Innholdsfortegnelse for 1/17/2023 i Amateur Photographer

Live Bulb, Live Time and Live Composite Olympus, now OM Digital Solutions, was the first maker to introduce these clever features, and even now, only Panasonic has introduced something similar. Their purpose is to take the guesswork (or maths) out of shooting long exposures. With most cameras you need to switch to Bulb mode when you want to shoot exposures longer than 30 or 60 seconds. And when Bulb mode is activated, the shutter is held open for as long as the shutter release (either on the camera or a remote release) is held down – though it’s often limited to 30 minutes. It’s great for night photography and shooting with a Big Stopper ND filter over the lens to enable water or cloud movement to be blurred. Normally, if…

Technique CUSTOM FEATURES Will Cheung Will has spent much of his working life testing cameras and has had his hands on most of the models in the shops today. ‘It’s like Christmas when a camera turns up for testing,’ he says. ‘There are two tiny downsides, though. One, you have to hand the kit back and sometimes that hurts, and two, when I go out with my own camera I have to re-learn it.’ www.williamcheung.co.uk Digital cameras are wonders of imaging technology and these little marvels let you capture pro quality photographs with out of the box simplicity. Charge up the battery, slip in a memory card and off you go; you don’t even have to move the camera off its factory settings. But delve into the camera’s menus…

The primary purpose of an in-body image stabilisation (IBIS) system is to compensate for the accidental movements that occur when photographers are handholding a camera and therefore enable sharp images to be captured when using slower shutter speeds than normal. It works by detecting the camera-shake and shifting the sensor by tiny amounts to correct for it so that the image isn’t blurred. The fact that the sensor can be moved very precisely enables another feature, usually called something like Pixel Shift Multi Shot mode or High Res Shot mode, that is now found in some cameras from Fujifilm, Olympus / OM System, Panasonic, Pentax and Sony. When the mode is activated, the camera takes a series of images, shifting the sensor by a tiny amount, sometimes half the width…

‘As we approached the property I had a really bad feeling, it looked bad from the outside, everything had steel shutters on except this one flat, it was an isolated little flat. We stepped in and the smell of the property was just overwhelming of damp and mould. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it and everywhere inside had mould on it. The carpet had mould on it, the towels and all the surfaces. Sireena was incredibly houseproud and cleaned the place every day and the mould grew back overnight. When we were walking through the property, you could hear water squelching beneath the floor. I didn’t know where to put my camera bag, mould grew on it after the shoot. She wasn’t in a good place mentally but I…

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.…

At a glance £1,999 body only ■ 24.2MP full-frame sensor ■ ISO 100-51,200 (standard) ■ Up to 30 fps shooting ■ C4K 60p video recording ■ 5-axis in-body stabilisation ■ 3.68m-dot, 0.78x viewfinder ■ 3in, 1.84m-dot vari-angle LCD touchscreen PDAF At long last, the S5II gains on-sensor phase-detection hybrid autofocus, with 779 points. Cooling Panasonic has cleverly fitted a fan into the viewfinder housing, providing active cooling for extended video recording. Video 6K recording is available at 30 frames per second, or 4K at 60fps, with no hard limit to recording times. L-Mount A wide range of L-mount lenses is now available to fit the S5II from Panasonic, Sigma and Leica. TWO years ago Panasonic launched its first mass-market full-frame mirrorless camera, the Lumix S5. With a 24MP sensor in…

7 days A week in photography AP IS saddened to report the death of eminent photojournalist Marilyn Stafford, who passed away peacefully aged 97 at her home in Sussex on 2 January. Marilyn received AP’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, and a major retrospective, Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, was published by Bluecoat Press in 2021. Marilyn Stafford’s career in photography got off to a remarkable start when she was invited, as a young woman, to take stills of Albert Einstein. These images were well received, even though she’d never used a 35mm film camera before. In 1948 she moved to Paris and befriended such luminaries as Robert Capa, who suggested she become a war photographer (a suggestion that didn’t appeal), and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cartier-Bresson encouraged Stafford to take…

7 days A week in photography £50, Flammarion, hardback, 196 pages, ISBN: 9782080289254 Magnum Photos is a name that will be familiar to many AP readers, being home to some of the greatest photographers of the past 70 years or so. For this interesting volume, the Parisian fashion brand AMI commissioned 13 photographers from the famous agency – along with two guest video artists – to interpret the theme of family. The results are 15 sets of images which depict an intimate and fluid concept of the contemporary family, a universal subject which will mean different things to different people. Each photographer was given complete artistic freedom to interpret the theme however they saw fit. So, for example, we see Lindokuhle Sobekwa using the family tree to illustrate ancestry and…

A short walk from Buckingham Palace, near the Ritz Carlton Hotel and running parallel to the border of Mayfair and St James’s is Jermyn Street, created around 1664 by and named after Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans. It has developed to become known primarily as a street for gentlemen’s clothing retailers. Today you could drift into number 55, Davidoff of London, and pick up a box of rare and vintage cigars or pop into number 71-72 for a shirt from royal makers, Turnbull & Asser. At number 74 you can get a haircut among luxury grooming products at Taylor of Old Bond Street. At number 45, the Fortnum & Mason restaurant, you could lunch on a £62.50 plate of Dover Sole a la Meunière; or you could check-in…

TechniqueISO POWER TIPS Will Cheung Will loves to exploit all that advanced imaging tech provided by the camera boffins and he’s happy using ISO 1600 and more, confident of achieving exhibition-quality pictures. www.williamcheung.co.uk The fundamental skill of digital photography is controlling the trinity of camera settings: aperture, shutter speed and ISO. While ISO is a relatively recent recruit to the three, its power is immense and not to be underestimated. Learn the skills to master the three settings and you have rock-solid foundations to build on. While there have been major innovations with apertures and shutter speeds, on a digital camera they perform essentially the same function as they did on cameras of old. The aperture is the adjustable hole that controls how much light reaches the sensor and the…

Technique THE MAGIC OF PRE-CAPTURE BURSTS It’s all very well having a camera that can shoot at 10fps, 20fps, 40fps or even more, but very often the problem is not how fast the camera can shoot, but how fast you can react. Many subjects are unpredictable. You don’t know the precise moment when a bird will take flight, for example, or when the starting gun will fire for a sprint race. If you wait for that moment before you start shooting, you will almost certainly miss the action, and yet if you keep the shutter button pressed in anticipation of something happening, you can easily fill the camera buffer before anything actually has, so you miss everything, not just the start. This is where the magic of pre-capture bursts…

Testbench CAMERA TEST At a glance £4,000 body only ● 61MP full-frame sensor ● 693-point AF with subject recognition ● ISO 100-32,000 (standard) ● Up to 10fps shooting ● 8K 24fps video ● 9.44m-dot, 0.9x EVF ● 3.2in, 2.1m-dot 4-way LCD Since the original Alpha 7R appeared in 2013, Sony’s ‘R’ series models have established a resolution benchmark for full-frame mirrorless, making them popular with landscape and studio photographers for whom capturing the maximum detail is paramount. Despite being over three years old, the current A7R IV is still unsurpassed in this respect, thanks to its superb 61MP sensor. But the firm isn’t known for resting on its laurels, so now we have a new version. The Sony Alpha 7R V features the same sensor and core imaging specs,…

7 days A week in photography ‘KAMARA and Kilifi’, a touching image by top wildlife photographer Ami Vitale, is amongst the fine-art prints being sold in the Vital Impacts Winter collection. Vital Impacts was set up by National Geographic contributor Vitale and journalist Eileen Mignon, with all profits from image sales going to conservation and humanitarian efforts around the world. Other featured photographers include Steve McCurry, Nick Brandt and Britta Jaschinski, the latter being an AP award winner. See vitalimpacts.org…

Technique MASTER WHITE BALANCE Today’s digital camera users don’t know how lucky they are! Back in the days of film, you had to buy a film colour-balanced for ‘daylight’ and you just put up with whatever colour shifts occurred as the light changed. Pro studio photographers might switch to specialised ’tungsten’ balanced film, but that was about the extent of your choice. But digital cameras work differently. Their sensors capture all colours equally, but they offer a variety of ‘white balance’ settings so that you can ‘rebalance’ the colour to suit the conditions. What is white balance? The name says it all, really. The camera’s white balance system balances the colours so that white is rendered as white, and not with a colour cast from different types of lighting.…

TestbenchSMARTPHONE TEST At a glance £749 ● Android smartphone ● 6.81-inch screen, 2848 x 1312 pixels ● 256GB storage ● Wide, ultrawide and telephoto cameras ● 4K 60p video ● www.hihonor.com/uk The Honor Magic4 Pro is the first flagship phone from fast-growing Chinese smartphone maker Honor, now independent from its former owner Huawei. As well as being able to run all the Google apps (unlike Huawei devices), it features a wide/ultrawide camera combination, backed up by a 64MP telephoto plus a ToF (Time of Flight) depth sensor. Design and features At 215g the phone is a tad lighter than some rivals, notably the Oppo Find X5 Pro, and the curved glass finish feels nice in the hand (there are black or cyan finishes). That said, it soon gets covered in…

LAUNCHED 1996 PRICE AT LAUNCH approximately £700 GUIDE PRICE NOW £60 (recent auction buy) This was Pentax’s first digital camera, made at a time when photo company designers, liberated by the new digital technology, no longer felt the need for cameras to look like… well, cameras. The EI-C90 comes in the form of a flat package which divides into two parts. The camera section, which measures 105x80x35mm, can be taken out and about for shooting pictures, but there’s no screen on which to preview the pictures, or view them after exposure. That of course wouldn’t have been seen as a disadvantage to film photographers used to waiting days or even weeks to see what they had just shot. Back home, the camera part is joined to the slightly smaller monitor…