Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/11/24 i Amateur Photographer

7 daysA week in photography THIS stunning image by Greek photographer Athanasios Maloukos was a category winner in last year’s Travel Photographer of the Year competition, which is now open for 2024. Portfolio categories include Faces, People, Cultures; Planet Earth – Landscapes, climate and water; and Nature and wildlife. There are also single-shot categories – Cities, Towns and Streets; Escape; Festivals and Celebrations; and Women in World Culture – and the Young Travel Photographer of the Year award, open to entrants aged 18 and under. For full entry details, visit www.tpoty.com…

7 daysA week in photography LEXAR has expanded its Professional Silver Card range, offering a decent amount of storage and data transfer speeds at a competitive price. You can get the 64GB version of the Lexar Silver SDXC UHS-I Card for a mere £12.79 on Amazon, while the 128GB version costs around £7 more. At the higher end of the storage range, the 256GB version is available for £34.99, with 512GB and 1TB versions available soon. These should obviate the need for carrying around lots of extra cards (though it’s always sensible to have a back-up card in your bag or camera case). Should you need a Micro SD for your phone or action camera, the Silver Plus microSDXC UHS-I Card is available in 64GB (£9.99), 128GB (£15.99) and 256GB…

Before and After Coal Free. Until 15 September at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD Subtitled ‘Images and Voices from Scotland’s Mining Communities’, this free exhibition focuses on the history and impact of coal mining. Its starting-point is a 1982 series of black & white photographs of Scottish miners by US photographer Milton Rogovin, titled Family of Miners. These images have been revisited by artist Nicky Bird, who has photographed sites and surviving people from those images and their families for her related project, Mineworkings. Rogovin’s images, which show miners at work and in their free time, are an evocative document of the community at that time. Bird’s touching images of their children and grandchildren show the importance of industrial heritage and the community spirit still…

Composition is the age-old art of arranging elements within a frame into the most visually pleasing, stimulating order. It is key to successfully communicating your ideas, vision, creativity, and message. The two biggest compositional challenges are how to balance the elements within the picture, and how to represent three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium. Nature photographers have colour, space, balance, symmetry, perspective, scale, motion, depth, and lighting at their disposal to help bring their compositions to life. As the natural world rarely stays still for long, wildlife photographers often must make decisions very quickly. In time, you will start to do this intuitively. However, at first, there are several useful compositional ‘rules’, tips, and techniques designed to help you capture striking and well-balanced photographs every time. We get some expert…

7 daysA week in photography NIKON hit a production milestone of 120 million lenses for its interchangeable-lens cameras in April – this includes both DSLR and mirrorless glass. As with Canon, the company has a long history. The Nikkor trademark was first registered by Nippon Kogaku K.K. in 1932, before the company changed its name to the much easier-to-remember Nikon. ‘Beginning with the introduction of Aero-Nikkor aerial photographic lenses in 1933, Nikon is still one of the few manufacturers that crafts lenses starting from the production of optical glass,’ the firm said. ‘Over the years, Nikkor has consistently integrated cutting-edge technologies into its lenses, including features like aperture control, autofocus, and vibration reduction (VR). The legacy continues with Z lenses, specifically designed for Nikon mirrorless cameras, boasting a new mount…

I knew Tim Hetherington before he became a war photographer. We worked together on a couple of stories for a new magazine that never launched. It was 1999 and our paths then diverged; I went to leafy Sussex and Tim went to war. In choosing Liberia, he entered an especially brutal conflict zone, a country that had already suffered a seven-year-long civil war, when only three years later it plunged into another. Liberia in 1999 marks the starting point of Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington, an exhibition of his sensitive and deeply considered work, now showing at the Imperial War Museum, London. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as Tim was anything but the clichéd, bullet-dodging war photographer that Hollywood loves to portray. Fortunately, the museum and curator Greg Brockett…

TestbenchLENS TEST Announced in March, the Nikkor Z 28-400mm f/4-8 VR is designed as a versatile superzoom lens that might, theoretically, never leave your camera. Giving you a 14.2x zoom, it could cover subjects as diverse as landscapes, portraits, macro, sports and wildlife. This could make it a good choice for situations such as travel or day trips, when you’re trying to keep your kit bag as light as possible. It might also be a good option for those who want to shoot distant subjects but are working to a relatively tight budget. Up until now, the options for shooting with such a long lens for the Z series have been to use either the Nikkor Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR (£1,799), or the Nikkor Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S, a…

LAUNCHED 1959 PRICE AT LAUNCH £40-50 GUIDE PRICE NOW £130-150 Foca cameras were made in France by Optique et Précision de Levallois, better known as OPL. The company made military equipment that included machine guns and marine rangefinders before deciding, in 1938, to produce a precision 35mm rangefinder camera to rival Leica and Contax. World War II put a stop to production, which was resumed again in 1945. In the years that followed, nearly 20 quality 35mm rangefinder designs were produced. Then came the Focaflex, OPL’s first fixed-lens 35mm single lens reflex (SLR). It was an unconventional design. As the film is advanced, a reflex mirror swings up at an angle, rather than down in the usual way, so that its reflective side faces down as opposed to the more…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Fan of film I am a fan of film cameras and regularly use them instead of my DSLR and mirrorless cameras so it was good to see your article highlighting classic cameras of the 1970s (AP 14 May). I still use my Canon EF, Canon AE-1P, Canon T90 and Canon EOS 5. I develop the b&w films myself, and take the C-41 films to my local lab. I then scan the negatives using a PlusTek film scanner. It has made photography fun again. I like the look of film and to me this is a more pleasing route to the end result rather than heavy computer editing. It is like people listening to vinyl rather than CDs. Using films slows my picture-taking down, rather than taking…

7 daysA week in photography NOBODY can accuse Sigma of resting on its laurels, and the industrious independent lens maker has now announced the 28-45mm F1.8 DG DN Art, the world’s first full-frame zoom lens with a constant maximum aperture of f/1.8. While the zoom range is somewhat limited, the lens is competitively priced, coming in at £1,299. The lens, which follows on from Sigma’s 18-35mm F1.8 DC HSM Art and 24-35mm F2 DG HSM Art, employs an inner zoom mechanism to keep the overall length of the lens constant when the focal length or focus distance changes. This means that the lens is easy to use when shooting handheld, stable when mounted on a tripod or gimbal, and more resistant to dust and water, Sigma claims. Handy for close-ups…

7 daysA week in photography Until 17 November (Wed-Sun), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, NE8 3BA Many people have an idealised view of sparsely populated rural locations and what it would be like to live and work in them. In Middle of Somewhere, Joanne Coates, recipient of The Vasseur Baltic Artists’ Award 2024, looks at the hard reality of life for people who live in such places. Coates, who describes herself as a working-class visual artist using the medium of photography, is based in the north-east of England and works as an agricultural labourer. She’s interested in the lives of people who have been under-represented historically and says it’s important for her to be part of the communities she documents. Her work has included long-term projects Lie of…

If you aren’t a fan of social media, then this article probably isn’t for you. Because it’s about my use of social media. In particular, my little daily stories on social media. Spiels, I call them. I’m not a fan of the word ‘blog’. I’ve never been a particular fan of what they used to call buzzwords. Not that what you call them is in any way important. They are what they are. Everything is done so quickly these days. And the sharing of photographs on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook is no different. People have lists of hashtags already carefully prepared. Hashtags that will increase their pictures’ visibility. But does a one-second glance count as visibility? Seen for an instant and forgotten a moment later. I found the…

The EOS 550D was introduced in 2010, succeeding the 500D from 2009. Although it was billed as a baby EOS 7D by Canon at the time of release, the maximum shooting speed of 3.7fps was never a match for the 7D’s 8fps burst, and neither was its nine-point AF system. By and large, though, the 550D’s 18MP APS-C sensor, ISO 100-12,800 range and 3in, 1.04m-dot LCD screen met the requirements of the average enthusiast. It also offered some other useful features such as Full HD video recording, an external mic socket and an LP-E8 battery, good for around 400 shots on a single charge. Today it’s a camera best suited to those who don’t fancy breaking the bank when starting out, but at the same time want their camera to…