Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/18/25 i Amateur Photographer

BRITISH photographer Ian Wood has won the latest Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award, organised by the Natural History Museum. Twenty-five images were nominated, but Ian won through with this charming image of a Eurasian badger looking at badger street art. Ian’s image, along with four highly commended winners, are on display at the Natural History Museum until 29 June and at nhm.ac.uk/wpy/peoples-choice. The overall winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year will be announced in October.…

MAX Rush from London has been named overall winner of the 18th International Garden Photographer of the Year competition, winning £4,000. Max prevailed with ‘Spectacle of a Painted Storm’, a classic English garden scene taken with a hand-built field camera based around a Sony Alpha A7R body plus an adapted Mamiya 50mm lens. ‘My camera is unique, having been constructed from wood which came from at least three trees in Richmond Park,’ Max explains. ‘They were an old oak affected by beefsteak fungus, a cherry tree that grew at Richmond Gate, and a veteran oak that’s still alive. The wood was donated to me for this project by the Royal Parks. Each photograph is composed of eight overlapping frames which match precisely. These were then stitched automatically in Lightroom, giving…

Julian & Jonathan by Sarah Mei Herman £45, GOST, hardcover, 160 pages, ISBN: 9781915423559 A tender and poignant project, this book shows that sometimes your best subjects are closer than you might think. The photographer Sarah Mei Herman was 20 when her half-brother Jonathan was born in 2001. Until then she had been an only child, and when she was younger dreamed of having a sibling. Already an adult by the time her brother was born, she found that photographing him – sometimes alone, sometimes with their father, was a wonderful way to connect with her new sibling. The work spans more than 20 years, documenting Jonathan’s growth from child to adult, as well as reflecting Herman’s own route through life as an artist, daughter, and half-sister. Most of the…

In 1917 Nippon Kogaku KK set up business in Tokyo, primarily for the production of lenses and optical devices that included telescopes, microscopes, binoculars, surveying equipment and the like, mostly for military and scientific markets. During World War II, from 1939, the company expanded vastly with more than 20 factories to produce equipment for the Japanese military forces. When the war ended in 1945, production was consolidated into a single factory, and in 1948 the first camera was produced. Its name was taken from NIppon KOgaku with an added ‘N’ to finish it off. From then on it was Nikon cameras that defined the company. Look at the manufacture and development of any company’s cameras over a long time span and you see the way they fall into distinctive eras,…

Ever since full-frame mirrorless became the dominant format for high-end cameras, there’s been an arms race between manufacturers to produce exotic large-aperture lenses that wouldn’t previously have been possible. The Sony FE 28-70mm F2 GM is designed for photographers who shoot such things as weddings and events, and who want to use a larger aperture than f/2.8 without giving up the flexibility of a zoom. As part of the premium G Master range, it promises top-quality optics and pro-level handling. With a hefty price tag of £3,049, though, this is anything but a casual purchase. It costs considerably more than Sony’s previous benchmark standard zoom, the FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM II. And that ultra-large aperture comes with some real penalties, most notably a shorter wideangle end and significant extra bulk.…

Think of AI, and most photographers will probably immediately think of the power of AI image editing or manipulation. By now, most of us are familiar with the latest generation of tools from companies such as Adobe, Topaz, Apple, or Samsung for intelligently removing objects from images or placing a new object in the scene. However, AI has much more to offer photographers than just image editing. This feature aims to show what is currently possible with tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai, but for those unfamiliar, here is a brief primer on precisely what AI tools such as these are. Large Language Models First of all, what people call AI isn’t artificial intelligence as such, not in the way science fiction writers have imagined. The latest tools, such as…

When was the club founded? An incarnation of the club was founded in December 1889 and archives show The Maidenhead Advertiser reporting on an exhibition held in 1891. Records are patchy up until 1940, at which time the club was still active and known as the Maidenhead Photographic Society. In 1974 our name was changed to Maidenhead Camera Club (MCC), as it remains to the present day. What does your club offer to new members? A welcoming and encouraging atmosphere greets all guests and members, regardless of where they are on their photography journey. We provide a varied programme of events from September to May via almost 40 weekly meetings. Our ‘MCC in Action’ offers many outdoor activities and visits to a wide variety of locations and venues, ranging from…

SUPERZOOM bridge cameras remain a popular choice for those seeking a relatively compact camera with a conveniently long lens, and Nikon has announced the Coolpix P1100, an update to the P1000 released way back in 2018. The revamped model packs the same stabilised lens with 125x optical zoom, but now offers USB Type-C connectivity instead of MicroUSB, better battery life of 260 shots (up from 250 on the previous model), improvements to Bird-AF selection and updated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. While the 125x optical zoom lens offers the equivalent of 24-3000mm from ultra-wide to super-telephoto zoom, the Nikon P1100 weighs in at a hulking 1.4kg – making it the biggest, heaviest ultra-zoom camera ever made. Other features include subject-tracking AF, an ISO range of 100-6400, 7fps burst shooting, a 3.2in vari-angle…

£50, Taschen, hardcover, 244 pages, ISBN: 9783754400685 The extremely well-known Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920, but was forced to flee from the Nazis aged just 18. Later, as his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he regularly returned to his home city to shoot for magazines such as Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, and ZEITmagazin, as well as for his own publication, Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. The newly relaunched German Vogue sent Newton to go back to his youth to capture the fashions of 1979. The resulting portfolio was titled Berlin, Berlin and was a tribute to his beloved home city. In this gorgeous new book from Taschen, Newton’s most celebrated Berlin images are included, featuring images from throughout his career. There’s even some unknown work…

‘I did make the film with the idea that if you didn’t know who Martin Parr was, you knew nothing about photography, that you would find this film interesting,’ says British director Lee Shulman from his home in France where he’s lived for over 20 years. Schulman has received awards for directing 100+ adverts globally. In 2017 he established the art initiative The Anonymous Project, collecting and preserving unique colour slides from the past 70 years taken by amateur photographers. After bumping into each other at Shulman’s installation, The House, at the 2019 Rencontres d’Arles, a bond developed with Parr. They went on to collaborate on the book Deja View (Hoxton Mini Press 2021) which pairs Parr’s images with archive images from the Anonymous Project. When Shulman first saw Parr’s…

Our comprehensive listing of key specifications for DSLR lenses 177 lenses listed & rated 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…