silver While Richard Silver is New York born and bred, to him home is where his camera is. He has visited 78 countries and more than 245 cities, and uses techniques such as tilt-and-shift, vertical panoramas and time-slice to present our everyday world in an altered visual context. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the US, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. To see more of his work, visit www.richardsilverphoto.com. 2004 Nikon Coolpix 8700 This very early digital camera also happened to be my first Nikon purchase. The Coolpix 8700 was so easy to use and was the one I started taking with me on all my travels. At a whopping 8 million pixels, it was one of the largest outputs at…

HUNDREDS of professional and amateur photographers gathered at the first of Calumet's Autumn Encounter More Open Days, which took place in London recently. Attendees were given the opportunity to meet with experts from leading brands such as Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon and Sony, to try out new equipment and ask questions. And, by all accounts, the new Open Days were something of a success. Peter Schneiter, from Croydon in south London, travelled to the Drummond Street store specifically for the event. He said: ‘This is my first Open Day and I have enjoyed it immensely. There's so much going on and it was great to take advantage of the complimentary sensor cleaning and special offers that were available.' Jon Warner, MD of Calumet Photographic, said: ‘We are very proud of our…

People of London By Peter Zelewski, Hoxton Mini Press, £17.95, 160 pages, hardback, ISBN 978-1-91056-615-2 YOU MAY recognise the work of Peter Zelewski. The images that have appeared in this little book have popped up on a variety of websites. The pictures were shot over the past three years and are the result of hundreds of hours of Peter trawling London's streets seeking out individuals who represent the diversity of such a huge city. Within the pages we find buskers, refuse collectors, lawyers and everything in between. Each of the images is accompanied by a caption offering some of the most intimate thoughts of the subjects. This results in a deeply personal approach to a city that many can find overwhelming. In such troubled times as these, it's heartening to…

On the morning of 21 October 1966, 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto the village of Aberfan in South Wales, destroying Pantglas Junior School. In the US, a photojournalist called IC Rapoport, who was working for Life magazine, was moved by footage of the disaster that was being beamed around the world, one of the first times a major disaster had been televised so soon after it had happened. Today, speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Rapoport, or Chuck as he is affectionately known, recalls how he came to photograph the aftermath of the disaster. ‘I was obsessed with going to Wales,’ he says. ‘W Eugene Smith, the photographer, was an idol of mine and he had shot a very well-known…

It's something of a truism that to get the most from your pictures, you need to shoot in raw and carefully tweak each shot in post-processing. But, let's face it, we don't always have the time, or indeed the inclination to do this. Equally, if you like to share pictures immediately after taking them using your camera's Wi-Fi, then playing around with raw processing may not be an option. This means there's a lot to be said for setting your camera up to giveJPEGs you like. Fortunately, most cameras are capable of giving pretty good JPEG output. The most recent models also tend to give lots of control over how the files will look, with multiple colour modes and detailed tone-curve settings. Many also include creative processing options, which allow…

AS YOU would expect, by default Nikon cameras give good-quality JPEGs that have strong, saturated colours. The firm's high ISO noise reduction is usually particularly effective, removing most chroma noise but leaving a little luminance grain behind. The main issue Nikon users need to be aware of when shooting JPEGs is a distinct tendency for the auto white balance system to over-neutralise, giving dull-looking images in daylight. This persists even when the Keep Warm Colours option that's available on some cameras is enabled, as this only applies to low colour temperature artificial lighting. A workaround is to apply a degree of fine-tuning towards amber in the AWB settings. Picture Controls Much like Canon, Nikon includes an array of colour modes, which it calls Picture Controls. Alongside a generally bright and…

PENTAX cameras have many strengths, but unfortunately, the standard JPEG output isn't top of the list. It's not that the images are unusable, but rather that a combination of an overly vibrant default colour mode, coupled with a tendency towards underexposure and cool auto white balance, means the gap between the JPEGs and the image quality potential from raw is larger than most. Having said that, if you pay attention to how the camera is set up and what it is doing, it's perfectly possible to get some decent output. The good news is that Pentax DSLRs include a remarkable level of customisation, and this extends to the JPEG processing. On recent models, all the settings are placed together on a single control screen that's accessed using the Info button,…

 OF ALL the camera brands, Fujifilm gets its JPEG processing mostly right most of the time. Indeed, the original Fujifilm FinePix X100 was the first camera with which I was happy to use JPEGs as a matter of course. The firm's subsequent switch to using its X-Trans sensor has brought clear benefits at high ISO settings, although some photographers are unhappy with how fine detail is described. ‘The firm employs colour scientists with decades of experience of film’ The excellence of Fujifilm's JPEGs is down to a combination of factors, but is led by the company's superb Film Simulation modes. Where most companies have just one or two colour profiles you might realistically choose to use without further processing, Fujifilm has a whole stack. Personally, I have a preference for…

Segment mode explained Q I have several cameras and love using them all, thanks to their individual capabilities and options. One thing I notice is that they all have similar exposure modes, called ‘segment', ‘centreweighted' and ‘spot'. I use the middle centreweighted setting, and I understand and use spot mode, but I don't understand the segment mode. Can you explain it? Robin Fordham A The implementation of all these modes varies a bit from manufacturer to manufacturer, and from model to model, but a ‘segmented’ metering mode, also known as ‘matrix’ mode and even ‘evaluative’ mode, will break the frame up into an array and examine, or evaluate, each element in the array individually. If the brightness of some of the elements is substantially different to the majority of the…