Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/14/2023 i Amateur Photographer

CONCRETE – it’s the second most widely used substance on Earth after water, apparently. As the recently released shortlist from the Concrete in Life global photography competition shows, concrete can also be an element in striking images. More than 14,000 images were entered into the contest, run by the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), out of which a shortlist of 80 shots was drawn up. The overall winner gets $10,000, with $2,500 for each of the category winners. The results will be announced on Instagram on 15 February. See bit.ly/concretecontest, and turn to page 14 for more architecture photography tips.…

CANON’S second newcomer becomes the entry-point to the firm’s RF-mount line-up. Physically, it’s another very familiar-looking design. As implied by its name, the EOS R50 is essentially a re-worked version of the existing EOS M50 Mark II, but now with an RF mount, rather than EF-M. If you needed any confirmation that Canon’s older EOS M-series APS-C mirrorless system has now effectively reached the end of its development, this is probably it. Internally, the EOS R50 shares its sensor and processor with last year’s EOS R10 and offers a broadly similar specification. However, it’s even smaller and lighter, with a particularly beginner-friendly design. Canon says that it’s aimed at those buying their first standalone camera, having previously used a smartphone for shooting photos and video. Despite its entry-level positioning, the…

Technique HOW TO SHOOT BLACK + WHITE Will Cheung Will grew up with black & white photography and still prefers creating images in shades of grey to vibrant colours. Interesting fact: his first-ever published picture was in Amateur Photographer back in 1977, a snow scene in monochrome. www.williamcheung.co.uk Making black & white pictures is challenging, creative, fun and intensely rewarding. What’s more, every digital photographer can indulge in this form of expression with no need for any extra kit. All that’s needed is a little re-training in your mental approach to picture-taking and perhaps learning a new editing technique or two to make the most of your vision. Another option is to take the analogue route if you still own a film camera. Of course, you could always pick…

ROBERT DARCH The work you make as a photographer is often a reflection of the life you’ve lived. Born in 1979, Robert Darch’s last book, VALE, was a response to a life he didn’t live after a decade of illness robbed him of his young adulthood. His latest book, The Island, is a response to the life he’s living in post-Brexit Britain. ‘As a photographer, I’m not particularly judgemental. You can make a much more straightforward judgemental work about Brexit and who voted for it. The issue is so complex and layered and I can see both sides. For me it was more about how do I feel about this? I felt really heavy about the decision and it’s not a feeling I’ve associated with politics in the past,’ Robert…

LENS TEST Testbench Designed as a hybrid lens for those who like to use their cameras for both photography and videography, the Fujinon XF 18-120mm F4 includes a number of videocentric features. But it’s also intended to be well-suited as an everyday lens thanks to its versatile zoom range. Covering an equivalent focal length of 27-183mm, it’s a lens that can tackle a wide variety of subjects including wideangle landscapes, portraits, or relatively close wildlife or action-type subjects. It also offers 0.2x magnification, making it capable of capturing close-up shots, too. Considering it’s designed as a video lens, it’s perhaps surprising not to see a capability to go any wider, which would probably make it more appealing for vloggers. The lens has been designed to be relatively small and…

ENTRIES are now open for the UK round of this year’s EISA Photography Maestro competition, on the theme of The Animal Kingdom. EISA (Expert Imaging and Sound Association) is a community of 60 technology magazines, websites and social media commentators from 29 countries, and AP is an active member. This is a portfolio-based competition so, to enter, UK residents need to submit between five to eight images on the theme, rather than individual images. The brief is quite broad, so you can include all types of wildlife (including urban) as well as pets and farm animals. Note that existing portfolios are excluded, however – all images need to have been taken for the purposes of this contest. We’ll be featuring the top three winners in AP, and the overall winner…

LEICA has announced two compact lenses for its SL range, the Summicron-SL 35 f/2 ASPH (£1,950) and the Summicron-SL 50 f/2 ASPH (£1,700). Both L-mount lenses feature a linear direct drive, which Leica claims enables smooth and accurate focusing. You can also obtain the new lenses as part of an expanded SL2 and SL2s kit range, with an £850 voucher scheme running until 30 April. A Leica account is required to activate the voucher, which can be set up at club.leica-camera.com…

NIKON has announced two new lenses for its Z-series mirrorless cameras. First up is the Z 26mm f/2.8 wideangle pancake lens, which is the slimmest and lightest full-frame wideangle lens in the Nikon Z line-up – it weighs around 125g and is 23.5mm long. The 26mm focal length is equivalent to 39mm on Nikon DX-format cameras, and the lens has a minimum focus distance of 20cm. Other features include suppressed focus breathing for video shooting, a customisable control ring and a bayonet lens hood, upon which 52mm filters can be attached. There’s a metal lens mount, and the lens barrel and moving parts are sealed against dust and water. Also announced is the Z 85mm f/1.2 S, a fast, pro-spec portrait lens. Its main features include 11 rounded diaphragm blades…

PERHAPS the biggest criticism of Canon’s APS-C RF-mount line-up so far has been the lack of matched RF-S lenses, with just 18-45mm and 18-150mm kit zooms available. Canon has now added another, in the shape of the RF-S 55-210mm F5-7.1 IS STM telephoto zoom. Its decidedly dim maximum aperture is disappointing, though, being 0.3 stops slower than its older EF-M counterpart. Featuring optical stabilisation with a 4.5-stop rating, it’ll cost £429.99.…

DEDICATED FOLLOWERS OF FILM Even when we aren’t fully conscious of it, we express ourselves through our pictures. On the simplest level, people who like trains tend to take pictures of trains, and people who like birds photograph birds. And when others look at our pictures they can begin to tell what sort of person we are, or at least what we are interested in. When we are new to photography and still experimenting with subjects, light, angles and exposure, the expression of our personality may become lost in the multiple directions we take, our technical and creative failures and in our own weak grasp of who we are and what we want to say. As we progress though, become proficient and learn to make the camera do what we…

Testbench IN THE FIELD Panoramic cameras have a history almost as long as that of photography itself, and the desire to capture the whole of a landscape has led people to some fairly extreme technical solutions. These boil down to a couple of basic options: use a really wide lens, and perhaps crop the frame to a ‘letterbox’ format, or use a normal wideangle lens but swing it around in an arc to make a cylindrical capture of the scenery. Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages: A truly wideangle lens will have a complex and expensive construction if it is to avoid serious distortion and lack of sharpness in the corners, while a swing lens camera introduces mechanical complexity of a different type. The Victorians tried all sorts of…

Subject detection The AF system is capable of recognising humans, animals, vehicles, with auto selection between subject types. 24MP sensor The EOS R8 uses the same 24MP full-frame sensor as the recent, much more expensive EOS R6 Mark II. IT’S ONLY a few months since Canon announced an update to its enthusiast-focused full-frame EOS R6, with the Mark II gaining a brand new 24.2MP sensor. Now, the firm has taken the same sensor and processor, and placed them inside a smaller and simpler body based on the entry-level EOS RP. The resulting camera, the EOS R8, doesn’t officially replace the RP, but instead sits above it in the line-up (for now at least). Major photographic specs include a sensitivity range of ISO 100-102,400, along with burst shooting at 6 frames…

Anyone who has tried black & white photography will know that it’s not as simple as it seems. You can switch to your camera’s black & white modes, turn the saturation down to zero in your photo editor or wade through long lists of presets and still not achieve drama, depth and richness. It’s because black & white is visually very different to colour and not just in the obvious way. It relies on contrast, light and shade and composition for its effect, and you need to develop a different kind of eye when taking pictures. You also need a different set of editing skills, as some of the best black & white imagery of the past was made in the darkroom, just as much as it was in the…

DJI has introduced the Mavic 3 Classic as a more affordable alternative to the Mavic 3 that was announced in November 2021, with the specifications of the two drones being almost identical apart from in one respect, the camera(s). Whereas the Mavic 3 has two cameras, the Mavic 3 Classic has just one. That might sound like a deal-breaker, but in this instance, it’s a shrewd move on the manufacturer’s part. That’s because the Classic retains the Mavic 3’s Hasselblad camera with a 20MP Four Thirds sensor and 24mm equivalent lens, but eschews the 162mm equivalent camera with a 1/2-inch sensor, which is really only suitable for checking distant objects and route planning. Consequently, the Mavic 3 Classic is able to shoot 20MP, 12-bit DNG raw files and 5.1K video…

LAUNCHED 1925 PRICE AT LAUNCH £10-20 (guesstimate) GUIDE PRICE NOW £150-200 Since this issue of AP is published on St Valentine’s Day, what better time to introduce a camera from the past with a bit of a romantic connection. It’s French, it’s called the Amourette and that’s the French word for a brief love affair – what, in the UK, we might call a bit of a fling. The Leica I, introduced in 1925, is usually thought to be the world’s first truly viable 35mm camera. But while that was happening in Germany, over in Austria, a company called Österreichischer Telephon AG, better known for making telephones, came up with its own 35mm camera. The Amourette is much smaller than the Leica, measuring just 10x5x4cm with a wire frame viewfinder…

DSLR 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 Each manufacturer has its own lens mount and most aren’t compatible with one another. For example, a Canon DSLR can’t use Nikon lenses, although you can use independent brands if you get…