Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/21/2023 i Amateur Photographer

If you’re deterred by the perceived complexity of photographing the night sky, this issue’s for you. As Andi Campbell explains, you can add the Milky Way and other astronomical features into your landscapes without a lot of sweat and expenditure – he reveals his straightforward and affordable approach on page 14. Peter Dench then wrestles with one of the biggest questions in photography – will images generated by artificial intelligence change our favourite art form forever? It’s essential reading if you are worried about the rise of the machines. Hardware highlights include tests of Canon’s RF 24mm F1.8 Macro and Sony’s latest wide standard zoom, and check out our great new subscription offers on page 37, too. THIS WEEK’S CONTRIBUTORS ANDI CAMPBELL Andi reveals how to get great astrophotography shots…

7 daysA week in photography Are AI image tools a serious threat to human-made photography? They’ve certainly generated plenty of media excitement. Believe the hype, and we’re on the brink of a ‘paradigm shift’ in creativity. Human ingenuity and uniqueness will be swept away by a tide of robotic artistry. Pictures captured by humble meat sacks (i.e. us) will be niche, quaint, or a distant memory. I think most of these concerns are misplaced. I’ll even boldly predict that this isn’t a new creative era at all. Rather it’s likely to be a pretty dull period of stale outputs across the many fields of artistic and cultural production. I could be wrong: such is the danger of predictions. To explain why, we should look at how these tools actually work.…

Andrew Campbell Andrew (Andi) Campbell is a landscape photographer based in the South West of the UK. His passion for photography is based around capturing wonderful landscape images how he sees them, and teaching others how to achieve the same. He offers both 1-to-1 and group workshops in the South West of England and further afield. Visit andrewcampbell.co.uk It’s about 2am in the middle of May 2021 and Andi Campbell is framing an image of Start Point lighthouse under a sky full of bright, beautiful stars. Astronomical twilight, the last phase of illumination in the sky, ended two hours ago, plunging these cliffs into the deepest darkness and its first glimmers won’t reach over the eastern horizon for another 40 minutes. Dawn itself is three hours distant. This is truly…

Returning to life in England after spending the best part of two months in Longyearbyen – the world’s northernmost settlement – must have taken some getting used to. There’s no need to walk to the Co-op with a rifle over your shoulder (for scaring polar bears), the threat of being buried in an avalanche is pretty slim and, crucially, it’s dark at night and light during the day. Longyearbyen is a place that likes to remind you that you are extremely vulnerable, as Graeme Chesters (winner of AP’s first bursary) discovered. ‘On occasion I would walk to the head of the valley and find myself transfixed by the northern lights,’ he explains. ‘I would be fiddling with my camera settings and tripod and staring into the sky when I would…

● £230-355 ● www.kasefilters.com WHEN I reviewed Kase’s original Wolverine magnetic circulars a couple of years back, I found them to be the quickest and easiest way of working with polarising and neutral density (ND) filters. Now, the firm’s second-generation Revolution filters bring some useful updates. The basic idea, though, remains the same. You screw an adapter ring onto your lens, and the filters then clip on magnetically. Multiple filters can be stacked, allowing polarising and neutral density filters to be used at the same time. Entry-Level Kits include polarising, ND8 and ND64 filters (3 and 6 stops respectively), while Pro Kits add an ND1000 filter (10 stops). They’re initially available in 77mm and 82mm sizes. However, the Revolution design brings some key improvements. Firstly, you now get two screw-in…

Photo Critique ‘The blood, the dirt, the makeshift theatre, all make the reality unavoidable’ At any one time there are too many awful things happening in the world for a person to keep up with. We only have so much time to dedicate to events occurring beyond our direct sphere of influence, and even when others bring us the news from far-flung places in neatly packaged reports we may not have space in our lives to consume them. Certain events may make it into our consciousness and may even stay there for some time, but the constant pressure of new internal and external concerns will mean that unless we dedicate ourselves to a small number of situations we won’t have much of a grasp on anything. How could it be…

A CENTRE for photography has opened in the newly renovated Shambellie House, set in the village of New Abbey near Dumfries. It comprises a digital suite, darkroom and exhibition spaces, designed by Ricky Nolan, a professional photographer and local college lecturer. ‘By having both the digital suite and darkroom we can begin to offer ways of taking digital images and producing large-format negatives and experiment with various printing techniques and alternative processes,’ he explains. See www.shambelliehouse.org…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Driven nuts I’ve been using a Lumix FZ82 as my out-and-about camera for three years now. It takes surprisingly good pictures but has been driving me nuts. The problem has always been that the focus area moves when I use the viewfinder. I set it just above centre, look through the viewfinder and it moves to the bottom right-hand corner. I swear a bit, reset it and I might get a couple of shots then it does it again. It has been driving me mad. Then last night I had a lightbulb moment and worked out why. It’s my big nose! It appears that the back screen is still live even when using the viewfinder, and my nose touches it. Who knew? Buried deep in the…

Richard has been a photographer since 2013 and lives in Brighton & Hove. More of his images can be viewed on his website www.richardmurgatroyd.com and on Instagram @richardmurgatroydphotography AP: Tell us a little about your photography background RM: I’ve loved photography and owned film cameras pretty much all my life. My inspiration to shoot came from a combination of whatever National Geographic magazines I could get my hands on, travel documentaries, and glossy travel magazines stuffed in the weekend newspaper. I bought my first Canon film SLR back in 1997 and moved to digital in 2007 with the Canon EOS 350D. I had fallen into corporate jobs after university but had a now-or-never career epiphany in 2011. I upgraded to the EOS 5D Mark III ahead of a nine-month trip…

Tech Talk At the end of last year, two quite extraordinary announcements were made. The first, made by Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation via the Nikkei news agency, announced that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 15 would use its image sensors, including one incorporating new technology to double the pixel saturation capacity. The second came in the form of a tweet from Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, saying that Apple had been partnering with Sony SS to provide image sensors for Apple products for more than a decade. In neither case was the information unexpected. For that decade, experts have been tearing down Apple products and finding image sensors bearing ‘IMX’ model numbers, indicating that the sensor originated from Sony. Instead, what was remarkable was that the partnership was acknowledged. It is quite unusual…

IN MORE lens news, Sigma has unveiled the 50mm F1.4 DG DN Art lens for L-mount and Sony E-mount mirrorless cameras. With an all-new design compared to the existing 50mm 1.4 DG HSM for DSLRs, Sigma describes it as ideal for portrait, wedding, street, landscape and family photography as well as video. Constructed of 14 elements in 11 groups, including one SLD (Special Low Dispersion) element and three aspherical elements, the new lens incorporates High-response Linear Actuator autofocus motor technology (HLA) for fast and near-silent autofocus. The inclusion of HLA means a single double-sided aspherical element could be used as the focusing lens, instead of the eight-element focusing group of the existing 50mm lens. The lens barrel includes an aperture ring with a click switch which allows users to select…

BOATPHOTOS.co.uk, a long-established website selling images of boats and water-related activities, is being sold on eBay by owner Tony Toller. With no reserve and a starting price of just 99p, eBay bidders will get a chance to become the new owner, with bidding commencing on 23 March. ‘As I approach 80 it’s time for younger minds to carry this forward,’ he explains. ‘I started it merely as a weekend hobby in 2005 and sales boomed. In spite of selling my boat in 2018 and uploading very few new images since, orders are still coming in.’…

7 daysA week in photography AP picture of the week Taking in the View by Jessica Perry Canon EOS RP, Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm, 1/800sec at f/5.6, ISO 4000 ‘This image was captured in a woodland hide in the heart of our British countryside. Whilst patiently waiting for a bird to perch, a flash of red and yellow went past, landing on the tip of the branch. Not so long after the capture a gust of wind shook the branch, and the goldfinch went back off on his way. Small moments like these are incredible to capture, as unexpected as they always are…’ Instagram: @jessp_photography_ #appicoftheweek Win! To congratulate the AP Pic of the Week winner, Fujifilm is giving the winner a £25 voucher* to…

AI IN PHOTOGRAPHY When the influential French painter Paul Delaroche roved his eye across a Daguerreotype around 1840, he bluntly declared: ‘From today, painting is dead.’ Painting survived and photography found its role as a new way to create and see. Since its inception, photography has faced myriad changes and challenges from technological developments, more recently multimedia, videography, digital photography, the omnipotent internet, Photoshop and smartphones, among others. The latest disruptive technology to flip the photography world upside down and turn inside out is Artificial Intelligence (AI). There’s already a lot of AI in photography: DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and mobile devices use facial recognition, autofocus and tracking. The Olympus OM-D E-M1X was one of the first cameras that features deep learning technology to identify subjects and track them more efficiently.…