Innholdsfortegnelse for 18/10/2022 i Amateur Photographer

Riley’s camera is older than she is. It makes a nice change in a world in which most of us are worried about our cameras going out-of-date and us getting behind the times. It’s a very fine camera too – an Olympus OM-2N. Somehow though I’m not sure it would have made much difference which camera 31-year-old Millie had chosen from Xingguang Photographic Equipment City – her pictures would still be really beautiful. While some cameras are just tools, others that change the way we feel actually do have an influence on the way we shoot – and I suspect Millie’s gorgeous Olympus is one of those cameras. ted‘My boyfriend and I moved to China right before Covid,’ Millie says, ‘and during the pandemic I wasn’t working, so I needed…

Testbench FILM STARS When Russia invaded Ukraine back in February, most people in the UK had at least heard of the country. But fewer knew much about its history and culture. Did you know, for example, that Ukraine once had a rich and vibrant camera industry? This was before the country became a sovereign state following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, so Ukrainian camera manufacture is part of the much larger story of the Russian and Soviet photographic industry. Concentrating on Ukraine, however, two names come to the fore: Kiev and Fed. The former in particular produced cameras of almost every conceivable type, from tiny spy cameras to monster medium-format SLRs. The Kiev factory The Arsenal Factory, a fortress-like building in Kiev, dates to 1764. It…

7daysA week in photography GOOGLE announced its latest smartphones, the Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, in a globally broadcast launch event on 6 October. There won’t be an updated version of the slim, affordable Google Pixel 6a. However, the Google Pixel 7 has been slimmed down to compensate and is more compact than the Pixel 6. It has a 6.3in screen and slimmer bezels; the Pixel 7 Pro has a 6.7in display. Shipping with Android 13 and made from recycled aluminium, the new phones are powered by the latest Tensor G2 processing chip and come with the latest security features, such as Face Unlock. Google also promised that the phones will be receiving regular ‘Pixel Feature Drops’, designed to give them access to the latest developed features. Camera…

Technique WILL CHEUNG’S PRINTING MASTERCLASS Thanks to digital the world shoots more pictures than ever and almost all of them remain on smart devices, in clouds and secreted away on hard drives. To me, as a keen photographer, that doesn’t sit well and I love to print. Of course, I’m not saying that I print every shot – far from it – but having a beautiful print in my hands is incredibly satisfying and it justifies all the time and effort I put into my hobby. In my workflow, I make prints of potential really good shots early on in the creative process. With my latest shots catalogued and rated, I start with A5 matt prints of any five star shots and I use these as proofs. I’ll keep them…

This year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition saw 38,975 entries from 93 different countries put through an intensive process of anonymous judging by an international panel of experts. The judges are looking for originality, narrative, technical excellence and ethical practice. From these entries, the 19 category winners aim to highlight the natural world in all its finest majestic wonder and diversity. Overall winner, American photographer Karine Aigner, is the fifth woman to take home the grand title in the competition’s 58-year history. Her image, a close-up of cactus bees, photographed from a bee-level point of view, was taken at a Texas ranch. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Katanyou Wuttichaitanakorn from Thailand has been awarded the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year prize for his intriguing abstract image of a baleen whale capturing…

LENS TEST Testbench Sony’s E PZ 10-20mm F4 G is an ultra-wideangle zoom for the firm’s APS-C mirrorless cameras, on which it offers a range equivalent to a 15-30mm lens on full-frame. This should make it attractive for such subjects as landscapes and architecture. The ‘PZ’ designation indicates that it uses a powered zoom design, which makes it particularly well-suited for video. It costs £750. Sony already has an APS-C wideangle zoom in its line-up, the E 10-18mm F4 OSS, which dates from 2012 and costs £629. This lens is slightly larger and heavier, uses a traditional mechanical zoom, and includes optical image stabilisation. But unlike the new lens, it doesn’t benefit from weather-sealed construction. The closest third-party alternative is the Tamron 11-20mm F/2.8 Di III-A RXD (£819), which…

LEGO In Focus: Explore the Miniature world of LEGO Photography £26, Chronicle Books, hardback, 160 pages, ISBN: 9781797217604 If one thing can bring more joy to the human psyche than photography, it surely has to be play. Bringing the two together in this vibrant and cheerful book, 30 toy photographers show us the world from a LEGO point of view. In a way, there’s a bit of every genre represented. There’s nature, travel, adventure, urban life, portraiture, and much more. The imagination behind the scenes is sure to raise a smile – such as the washing machine disco – while the technical skills of photographing at this scale are impressive too. From a photographer’s point of view, it’s perhaps a little disappointing not to see more in the way of…

● £220-£540 ● www.orico.cc/us.co.uk ORICO isn’t the most familiar name when it comes to computer storage – instead photographers are more likely to gravitate towards the likes of Samsung, Lexar or WD. So when faced with this chunky, colourful portable SSD, you might dismiss it as a novelty. But that would be a huge mistake, as the Orico USB4 High Speed Portable SSD is, in fact, a startlingly fast drive. Judged by both speed testing programs and real-world use, it comfortably surpasses anything I’ve used from better-known brands, providing external storage that comes close to matching the speed of my laptop’s internal SSD. Key to this impressive feat is its use of the USB 4.0 protocol. Orico says this facilitates read speeds as fast as 3,100MB/s and write speeds up…