Innholdsfortegnelse for 09/01/2021 i Amateur Photographer

The enforced pause that has been placed on normal life during the past year has given many of us the opportunity to re-evaluate our lives. So many people have lost jobs that may or may not come back after the pandemic. For others the lockdowns have highlighted their dissatisfaction at being stuck in unfulfilling jobs, and inspired a desire to make a change and do something more creative. Like photography, perhaps. This might seem like an unrealistic dream but this week we talk to three of the many photographers out there who, within the past five years, have proved that it isn’t. It can be done, and they have done it. But you need a lot more than just photographic talent to make it, as they explain. I hope that…

NIKON Europe and the NOOR Foundation are offering free places on a documentary photography course as part of the first online Nikon-NOOR Academy. The masterclasses, from Nikon ambassadors Sanne De Wilde, Kadir van Lohuizen, Pep Bonet and other luminaries, will take place in spring. Each tutor will help budding photographers work on their portfolios, improve their technical skills and create more impactful visual stories. Applications close on 17 January and you can apply at contests.picter.com/ 2021-online-nikon-noor-academy.…

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, while many households across the country were using the time to have a clear-out, professional illustrator, designer and passionate photographer Jon Higham was benefiting from someone who never had. Higham’s father-in-law, John Strevett, is a lifelong hoarder. When John’s wife died, unable to look after himself, he joined finances with daughter Katie and Jon to buy an ancient house, full of character, near Bexhill with a view towards the South Downs. John has a private space next to the cellar where he lives among his artefacts. It was the perfect enterprise for Jon to complete during lockdown. ‘I just started examining his stuff,’ he explains. ‘I thought, there’s a huge project here and I started cataloguing it, about 37 pages. I gave it up…

There has been a lot of interest recently in wet collodion, though I have resisted the urge to experiment with the process. However, for several years, I have worked on a collaborative project with fellow photographer Andy Atkinson, using paper negatives and orthochromatic film, shot on 5x4in, to produce a series of evocative portraits. This method produced photographs with a limited tonality similar to collodion, but with more tonal control. All the work was shot in Andy’s studio, lit by daylight and each image exposed for eight seconds. We were particularly inspired by 19th-century portrait photography, and while some may question the lack of sharpness and clarity, which one usually expects from large format, we felt that the slight movement and blur of the sitter, plus the concentration required during…

Lenses Interchangeable lenses come in a huge array of types for shooting different kinds of subjects IN GENERAL, the easiest way to expand the kinds of pictures you can take is by buying different types of lenses. For example, telephoto lenses let you zoom in on distant subjects, while macro lenses enable close-ups of small objects. Large-aperture lenses allow you to isolate subjects against blurred backgrounds, or shoot in low light without having to raise the ISO too high. Meanwhile, all-in-one superzooms cover a wide range of subjects, but usually with rather lower optical quality. Lens mounts On the whole, each manufacturer uses its own proprietary lens mount. Notable exceptions are Micro Four Thirds, shared by Olympus and Panasonic, and the full-frame L-mount that’s used by Leica, Panasonic and Sigma.…

35 years ago this month, a baby-faced Bill Gates was posing for this picture. Later the same year, at the tender age of just 31, he became a billionaire. Here he is seen in front of hundreds of boxed Microsoft products at the packaging facility in the then-new 40-acre corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft was the first company to dominate the personal computer market, with its MS-DOS system and subsequently the Windows platform. The picture is also notable because it was shot by Joe McNally, the American photographer and occasional AP contributor, who has won four World Press Photo awards and is known for his skill with flash. The Getty Images Hulton Archive is one of the world’s great cultural resources. Tracing its origins to the founding of the…

WILDLIFE photographer George Logan has launched a new book of stunning photography to support and raise awareness for Africa’s dwindling’s lion population. The images in Lion: Pride Before The Fall will also spearhead campaigns to raise awareness of the dangers that the last remaining lions still face. Logan and the Born Free Foundation raised the money to publish the book through a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign which raised £78,000. Buy it from shop.bornfree.org.uk.…

In the midst of the first national lockdown a post appeared on my Facebook feed urging me to remember that in times of global crisis the people we really need are teachers, doctors, nurses and delivery drivers, not actors, athletes, and those in the arts. A few months later a government-backed ad featuring a ballet dancer appeared online with the words, ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)’. As the weeks went by, friends of mine working in the West End lost their jobs, photographers I admire saw their incomes dry up and my neighbour, a professional dancer, saw the career she had worked so hard to establish start to collapse. There is absolutely no doubt that every frontline worker deserves our heartfelt thanks…

1 Preparation is key. If you haven’t run your own business before then make sure that you save around six-months income before you make the jump – it can take up to a year to build momentum. 2 If you’re looking at weddings or portraits as income streams, focus on in-person sales to show clients images and receive orders. The difference in revenue between online galleries and correctly done in-person sales sessions is significant. 3 Make sure your shooting skills are solid before going pro. Ask for critique and take note of any comments offered by people ahead of you on your journey or people whose work you admire.…

I read Thor Simpson’s letter about digitising all the back issues of AP (Inbox, 20 October) and your reply, regarding the volume of scanning and the associated cost, and it triggered an idea. Projects like SETI and others use the general public to download and analyse data to provide a degree of scale that would otherwise be unachievable. Why not apply the same technique to the AP archive? You have an army of readers, many with scanners and spare time. Why not mail the magazines out to volunteers, who could scan and upload them to the AP website? You could also employ volunteers to collate the returned scans and even build the archive website. They would have the reward of contributing their efforts to making the valuable historical archive available…

Lenses Second-hand large-format cameras are sometimes sold with a lens, though not always. New cameras will definitely require one, plus the appropriate lens panel. 150mm is the standard focal length, 90mm for wideangle and 210mm as telephoto. However, large-format lenses are available in many other focal lengths. Tripod The Speed Graphic camera, used by press photographers between the 1930s and 1960s could be used handheld, but the majority of large-format work will require a tripod. It is always a balance between finding one sturdy enough to support the camera, and light enough to carry. Darkslides 5x4in sheet film is loaded into double-sided film holders. The number of shots possible at one time depends on the amount of darkslides loaded with film. Another useful item is a changing bag, which allows…

Musicians: Various – Island Life was a compilation album taken from the first nine years of Grace Jones’s career, 1977-1985, covering six albums Released: 3 December 1985 (Island Records) Best chart performance: No. 1 New Zealand Albums Chart (RMNZ) and No. 4 UK Albums chart Sales: Overall sales not known, however the record attained Gold status in the UK for selling over 100,000 copies Fascinating fact: The ten-track Island Life album was re-issued in France in 1996 as Island Life 2 with the background wall and floor colours both changed to yellow. Island Life 2 has 14 tracks, with the additions to the original album being Pars, Feel Up and two versions of the hit single Sex Drive…

For centuries, the headstone epitaph was elementary: Rest in peace; Here lies; Ever loved; Dearly beloved; Forever in our hearts. Curiously, the rules on what can and cannot be put on a headstone are hazy. Each burial ground relies on their own set of guidelines, every Diocese offers advice: inscriptions should be simple, dignified and reverent, passing sentiments are discouraged. Brief epitaphs with biblical words or words from hymns that reflect the life and work of the deceased are encouraged. As biblical and literary quotations have ebbed from public consciousness, quotes from television shows and verses from pop songs have prevailed. Many deceased are facing the final curtain, their way. At a cemetery I frequent, families have been doing it their way for decades and increasingly creative in remembering loved…

AP picture of the week Stone Stack With A Twist by Paul Manuell Pentax 645NII, 75mm, Kodak Portra 160, polariser, 2 sec at f/11 ‘I’ve been a hobbyist photographer since the mid 1980s and still shoot exclusively with film to this day,’ says Paul. ‘I’d had the idea for this shot weeks before I took it but needed the right weather, a receding tide (for safety) and a day off work to coincide. On the day that I finally managed to do it I shot off a whole film (15 frames) from various angles, and this was my favourite.’ This image, which Paul shared with us on Facebook, has a lovely quality to it that can only come from medium format film. Pebble stacks aren’t new but Paul’s execution, and…

ONE OF legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams’ most famous prints – ‘The Grand Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming’ – sold at auction for US$988,000 on 15 December. This set a new record for a single photograph sale at auctioneer Sotheby’s New York, as the company’s Emily Bierman observed. ‘The spectacular results from yesterday’s sale not only affirmed Ansel Adams as one of the most important artists of the 20th century, but also that his subject matter is as relevant today as when it was created over half a century ago.’ Adams made the image for the US Department of the Interior in 1942 and the print was sold as part of ‘A Grand Vision: The David H. Arrington collection of Ansel Adams masterworks’. The collection…

1 Learn about the business and marketing side, because trying to make up for that later is really challenging. Figure out who your ideal client is, as it really helps you to home in on who you want to photograph. 2 Don’t feel that you have to buy loads of props. When clients come to you it’s because they want to be photographed by you, and that’s all they are going to see when they look at the pictures. Get a few small pieces you really love, because then you’ll get comfortable using them. 3 Enjoy it! Running a photography business is fun. Don’t feel that you have to do what everyone else is doing – if there’s something you love and you want to learn, then go for it.…

When compared to 35mm and medium format, shooting with a 5x4in camera is certainly not as straightforward, but it has many advantages. Primary is the quality of the larger negative or transparency. Approximately 14 35mm negatives could fit onto just one sheet of 5x4in, so when enlarged, whether in the darkroom or from a scan, the fineness and detail of the photograph can be breathtaking. However, while it does demand a more time-consuming approach to taking photographs, it can be a very rewarding experience. 5x4in studio cameras A wide variety of 5x4in cameras is available, both new and second-hand, with the two main types being the studio and field camera. Studio cameras, often known as a monorails or view cameras, are study instruments with the lens plane and focusing screen…

Ed Caraeff This striking, defiant, aggressive approach to album cover design by Goude, the Esquire magazine art director boyfriend of Grace Jones, reflected her striking sense of self as an androgynous rock star and was an important part of her career.An image perfect for the time and one that would endure forever. Andy Cowles Wikipedia›describes this image as ‘anatomically unlikely’ – but this is why it’s so memorable. It stretches not just Grace Jones’s torso, but our willingness to believe. The graphic power and compositional wit are exceptional, fusing epic beauty with a domestic plug socket. Kirk Weddell The image is a knockout. Grace looks fantastic and gigantic. The cover really has impact, the elongated body, that super-dark skin, the lack of wardrobe, the lighting, even the long kinky mic…

The crops shown below are taken from the area outlined above in red With no raw support from Adobe at the time of writing, raw files were converted to TIFFs in Nikon Capture NX with the default settings. As you would expect there is no visible noise at ISO 50 or ISO 100; in fact images look very clean up to ISO 800. By ISO 6400 the loss of detail caused by luminance noise reduction is visible, and this is the highest setting that I would feel comfortable using regularly. ISO 12,800 is certainly usable, but with a loss of fine detail and some colour noise. The maximum native ISO 51,200 has a waxy look with detail lost and patches of luminance noise. The extended settings should be avoided.…

One of the most treasured performance metrics for cameras these days is dynamic range or ‘DR’, to the extent that there are websites dedicated to it. It’s a fair bet that many people scanning those sites to find out which camera has the biggest DR have no clear idea of how it will affect their photography. So, what is DR? The term originally comes from communication electronics, and means the largest possible signal (and we need to be very careful what we mean by ‘signal’) divided by the smallest possible noise. As deduced by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, the DR gives a measure of the information contained in a sample, so its unit is properly ‘bits’, the unit of information. The total information in a communication is…