Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/29/25 i Amateur Photographer

With the upcoming 80th anniversary of VE Day it’s our pleasure to publish Glyn Dewis’s portrait project on the surviving veterans. It’s an interesting read, and perhaps it will inspire you to start your own portrait project. Also this week we feature an eclectic selection of winning images from the Sony World Photography Awards. The exhibition is on at Somerset House until 5 May, and I highly recommend a visit if you can make it. Finally, don’t miss our own event at the end of May – our Festival of Outdoor Photography is a feast of inspiration on all aspects of landscapes, nature, street and travel photography by some of the UK’s top exponents. See page 38 for details on how to get tickets. Our cover image this week was…

SAMYANG has partnered with Schneider-Kreuznach to announce its first super-wide zoom, the AF 14-24mm F2.8 FE for full-frame Sony cameras. This relatively light and compact lens offers a useful focal length range for a variety of subjects, including landscape, architecture and interiors. With its relatively bright aperture, it could also be useful for nightscapes, astrophotography and even environmental portraits. Photographers looking to cut back on the bulk of their kit will welcome the compact size (88.8mm long x 84.0mm in diameter), and the light weight of 445g. The lens also boasts weather-sealed construction and is compatible with 77mm screw-in filters. Optically, the design employs 15 elements in 11 groups. Minimum focus distance is just 18cm, giving a maximum magnification of 0.26x. A focus mode switch and focus lock button are…

PALESTINIAN photojournalist Fatima Hassouna has become another victim of the war in Gaza, killed alongside seven members of her family in an Israeli air strike earlier this month. A documentary on Hassouna’s work is about to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Center described her death as a ‘crime’. It notes that 212 journalists have died in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023.…

● ER1-80 - £349.99 ● ER1-100 - £369.99● ER1-120 - £419.99 ● uk.neewer.com Sliders are generally quite expensive, so I was drawn to this Neewer model as it costs a lot less than others, but at the same time seems to offer all the features of units more than twice the price. It comes in three options, the ER1-80 which is 80cm long, the ER1-100 which is 100cm, and the ER1-120 which is 120cm and reviewed here. All three are made with a mix of carbon fibre and aluminium alloy to keep them lightweight but strong, and they come with a central guide bar that enables the camera to swivel on its axis as it moves along the rails. This means the camera can perform a 120° sweep of a…

Sue @suseabbott Black & white for me. With colour you see the colour, with black & white you see the detail. Donna Shoots People Do you remember when every single wedding photographer did black & white photos with little details and features re-coloured in Crimson Red ... them were the days? If talking colour, I love the colours of slide film like Kodachrome from the 1960s and ’70s that you’d see in National Geographic magazines, with reds and blues so deep you could get lost in them. And then there’s the black & white images in the broadsheets from The Observer or The Independent – sharp contrast, amazingly composed, that captured and told every detail of the story. Images that inspired you to grab your own film camera and get…

AMY DAVIES Features Editor Amy brings us Helly Barnes’s interview with Glyn Dewis, and tests Xiaomi’s 15 Ultra JESSICA MILLER Dep Online Editor The manager of our social media channels selects more great reader images on page 44 ANGELA NICHOLSON Former AP technical editor Angela tests a beginner-friendly drone, the DJI Flip DAMIEN DEMOLDER AP’s former editor tests Neewer’s camera slider for timelapses and video motion ANDY WESTLAKE Technical Editor In charge of the technical pages, our resident kit expert also curates the Buying Guide JOHN WADE In Tech Talk this week, our expert authority on vintage cameras looks at an Ensign folding camera…

When I first started to take photography seriously, I spent huge amounts of time looking at other photographers’ work, trying to determine what separated a good image from a really great image. And it was quite a shock when I realised that the answer was photo editing – or ‘post processing’ as it’s often called, sometimes abbreviated to ‘post.’ That lightbulb moment changed everything for me, and I’ve genuinely never looked back. Which is why I really struggle with the advice I often see given to beginners – that they should ‘get it right in camera’, and that anything else is just being lazy and relying on software to ‘fix’ a poorly-taken photo. It’s also why the first thing I tell my photography or Lightroom tuition clients is that this…

We’ve been mightily impressed by the recent Xiaomi output, with last year’s 14 Ultra being the smartphone to beat for a while. Now, the newest version, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, is here with a slew of improvements designed to entice new users across from the likes of the bigger-known brands such as Apple and Samsung. As we’ve seen for the past few generations, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra again teams up with imaging experts Leica for its lenses, of which there are a class-leading four found on the device. Once again, all four are Leica-branded lenses, giving you an indication of the high quality of the optics. The high-quality specifications found in the Xiaomi 15 Ultra come at a fairly high price. You’ll pay a minimum of £1,299, rising up to…

LAUNCHED 1932 PRICE AT LAUNCH £16 15s (£16.75) GUIDE PRICE NOW £120-150 Back in 1900, the introduction of the No.3 Folding Pocket Kodak set the style for a type of camera that would proliferate for more than half a century. It consisted of a slim box with a bed that dropped down to reveal the lens which was pulled out on bellows along rails ready for action. With a few notable exceptions, most cameras of this type offered meagre specifications, with shutter speeds restricted to 1/25-1/100sec, or 1/250sec at best. And then along came the Ensign Autospeed. The big thing that separates the Autospeed from its contemporaries is its focal plane shutter, unusual in a medium-format folding camera, allowing a range of speeds covering 1/15-1/500sec. Like all focal plane shutters,…

WIN! The AP Pic of the Week winner will receive a beautifully framed print of their winning image worth up to £100. If you Love it, Frame it! ThisPicture.com is an experienced, high-quality framing company with a unique, easy-to-use website. Build single or multi-image frames with a few clicks of your mouse and select from a wide range of frames, window mounts and glazing options. Each frame comes with a three-year guarantee and FREE P&P within the UK. Visit thispicture.co.uk Tranquil Waters by Scott Tovell Sony A7R V, 70-200mm F4 G OSS, 1/60sec at f/13, ISO 100, 80mm ‘First time shooting at this location and focusing heavily on a composition in the opposite direction, the fog revealed the cluster of trees across the lake. Sunlit for 30 seconds before clearing…

John Johnson is a Liverpool-based photographer known for his famous images of local Merseyside musicians, football fans and cityscapes. His work is widely collected and his images are popular as album covers and promotional shots, such as that of Channel 4’s The Piano Season 2 winner, Brad Kella. A quiet, unassuming man, Johnson and his camera quietly consume Liverpool culture and tourism, making friends and lifelong supporters as he goes. For this column I’ve selected an image from one of his rare series’ taken outside the city of Liverpool. Catch of the day In this picture, taken in the well-known New York area of Coney Island, Johnson turns his curious eye to a fisherman strolling along the pier with his catch of the day. The image is similar to the…

VILTROX has announced an f/1.2 full-frame prime lens for the competitive price of £959. The AF 35mm F1.2 LAB FE is an autofocus lens for Sony E-mount which combines five extra-low dispersion segments, three high-refractive-index elements and two large precision aspherical lenses, while also featuring a a 0.96in LCD display for quick access to settings. It weighs under 1kg and is splash- and dust-resistant, too. See bit.ly/fastviltrox…

As the nation commemorates the 80th anniversary of VE Day and it becomes noticeable how few veterans remain, the poignancy of Glyn Dewis’s 39-45 Veterans Portrait Project grows more profound. When I sit down to chat with Glyn about the project, he appears relaxed and speaks with modest pride about the veterans he photographed and their impact on him. Glyn clearly didn’t allow his ego to interfere when capturing the characters of almost 100 World War Two veterans. Instead, his warmth and good humour enabled him to achieve genuinely emotive portraits. Lifelong interest Glyn’s career began as a Photoshop editor for the BBC and Sky. He only later picked up a camera, wanting to be involved in the process from capture to final edit. The idea for the Veterans Project…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Raw stories I don’t shoot raw and take a perverse pride in only shooting in JPEG. And, yet, I find myself dissatisfied with Gavin Stoker who asks if you, like him, ‘feel like raw is a bore and you can’t be arsed with it any more?’ The source of my dissatisfaction is hard to fathom, given that I agree with all the points he makes. Gavin says some photographers ‘will want the reassurance of being able to edit files to the nth degree’. Here, I add a fifth point, one he does not mention. Five, manipulation in post (especially to the nth degree) means altering the ‘truth’ of what the camera saw. But this should be a positive attribute of raw (especially to those of us…