Innholdsfortegnelse for 19/07/2022 i Amateur Photographer

The cost of new cameras has increased substantially in recent years, for a multitude of reasons. The good news is that there are plenty of great second-hand cameras out there to suit all budgets. This week we look at a selection of cameras from every major brand that you can buy for less than £500 (a lot less, in some cases) and show what they are capable of in skilled hands – some of them are still being used professionally! Film photography has become more expensive recently too so we also look at how to pursue it in the most economical way possible. Saving money is great, but getting something for free is potentially even better, so check out our round-up of the best free photo-editing software. In this bargain-focused…

Being wo[hu]man: The world through the eyes of great women photographers. Edited by Walter Guadagnini £30, Silvana Editoriale, softback, 240 pages, ISBN: 9788836647613 Featuring some of the biggest names in photography over the past 100 years – all of which happen to be women – this is a great collection if you’re interested in the history of photography, archival/historical work and a wide array of genres. The book has been divided into three chronological sections, offering a comprehensive overview of women’s contribution to the photographic medium, as well as exploring how women might perhaps see certain situations in a different way from their male counterparts. As well as the fantastic images, there are essays to help contextualise some of the work. An English Summer by Chanel Irvine £30, Hoxton Mini…

TREASURES FROM THE HULTON ARCHIVE Open Air School by Harry Todd Pupils of the newly opened Hazelbury Open Air School in Edmonton attending an open-air class wearing bathing costumes. Such schools were purpose-built with the intention of combating the spread of tuberculosis, which was particularly prevalent in the lead-up to the Second World War. The idea was that fresh air and ventilation would improve children’s health – and they were generally built away from city centres to reduce exposure to pollution too. By 1937, there were 96 open-air day schools that had been opened in Britain, with a further 53 also being residential. The Getty Images Hulton Archive is one of the world’s great cultural resources. Tracing its origins to the founding of the London Stereoscopic Company in 1854, today…

Canon EOS 700D Tobi Sobowale Fashion and beauty ace Tobi Sobowale reveals how she built up a top portfolio with a cheap DSLR from her student days If you’re looking for cheap cameras, Canon DSLRs are a fantastic place to start. The regular incremental upgrades made over the years mean that there are plenty of different models out there, all of which are highly capable for many genres. Their fans include Tobi Sobowale, a London-based fashion and beauty photographer. Her images have been widely exhibited and published, including in The Guardian – and most were shot on the Canon EOS 700D, an APS-C DSLR that’s almost a decade old. ‘I aim to show the multifaceted nature of black women,’ Tobi says. ‘Yes, we are bold and powerful, but…

It may seem as if you could save by developing film yourself, but the time and space required, not to mention rising costs of chemicals, mean this is far from a sure thing. ‘Home development is likely more of a passion than a way to save,’ says Simon Skinner from Photobite. ‘There are some great labs out there, offering great prices to develop your film, so unless you’re a complete purist, this is likely the better bet.’ Recommended labs There’s a wide choice of places to get your film developed but here are three of our favourites… Analogue Wonderland Since getting its WonderLab off the ground last year, Analogue Wonderland has been developing up a storm. The development time targets are 2-3 working days, and there’s a lot of fun…

● £149 ● www.vanguardworld.co.uk Faced with the problem of what to pack for a short trip to British Columbia, I decided to make my life easier by choosing the smallest of Vanguard’s VEO Active bags that are designed for hiking – the 42M. Measuring 270x190x440mm, the bag would be small enough to come with me on the plane, with no chance of the dreaded words, ‘The flight is full, so we’ll need to put your bag in the hold.’ Another selling point was the rigid metal frame at the rear, which should offer protection from other passengers ramming their bags against mine when squeezing them into the overhead lockers. In the end, I packed a Sony Alpha 7 IV with Sony 24-70mm f/4, Sony 16-35mm f/4 and Sigma 100-400mm f/5-6.3…

Olympus Tough TG-6 ● £369 ● www.olympus.co.uk Olympus’s Tough compacts have habitually won our underwater camera group tests, and this latest model is still the best of its type. It’s waterproof to 15m, shockproof against a 2.4m drop, crushproof and freezeproof. The 25-100mm equivalent lens is paired with a 12MP sensor, and viewing is via a 3in LCD. This is also one of the few rugged cameras that can record raw files. Panasonic LX100 II ● £749 ● www.panasonic.com/uk A high-end compact for creative photography, the LX100 II is based around a 24-75mm equivalent f/1.7-2.8 lens and a 17MP Four Thirds sensor that features a true multi aspect-ratio design. It also boasts a full range of traditional analogue control dials, and the corner-mounted viewfinder is complemented by touchscreen LCD. Reviewed…

Photo Critique I first saw the work of Gisela Torres when looking through entries to the Open Call for Peckham24, 2022, a photo festival in south-east London. The theme was Fact Fiction Fantasy, and when I looked at the photographs and read the story of Gisela and Edmonia, who both feature in the image shown here, I knew we had found someone whose work was very special. I was struck not just by the mysterious pictures made by Gisela, but by the extraordinary weaving of the lives and stories of Mary Edmonia Lewis and Gisela Torres herself. Mary Edmonia Lewis, (Wildfire), born 1844, was a sculptor of mixed Haitian and Ojibwe Indian race, who travelled extensively and made many significant works in Italy. She arranged for The Death of Cleopatra,…

AP picture of the week Stellar Reflections by Nick Herrod Nikon Z7 II, Nikkor Z 20mm f/1.8S. Foreground: 240sec at f/5.6, ISO 1000. Sky: 5x 120sec at f/2.5, ISO 640 Nick tells us, ‘Astrophotography has opened me up to an amazing community. There’s nothing quite like striking up conversation with like-minded photographers as you wait for the Milky Way to rise into your composition. Bodiam Castle is a site I had hoped to get an astro shot of for quite some time. It’s a beautiful castle, but the atmosphere was quite different at night. It was dark and eerie, with the sounds of the mammals living in the moat and the owls in the trees adding to the spooky atmosphere as a layer of mist gradually formed above the water.’…

I’ve never liked being photographed, perhaps it’s because I’ve always resisted being put in a box. The same is true when it comes to my photography books. I’m not really an instructional writer or an academic. I like it that way. There are only so many ways to ‘jazz up’ shutter speeds and f-stops, and I’m not all that interested in academia. It feels a bit like preaching to the converted if I’m only speaking to an in-crowd of intellectuals. Instead, I’ve always been far more interested in taking readers on a journey. I want to catch people early, before they have an entrenched idea of what photography is or should be, and then lead them deeper into the more philosophical and psychological complexities of visual language, of what it…