Innholdsfortegnelse for 30/08/2022 i Amateur Photographer

It’s difficult to think of a more life-affirming and satisfying genre than wildlife photography, but doing it properly involves much more than schlepping around a nature reserve with your camera. How do you get sharp shots of birds in flight, for instance, or light shy domestic wildlife at night? And what are the best cameras and lenses for wildlife? This bumper issue answers these pressing questions and many more, with tips and advice from some of the best wildlife photographers out there. The editing side is covered too, and we also discuss the ethics of wildife photography. There have been some shocking stories of photographers faking shots, or even abusing or injuring their subjects. We’re sure AP readers are always considerate and honest, but it’s important to stay abreast of…

Platinum Jubilee: The Queen’s Accession Until 2 October, Buckingham Palace. Included in ticket to see State Rooms, £30. See rct.uk for opening times and prices This exhibition centres around 24 official portraits of the Queen taken by Dorothy Wilding, many of which were used as the basis for official imagery of Her Majesty – such as on stamps and coins. For the first time, Wilding’s original hand-finished prints are shown alongside items of jewellery worn by the Queen for the portrait sittings – some of which have never been on display before. Wilding first began taking photographs of the Royal Family in the 1920s. In May 1937, she became the first official female royal photographer. Featured in the show is the official engagement portraits for Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip…

Marsel van Oosten Marsel van Oosten was born in The Netherlands and worked as an art director for 15 years. He switched careers to become a photographer and has since won Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Travel Photographer of the Year. He’s a regular contributor to National Geographic and runs nature photography tours around the world. Visit www.squiver.com ‘Hide photography is a great way to be unobtrusive and wait for the animal to get close to you’ One of the golden rules of wildlife photography is to try to photograph your subjects at eye level or lower. The reason for this rule is simple: when you’re at eye level with your subjects you feel much more of a connection… it’s like you’re one of them. The opposite is also…

There are few better pursuits in life than grabbing your camera and striding into the great outdoors to immerse and engage in the natural world. The drive to get the shot can become maddening, obsessive. With no centralised industry resource on what is and isn’t acceptable, moral boundaries can blur to the point of illegality. Opinions on how to behave as a wildlife photographer, wildly differ. Lines are drawn, choices are made. Photographers can’t all be expected to be experts in animal behaviour but do have a duty of care. A deep love of nature is paramount, every life form treated with equal importance: invertebrate, amphibian, reptile, bird or mammal. Nature stories need to be told and great photographs can still be achieved within ethical confines. If you’re asking yourself…

In late June, Canadian amateur photographer Andrew Interisano, who works as a digital media planner, was announced as the winner of the inaugural Urban Wildlife Photography Awards. His striking image, ‘Date Night’, showed two coyotes on a dimly lit suburban street in Toronto, Canada. The free-to-enter photography awards were the brainchild of the global photography platform Picfair. Picfair had recognised the growing trend for photographing urban wildlife – one that further proliferated during the spate of Covid lockdowns. Over 6,000 amateur and professional photographers, from every continent on the planet, submitted their shots; animals including pigeons, foxes, lizards, raccoons, rats and squirrels were pictured adapting to city life around the world. The winning images were chosen by Picfair’s head of content, Philip Mowbray, and a guest panel of judges who…

Richard Peters Richard is a Surrey-based wildlife photographer and an ambassador for Nikon and Datacolor. He’s one of only a few British photographers to be named the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and has won several awards in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest. See www.richardpeters.co.uk and Instagram: @richardpetersphoto Finding new ways to light and photograph wildlife is an obsession for Richard, as he quickly became bored with ‘regular’ wildlife styles. ‘I’m not belittling the efforts of other photographers, but for me I need to keep pushing and challenging myself, which means not just shooting regular portraits or action shots,’ he asserts. ‘I need to stay excited. Over the years, I’ve found it’s not just about the subject, it's about the light and everything else around them. So,…

Tech Talk With the price of film having shot up in recent months, there’s a renewed interest in half-frame cameras. As the name suggests, they produce negatives half the size of standard 35mm cameras, so you get twice as many photos per roll. The obvious downside is that with smaller negatives the image quality is inevitably reduced, but even so, the better half-frame cameras can still produce good results. You might expect half-frame cameras to be considerably smaller than full frame, but that’s not really the case. The saving in width of the camera body from the narrower negative only amounts to 18mm, so the scope for size reduction is modest. The Olympus Pen EE3 was introduced in 1973, a decade that saw colour film becoming more affordable and therefore…

Photo Critique Joy Gregory lives and works in London, having first moved from Manchester to study an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. An exhibition that Joy made in the 1990s, The Language Of Flowers, was the most comprehensive and beautiful series of cyanotypes, encompassing a huge number of flowers, each with their meaning embedded in the cyanotype. This first manifestation of her interest in botanical references showed a dedication of purpose. Joy has had a long relationship with plants and flowers; and her extensive research did allow for us to spend a day smelling roses in Kew Gardens! Life force I proudly have one of Joy’s cyanotypes on my wall (a Magnolia blossom which means Perseverance, my philosophy in life.) The picture I have chosen is…

Sean Connery by Chris Ware Scottish actor Sean Connery, best known for his role as James Bond, sets off for a game of golf. Between 1962 and 1967 he played 007 in the first five Bond films, before returning again in 1971 for the seventh film, Diamonds are Forever. His last appearance as the character came in 1983 for the film Never Say Never Again, a remake of the earlier film Thunderball. Connery died in 2020, aged 90. 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 it houses over 80 million images spanning the birth of photography to the digital age. Explore it at www.gettyimages.com.…

APOY 2022 Round Six Close-ups Fit a macro lens to your camera, and you open up a whole new world of wonderment. Studying your surroundings in detail, looking for a subject, setting up the camera and homing in on the minutiae of our planet is an almost meditative process. It’s easy to see why so many photographers are so passionate about it. However, it can be a genre where technique sometimes overtakes artistry. A successful macro shot has to be more than a close-up of an insect on a leaf, taken in the sort of flat conditions that shows off every possible detail. While these images have their place, we need more than that. We are looking for creative use of depth of field, gorgeous light, softness where appropriate…

IN ASSOCIATION WITH FUJIFILM AND One common mistake newcomers to videography make is to lock the camera off on a tripod and film a scene. Now, there are times and places when this is suitable, but follow this course all the time and you’ll be left with static, boring footage that is low in production value and will struggle to engage with viewers. So, what’s the alternative? Well, adding motion into your footage has multiple benefits. First up, it can help you show more of a location, and secondly it can help add a sense of energy to the video. More importantly, it can really ramp up the feel and production value of your content and, if you plan on sharing or even selling your video work, this should be…

AP picture of the week Gannets Flying Formation by Martin Goff OM System OM-1 with Olympus 12-100mm at 25mm, 1/3200sec at f/8, ISO 640 ‘Taken from a boat on a session led by wildlife photographer Steve Race. I’d visited RSPB Bempton Cliffs many times but never observed the gannet colony from the sea. Watching them dive for fish was a fantastic experience. Sadly, avian flu has hit nesting seabirds hard although the colony at Bempton doesn’t seem to have been hit as hard as some others.’ Instagram, Facebook and Vero: @martingoffphotos #appicoftheweekWin! To congratulate the AP Pic of the Week winner, Fujifilm is giving the winner a £25 voucher* to spend on any photo prints or gifts at myFUJIFILM.co.uk, so that they can print their image any way they like!…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Regrets? He’s had a few Back in 1965, I was a young midshipman, serving in the Indian Ocean. I’d bought a Praktica IV F as we passed through Aden, with the intention of recording my travels to show my family on my return home. And I did so – pictures of landscapes and buildings. All very interesting but there was nothing about the day-to-day routine of life at sea. I also went on safari in Kenya but never even thought of taking my camera – what an idiot. All the experiences we had, the animals we saw, the camping, and the other people we met, are not recorded. So as well as carrying a camera all the time, make sure you actually use it. Back in…

1 Removal of sharpening to maximise the quality of the image 2 Add a subtle vignette to draw in the viewer’s eye 3 Remove any background noise if necessary 4 Add contrast and remove backlight haze in order to make the puffins stand out Tesni Ward A full-time wildlife photographer since 2016, Tesni is a regular contributor to AP and other publications, and also runs courses and workshops. See www.tesniward.co.uk and Instagram: @tesniward It’s not hard to see why puffins are one of the star species for photographers through the spring and summer: with their striking colours, highly photogenic features and quirky behaviour it can arguably be hard to take a bad image of them. During three photographic tours to Skomer off the coast of Wales this year, we were…

Round eight Wildlife We want to see your best animal and wildlife shots, and whether you find your muse in the local park, a zoo, or the wilds of the Serengeti, research and patience can be the deciding factor between an average shot and an outstanding one. You might choose to fill the frame with the head of a majestic lion, capture the abstract shapes of a starling murmuration, or show an urban fox in an inner-city context. Please note, this is not the round for domestic animals and pets. Your guest judge Your guest judge for Round Eight, Wildlife, is Tesni Ward. Tesni is an award-winning professional wildlife photographer and OM System ambassador based on the outskirts of the Peak District. While the majority of her work focuses…

Wildlife is one of the most popular subjects for photography, but it’s also very demanding. You want the camera to capture lots of detail, so you can see every aspect of an animal’s fur or feathers. A high continuous shooting rate can also be very useful, because it helps you to capture split-second moments such as when a bird takes flight or dives below the water. Likewise, the camera needs to have an autofocus system that’s capable of getting subjects sharp and sticking with them as they move. In this respect, the latest high-end mirrorless models shine, as they have subject-detection modes that are capable of recognising animals or birds and can even focus specifically on their eyes. These cameras also increasingly use stacked CMOS sensors, which allow high-speed shooting…

● £115 ● www.instax.co.uk Fujifilm’s original Instax Mini Link was one of our favourite accessories of 2019, and now the firm has updated it with some new features. At heart, it’s essentially the same device, namely a small portable printer that connects to your smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth, and then prints your photos onto Instax Mini film via the free Mini Link app. But it’s more than just a simple printer, as the app includes an array of additional features, some of which are practical and creative, and others that are just a bit of fun. Along with the ability to print any image from your phone’s camera roll, the app allows you to extract and print individual frames from video files. There’s also an Instax Camera option, which…

Olympus Tough TG-6 ● £399 ● 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…