Innholdsfortegnelse for 31/07/2021 i Amateur Photographer

It has been a tough year for portrait photographers, but with Covid restrictions easing there is huge pent-up desire to get back behind the camera. Portraiture offers more opportunity than most genres to create your own style and this week we present a wide variety of different approaches to capturing our fellow homo sapiens – from the classic documentary style of Kevin O’Farrell’s project on Irish boat-builders to Vijat Mohindra’s outrageously camp portraits of young Hollywood celebrities. We’ve got tips on shooting outdoors in natural light, and on using portable battery flash on location; we offer advice on working with models and we recommend a selection of lenses that are ideal for portrait photography. I hope that you’ll be inspired enough to shoot some portraits yourself and enter them into…

£50, Taschen, hardcover, 368 pages, ISBN: 9783836584685 Carrying out her duty for more than six decades, the UK’s longest-reigning monarch has been photographed by a veritable who’s who of portrait photographers over that time. The book spans the Queen’s early years right through to her most recent state tours and ceremonies. There’s everything here from coming of age during World War II, marriage, motherhood and coronation and her encounters with famous cultural and political icons of the time. Among the photographic heavyweights you’ll find in this tome are Lord Snowdon, Dorothy Wilding, Patrick Lichfield, Annie Leibovitz, Rankin and Cecil Beaton. You can turn to page 98 to find out more about Cecil Beaton’s well-known picture of the coronation.…

Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL The ELB 500 TTL compact and lightweight head with 18cm Q-mount reflector and Manfrotto Multiclips to hold lighting gels in place. Perfect with a carbon fibre light stand. Namgrip LS›255C carbon fibre light stand Weighing in at 550g and a shade under 500mm long, this will cope with lightweight battery flash kit, especially those with a remote pack for ballast. LEE Filters Master Location gel kit 300x250mm As lighting accessories go, this relatively inexpensive gel kit has all the essential colour correction, diffusion, and colour effects gels in one convenient pouch. Pixapro CITI600 TTL and ST›IV trigger 600Ws enables photographers to work in bright sun with wider lens apertures. The ST-IV trigger has a facility to lock TTL exposure to Manual. Peli 1535 Air Case The…

Most battery flash systems now have TTL metering linked to the camera, enabling the photographer to judge exposure using the camera display or histogram. If you’re methodical, judging exposure suited to the image is relatively straightforward if you follow these steps. Assuming the camera and flash are set up, the trigger is attached to the camera hot shoe, and all switched on: 1 With the camera set to Aperture Priority TTL with no exposure compensation, fire a frame. Check the resulting frame. Does it look fine, too dark or too light? Remember that TTL metering relies on reflected light which can be affected by the tones in a scene. You may want to make the frame lighter or darker using either exposure compensation or switching to manual mode. 2 Switch…

French photographer Delphine Blast is particularly interested in women’s issues in South American cultures where it’s not easy for a woman to find her place. Attracted to the multicultural continent, by bright colours and eclectic traditions, she has worked in Columbia, Peru and lived in Bolivia for a year. In July 2019, she travelled to Juchitán in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to photograph the women renowned for their courage and independence, especially economically. Most famously, they are known for their colourful costumes, adopted by artist Frida Kahlo. ‘I was interested in understanding how they could find strength and empowerment without denying their past traditions and culture. You see that a lot in their outfits,’ explains Delphine. The costumes are handmade, taking anything from a few weeks to several…

Hugo Begg Australia 100pts Panasonic DC-G9, 12-40mm at 12mm, 1/160sec at f/5, ISO 320 Hugo submitted several very strong images to this round, but this was the one the judges unanimously felt should be awarded first prize. The spiral is a common subject in architectural photography, but Hugo has done a good job of making a particularly interesting image from this one. He has balanced his composition well, giving slightly more space at the bottom than the top, and has exposed the shot skilfully so that all the detail is retained, right through from bottom to top. The tones are beautifully rendered, and the image is neither too flat nor too contrasty. A measured and carefully composed shot.…

Pete Baker and Jayne Bond maintain their positions in first and second place respectively, with Marco Tagliarino coming out of nowhere into third, showing how much the rankings can change from round to round. There’s no change to the leader of Young APOY, either, but Hugo Begg’s winning image has seen him jump from fourth to joint second. In the camera club rankings, Truro have hopped from fifth to third place. Keep up the good work! APOY 1 Pete Baker 150 2 Jayne Bond 130 3= MarcoTagliarino 120 3= TuuleMüürsepp 120 5= Helen Trust 110 5= IanBramham 110 7= DanielNewton 100 7= DaveSmith 100 7= Emma Phipps 100 7= June Fox 100 7= Roy Curtis 100 YOUNG APOY 1 Lucy Monckton 265 2= Hugo Begg 210 2= Muhammad Hossain 210…

1 Don’t waste time Don’t get sucked into cloning and healing. It will steal valuable time from your life for little or no reward. 2 Use a calibrated screen Always work with a hardware calibrated screen and revisit the colour of your images at different times of the day. I find it’s easier to spot individual colour tweaks that are needed when looking at a set of images in the Library grid view. 3 Aim for natural results Try not to spend too long working on an image. Less fiddling with images in post-production delivers more natural results. 4 Avoid gimmicks Always keep a ‘straight’ file without HDR, or ‘filmic presets’, etc. The fads of today will most likely look terrible in a year or two.…

Hunt for soft light Daniel loves shooting in the urban environment during the day. He hunts the city streets for alleyways and shadowed places to find that lovely soft and diffused light. If he can do a recce to find the perfect location before the shoot, he will. Try out the background Although the people in Daniel’s images are the star of the show, don’t forget the background is just as important. Daniel often shoots the scene blurred before bringing the model in to see how the colours and lighting are going to blend and work in the scene. Aperture priority Daniel prefers to shoot in aperture priority mode and then adjusts the ISO and exposure compensation setting accordingly. He often underexposes his image to avoid any blown highlights and…

People in the public eye often have limited time available for a photo shoot, and when shooting celebrity portraits I’ve often had to work quickly in difficult situations. Yet when I’m under pressure and time is short, the results are often as good as, or better than, those from a longer shoot. That’s certainly true of my experience photographing former heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno. My first shoot with him was in 2004, when I was commissioned by The Observer Sport Monthly. It took place at an event organised by Kids Company, a charity which supported excluded and disturbed teenagers, based in Camberwell, south-west London. Bruno was there to publicise his involvement in that year’s Sport Relief event, from which Kids Company would benefit. It wasn’t the best situation to…

1 Look for the light The light is what determines the location and where I place the child. Once I’ve found the best light, I’ll do what’s necessary to access it whether that’s to move furniture or to cross a creek. 2 Be ready I want everything set – props, staging, camera settings, games – so I’m ready to start shooting as soon as the child enters the light. Children have a very short attention span so I have to be quick! 3 Fun, fun, fun Play lots of games. I love ‘Simon Says’ – it enables me to get them looking in a particular direction whilst they think it’s a game. And, if they mess up, smiles and candid emotions are guaranteed. 4 Play music…

The winner of each round of APOY receives a £500 voucher to spend on anything at MPB. From top-of-the-range digital medium-format camera bodies, to entry-level DSLRs, telephoto zooms and wideangle lenses, MPB is a one-stop shop for used kit. And, of course, you can use your voucher towards your dream piece of kit, if it happens to cost more than £500. For portraiture, nothing beats a classic focal length with a wide aperture, which is why 85mm primes are so popular. It’s great for both full-length and close-ups, and there’s little or no distortion to features. MPB has 85mm wide-aperture prime lenses by the major brands, including the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L II USM, the Nikon AF-S 85mm f/1.4G and Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 GM. All feature outstanding optical…

This 35mm half-frame camera hails from the Belomo factory in Minsk. It was first made in 1988 during the dying days of the Soviet Union, with production continuing through until 1997. The Soviets were well known for plagiarising Western designs in everything from cameras to supersonic aircraft, but the Agat 18k appears to be a fresh design rather than a bootleg. The simple, almost brittle, feel to the camera belies its quite respectable specifications. The 28mm f/2.8 Industar lens has apertures running from f/2.8 to f/16, while the shutter speeds cover 1/60th to 1/250th sec. But there’s no way to specify the exact settings, as the shutter and aperture are coupled together and set using weather symbols. The film speed can be set from ISO 25 to 1600, and this…

Andy Greaves was bought an Olympus OM10 for his 18th birthday in 1980. His first success was a Portuguese fisherman wearing a Union Jack T-shirt taken whilst on holiday in the Algarve. Photography had become for him ‘an itch that continually needed scratching’. When younger he was allowed to stay up to watch classic TV comedies like Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son, and Til Death Us Do Part, so humour has always been important to Andy. His preferred genre, therefore, became street photography where he captured the odd, surreal and downright weird scenarios taking place in his native Chesterfield. Although not naturally clubable, he joined the local photographic society and acquired a reputation for his individualistic work. This gave him a place to show his pictures, and a release from…

Service Please by Fox Photos Joey the crane at Kew Gardens gets a snack from the canteen, July 1929. A well-known personality of Kew, Joey the Stanley Crane led an eventful life. The Journal of the Kew Guild describes events such as losing a toe in a lawn mower accident, defending other cranes from a geese attack, and last but by no means least, a love affair with a Demoiselle Crane, whose affections he won having defeated a rival. Even Joey’s death was anything but mundane – he fell through thin ice in January 1935, a story so tragic it even made the local papers.…

DXO LABS has released version 1.2 of its innovative raw pre-converter, DxO PureRAW. The software now supports five new cameras – the Fujifilm GFX100S, the Hasselblad X1D II 50C, the Leica CL and TL2, and the Sony Alpha 1. In addition, DxO PureRAW will now also support 26 new lenses. ‘DxO PureRAW automatically scrubs raw images of the residual defects, including distortion, unwanted vignetting, chromatic aberrations, and a lack of sharpness, produced by even the best lenses available,’ said the company. Users may then retouch and edit their images as they would normally in their preferred image editor, such as Photoshop or Lightroom. DxO PureRAW 1.2 for Windows and MacOS is now available for download from the DxO website for £115 (simply go to shop.dxo.com). A free 30-day trial version…

1 Aug 1969 LEGENDARY society photographer Cecil Beaton took a kicking this week in an extended opinion piece by respected portraitist Jorge Lewinski. Having faced a backlash for previously describing the Royals’ favourite (whose iconic coronation image you can see on page 50 of this issue) as a ‘superficial and trivial portraitist’ he doubled down over four pages to explain his reasoning, illustrated with his own portraits. Beaton’s portraiture, he said, was ‘lightweight and decorative, with his subjects more often than not merely extremely pleasant to look at. Thus it is quite understandable that his photographs should be so readily accepted – one might say lapped up – by the general public. The general public always prefers the glittering half-truth to the reality.’ He continued: ‘Should not a serious photographer…

Underexpose background When shooting my initial exposure checks I will slightly underexpose the background. The amount of underexposure will depend on the tonality or brightness of the scene. With a darker background, the foreground will pop and add depth to the photo. Buy a dummy I am an advocate of testing light modifiers/ shapers, practising ideas and techniques whenever possible. Willing models are not always available, so I use Fred. Fred gives consistency, enabling me to see the quality, quantity and colour of light. Go unplugged Working on location with battery flash is liberating. Here I worked in a winery cellar with little space and no mains electricity. A flash with beauty dish and shower cap diffuser on a carbon fibre light stand enabled me to position the battery flash…

Standard lens on a compact I read with interest Andrew S Redding’s letter regarding the need for a good compact camera with prime 50mm equivalent lens (AP 26 June). I sympathise, and I think that I have found the solution. Last year I acquired a Fujifilm X100F. This is very compact to carry, and, although its versatile 23mm f/2 lens is wider than Andrew proposes (equivalent to 35mm because of the APS-C sensor), the pancake lens allows a small optical teleconverter to be quickly attached in front to achieve 50mm equivalent. This is particularly useful for candid portraits. Adrian Johnson Battery query I have a Canon EOS 5DS R and was going to buy a genuine Canon battery, LP-E6N. To my surprise, Canon have now discontinued the manufacture of this…

1 Roy Curtis UK 100pts Nikon D800, 80-400mm at 140mm, 1/2500sec at f/13, ISO 200 Guest judge David Clapp says ‘This image is a double take. When I say that, I don’t mean the multiple-exposure technique that is handled so well, but the fact that upon first glance, it appears to be Charles Bridge in Prague. With gothic towers silhouetted against light, the positioning and subsequent overlaying spires (which create new spires in themselves) portray a mesmerising hat tip to this travel photography destination, astonishingly from the heart of Truro in Cornwall. No photographic artist wants to appear indistinct, and Roy has achieved something truly unique and timeless from a UK destination. The seagulls, both airborne and observing, are so essential to the compositional balance, as too are the small…

Roy Curtis shot his intriguing, round-winning composite with a Nikon D800, which is renowned for its outstanding quality and high-resolution images, thanks to the 36.3MP full-frame sensor. It is the sort of camera that particularly appeals to landscape and architecture photographers and, with the added feature of 1080p video, it is a great tool for helping push your photography to the next level. A model in excellent condition at MPB will cost you £669, or you can expect to pay £604 for one in good condition. In third place, Marco Tagliarino used a Canon EF16-35mm f/4L IS USM lens to create his almost surreal shot of Milan’s Piazza Duomo. This pro-standard wideangle zoom is hugely versatile, outstandingly sharp, and with its wide constant aperture, gives the photographer huge scope for…

Damien Lovegrove Damien’s career started in 1984 shooting stock and commercial photography. He then switched to retail photography, shooting over 400 weddings and 1,000 portraits. He now leads photography workshops and adventures all over the world. See more at www.lovegrovephotography.com I took this photograph of my dear friend Yulia on a workshop in Cambodia seven years ago and because the latest generation of Adobe Lightroom offers ‘Enhanced Raw’ processing I wanted to revisit the file and make a new print. Yulia, my model, and I were in an abandoned casino on the top of Bokor Mountain. The water where she is standing used to be a mosaic tiled floor and the driving rain has turned this area into a surreal inside lake. I was directing the action while kneeling in…

Canon EF 85mm f/1.4L IS USM lens This is Daniel’s go-to lens. The wide maximum aperture of f/1.4 is useful for those extra stops of light but also creates the magical bokeh background blur. Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Although Daniel rarely uses this lens, he says it’s useful when he wants to capture more of the sitters’ environment in their portrait shot. Reflector Daniel has a reflector to hand to bounce light back into the shadows when he needs that extra lift. It also works well as a catch light in the model’s eyes. Prism Lens FX filters This is a recent purchase for Daniel and the photographer is still in the experimental stages with these filters. From what he sees so far, he likes the results!…

So long as you do a good job, one portrait shoot might turn into two when the friends of your sitter get to see what magic you have conjured. As that social circle shares your contact details you’ll be asked to do a cousin’s wedding, a christening perhaps, a family group shot and before you know it you’re photographing the coronation of their eldest daughter. That may not be exactly how things progressed for British fashion photographer Cecil Beaton after he received that first call from a lady-in-waiting, but he quickly became a favourite photographer of Queen Elizabeth’s well before he was asked to photograph the official coronation pictures of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, on 2 June 1953. At the time, Beaton was a well-known fashion photographer, working for…

1 Extend canvas I begin by extending the image canvas and expanding the background by adding a portion of another image from the shoot. In this case I added more of the tower’s roof and resized the base image to make the subject appear larger. Once images are aligned, I blend any visible joins between the two using the Gaussian blur tool and the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop. 2 Adjustment layers To create separation between the background and subject, lots of Curves adjustment layers are used to selectively darken areas and highlight details. I’ll then tackle colour using Color Balance or Selective Color adjustment layers to isolate areas such as the increasing blue and cyan in the waterfall, the green on the roof and reducing the reds in the…

This year’s EISA Maestro Photo Contest required entrants to enter five to eight photographs on the theme of ‘faces’. The UK winner, Kim Ayres, receives a one-year digital subscription to AP and goes forward to the International round of the contest. The winning entries from each of the 16 participating EISA countries are judged together at the Association’s Awards Meeting in June 2021. The final results of the International Maestro contest will be revealed at the EISA Awards Gala, due to take place on 3 September 2021 (circumstances permitting). The overall winner will take home a €1,500 prize and an EISA Maestro Trophy. All of the National Maestro winners will also be eligible for the Public Choice competition, the winner of which will receive €1,000. Kim Ayres The UK’s overall…

THE SIZE and weight of a camera and the lens attached to it has a huge impact upon many photographers’ enthusiasm for carrying their kit ‘just in case’ or on a day out with the family. And while some full-frame mirrorless cameras are much smaller than the average full-frame DSLR, their lenses are often big and heavy – especially zooms with a constant f/2.8 aperture. However, the Sigma 28-70mm F2.8 DG DN | C is impressively small, in fact it can easily pass for a sub-full-frame lens with a smaller variable maximum aperture. It’s also dust-and splash-proof yet it provides a major weight-saving over Sigma’s 24-70mm f/2.8 while delivering very good image quality. As a wideangle fan, I missed the extra width afforded by a 24-70mm lens, but the Sigma…

AP picture of the week Kate at Half Moon Bay by Mick Dodds Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, EF24-105mm F/4L IS USM, 1/500sec at f/5, ISO 100 ‘This image was my first collaboration with a bunch of friends and only the fourth time I had done a model shoot,’ says Mick, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, but used to live in Jersey. ‘Half Moon Bay, in Victoria, Australia, is a popular place to visit and take photos. I wanted to try something different for this shoot so the night before I went to a local art suppliers and bought a few different colours of fabric, which I imagined would look amazing to flow during a breezy day.’ Mick was right – the red and orange fabric perfectly complements the blue…

Shallow depth of field (DoF) draws the eye to the subject and reduces background distractions. This portrait was shot in a relatively short time with a Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 prime lens on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. I set the aperture to f/3.2, shutter speed to 1/1000sec and a low ISO of 160, with daylight white balance. As time was short I set the camera to aperture priority mode and the flash to TTL. The flash was a Pixapro PIKA200 with 48cm beauty dish octa modifier triggered with an ST-III trigger. To darken the busy garden background I dialled in minus 1.66 stops of camera exposure compensation, with no power increase or reduction on the flash. Using a relatively shallow aperture gave depth of field from the tip…

Increased age and decreased physical ability can reduce the parameters of the photographic activity we once enjoyed. This has and is happening to me and, no doubt, to some others who enjoy reading this magazine. Gone now are my days of carrying a pack containing a heavy camera and lenses, with extra clothing ‘just in case’, over numerous ladder stiles, through stone squeeze stiles and, with some expletives, through tight kissing gates. However, giving up photography not being an option I have tried several ways of accommodating these limiting factors, not always to my satisfaction. These are the ones that I have settled upon. 1) I don’t want to give up using my full-frame DSLR entirely. I appreciate the familiarity of it together with its comprehensive features. It also offers…

With so many of us living in towns and cities, architecture is a genre that’s open to the vast majority of photographers. It demands a precise approach, but it’s important to retain creativity and imagination, too. The top ten images here are all well seen, and often home in on the details of the scene, potentially creating something entirely new from the architect’s vision. But, as is so often the case, it’s something fresh and original that has caught the judges’ attention, as can be seen from the winning image opposite.…

1 Assess image I started by having a good look around the image, checking the sharpness, noise, and identifying what needs doing and in what order. I like to have a plan. I then used the auto button on the Transform Tab to sort out the angles. It’s a one-click wonder. 2 Noise and sharpening I used the ‘Enhance’ facility to create a DNG with extra resolution. This is an impressive feature that took just 5 seconds using my M1 Mac Mini. I applied global noise reduction, then sharpening. I finished off with the radial tool for some localised sharpening too. 3 Colour and exposure I switched through to my preferred Pro Neg S film simulation and I used the temp and tint sliders in the Basic palette to get…

Daniel Carson 35-year-old Daniel Carson is a location portrait photographer living in London who loves capturing people using natural light. You can find out more at www. danielcarsonphotography.net or follow him on social media @danielcarsonphotography. You may think that to take professional images you need loads of expensive lights and a large studio space; however, this is simply not the case. Daniel Carson is a photographer based in London and for the past four years he has been shooting professional portraits out on location using just natural light. Originally from Cheshire, Daniel accidentally stumbled across photography ten years ago. After training in horticulture to do garden design Daniel found himself buying a digital camera (going halves with his mother) to record his cousin’s RHS show garden. From that, his passion…

Vijat Mohindra cites his Indian roots as one of the core reasons why his portrait images are so vibrant. ‘When you think of India, you think of bright, bold, exciting colours,’ he says. The US-born photographer is now in his mid-30s and is based in Los Angeles – a far cry from his early life in his home state of Ohio. ‘Everybody was raised to think the same way, everything was very insular,’ he explains. Art was my escape, my freedom and the place for my imagination to run wild. It helped to give me something more than I was experiencing from growing up in the middle of suburbia.’ His visual inspiration was originally the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. ‘Dali’s surreal imagery showed me that there’s this whole other world,…

The news reports I read and heard about Hackney in the mid 1990s were rarely positive. When I had to visit the east London borough running errands for the photographer I was assisting, I scheduled them for noon when the supposed gangsters, pimps and addicts (I hoped) would be sleeping off the previous night’s endeavours. Around the same time, Essex-born photographer Jenny Lewis graduated from Preston University (University of Central Lancashire) with a degree in Fine Art, moved to London and made Hackney her home. ‘The first house that I absolutely loved was in Haggerstone near London Fields. A proper house with a pool table and a massive garden for parties. From that first house I’ve moved twice, one road over. I walk past that first house I lived in…

Tara Herron A creative lifestyle photographer based in Nashville, Tennessee, Tara has been a Canon Creator since 2019 and makes her living from creating content for brands on Instagram. She teaches aspiring content creators and children’s photographers. www.taraherron photography.com / @taraherron_photography. My story began after the loss of my daughter, Hallie; I was struggling to find a tangible way of incorporating her presence into our family photographs. When my then two-year-old son, Anderson, and I were playing in what would have been her bedroom, her standing chandelier suddenly scattered rainbows all over the wall as the light hit it just right. Anderson tried to catch them as I photographed him, and it dawned on me that Hallie could become the light in all my images – that’s how I’d visually…

● £24.95 light only, £59.94 HandyPod kit ● joby.com/uk-en MOST cameras are now equally competent at recording moving images as stills, so inevitably an ecosystem of accessories has sprung up to support this. Here we’re looking at an LED ring light that’s 12 inches in diameter, with a 10-step light intensity adjustment and three selectable colour temperatures: 5600K for daylight, along with 4000K and 3000K to balance with artificial light. Unlike some more-expensive alternatives, it only acts as a continuous light source, not a flash. It can be powered via any 5V USB source, either a mains supply indoors, or a power bank when you’re out and about. This light is designed for use with either smartphones or small cameras, including lightweight mirrorless models. Joby describes it as ‘the go-to…