Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/16/25 i Amateur Photographer

SIGMA has announced three new lenses – two primes and a zoom – as the latest additions to its Art and Contemporary series. All are for L mount and Sony E-mount. First up is the Sigma 35mm F1.2 DG II | Art, the successor to the company’s 35mm F1.2 DG DN | Art. As well as offering an improved optical performance, this fast lens is around 30% lighter and 20% shorter than its predecessor, measuring 81 x 111.4mm and weighing in at 755g. This has been made possible by the adoption of a floating focus design, enabling the lens groups to move independently of each other while maintaining high optical standards. Additionally, the improved optical design features 4 aspherical lens elements and thinner lens elements. Fast and quiet autofocus is…

£40 / $54.00, Kriss Grave Projects, hardback, 128 pages, ISBN: 9781954877191 I didn’t expect to enjoy Waterworks. A photo book dedicated to New York City’s hidden water system doesn’t exactly scream page-turner. But Stanley Greenberg’s black & white images, made in the early 1990s, reveal a subterranean world of beauty, geometry and human ingenuity. This isn’t just infrastructure – it’s industrial poetry. Greenberg, armed with access granted by the Department of Environmental Protection, takes us below the surface and behind locked gates, photographing valve chambers, pumping stations, pressure regulators and tunnels that few New Yorkers have ever seen – but all depend on. There’s something monumental about the silence and scale he captures. These are cathedrals of utility. The book itself is beautifully made. Printed by Kris Graves Projects, it…

We’d been searching for almost an hour. My eyes were sore from straining into the distance, and the customers on board were growing complacent. It was mid-afternoon, and I was crouched in my usual position on the back of the boat, four nautical miles from Sydney Harbour, scanning the horizon for one of the ocean’s largest animals – the humpback whale. The sun was high in the sky, not a cloud in sight. I was definitely getting sunburnt. The skipper’s voice crackled over the PA, offering a few words of encouragement as more than a hundred passengers moved around the boat, eyes peeled for the slightest ripple. Some were glued to their phones, others fighting off seasickness with varying degrees of success. The back deck, for once, was quiet. I…

JOSH Druding’s striking live shot of US singer/songwriter Chappell Roan is amongst the nominees for this year’s Abbey Road Music Photography Awards. Over 20,000 images were submitted this year, from 30 countries. Two new categories were introduced for 2025 – Portrait and Festivals, and Club Culture (which celebrates images taken in any year). The winners will be announced on 2 October and you have until 23 September to vote in the Music Moment of the Year open award – simply visit bit.ly/abbeyvote…

CANON has introduced a new large-aperture short-telephoto lens for its RF system, the RF 85mm F1.4L VCM. It’s a pro-spec lens for portrait and wedding photographers, which is designed for both photo and video use. It employs the same physical design as the company’s other f/1.4 RF primes, with the set now including five focal lengths: 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm. The new RF 85mm F1.4 slots into Canon’s lineup in between the huge and expensive RF 85mm F1.2L USM (£2,699) and the budget-friendly RF 85mm F2 Macro IS STM (£549). Measuring 99.3 x 76.5mm and weighing in at 636g, it’s only about half the weight of its f/1.2 sibling. Like the other f/1.4 primes, it takes 67mm filters. Other features of note include a 14-element, 10-group optical design…

€48, KehrerVerlag, hardback, 120 pages, ISBN: 9783969001905 In Vetur, Belgian photographer Patrick Lefèvre sets out across Iceland’s winter terrain and returns with a body of work that is as serene as it is severe. Shot during his first visit to the country in February 2024, Lefèvre’s images are not about grandeur or spectacle, but rather a quiet reckoning with space, light and solitude. The title, Vetur – Icelandic for ‘winter’ – sets the tone for this visual meditation. The 120-page book offers a journey through snowbound stillness and glacial silence. Roads become lifelines threading across vast white expanses; horizons vanish into fog or flare with fleeting light. Lefèvre’s Iceland is shaped by the mutable nature of winter itself, where weather and light shift within moments – transforming desolation into magic.…

When Regula Tschumi answered the phone, she had just arrived home from Ghana. It wasn’t just the jet lag she was contending with – her father had died the day before. ‘He was 97. A good death, you know,’ she said calmly. ‘He did almost everything he wanted to do.’ The timing was strange and poignant: her new book Buried in Style: Artistic Coffins and Funerary Culture in Ghana, two decades in the making, had just been published (by Kehrer Verlag) – a profound visual study of how Ghanaians honour the dead with style, symbolism, dance and joy. ‘I may not even show the book to my family, she added. ‘It feels… shy.’ Tschumi, a Swiss anthropologist, has spent years immersed in funerals that exploded with colour and choreography –…

Fujifilm’s latest camera, the X-E5, is something of a rarity these days. It’s a flat-bodied, rangefinder-style mirrorless model with a corner-mounted electronic viewfinder, that’s unashamedly designed for enthusiasts. In many respects, it can be seen as an interchangeable-lens version of the hugely popular X100VI – to the extent that it comes with a new, slimline 23mm f/2.8 lens. The X-E5 follows on from the X-E4, which was launched at the start of 2021. It’s fair to say that camera wasn’t universally well-liked, due to a somewhat over-simplified design and the lack of any real handgrip. But now Fujifilm has addressed these criticisms and reinstated the controls that went missing from the X-E4, while adding in a few more goodies besides. The result is a very likeable camera indeed. The X-E5…

OM SYSTEM has introduced a new, large-aperture professional telephoto zoom. The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 50-200mm F2.8 IS Pro, to give it its full, tortuous name, is built for Micro Four Thirds cameras, on which it provides a 100-400mm equivalent range. It also boasts optical image stabilisation and compatibility with teleconverters for even longer reach. It should be attractive to photographers shooting distant subjects such as wildlife and sports. Optically, the lens uses 21 elements in 13 groups, with plenty of exotic glass employed to maximise edge-to-edge sharpness and minimise colour fringing. Like all the firm’s Pro-series glass, it’s sealed against dust and water with an IP53 rating, and is freezeproof to -10°C. Both zooming and focusing are internal. The optical stabilisation system is rated for up to 7…

CANON has also announced a new Cinema EOS camera for pro videographers and production companies. Described as a video-first hybrid, the EOS C50 employs a brand-new 32MP full-frame sensor that enables 7K 60p internal raw recording. Thanks to an all-new body design measuring 142x88x95mm and weighing 670g, it’s the smallest and lightest Cinema EOS yet. It does without a viewfinder and mechanical shutter, but it includes active cooling for extended recording times. The firm has packed in plenty of high-end video features, including Canon Log2/3 support and open-gate recording. High-frame recording is available at up to 120fps in 4K, and 180fps in Full HD. A modular top handle with XLR microphone inputs comes in the box as standard. The control layout is optimised for video, with no fewer than three…

£40, Thames & Hudson, hardback, 144 pages, ISBN: 9780500028926 In Spirits and Spaces, Roger Ballen – long known for his stark black & white psychological tableaux – plunges headfirst into colour, with typically disorienting results. It’s his first monograph to explore this new dimension, and it’s every bit as bizarre, claustrophobic and unsettling as you might expect from the mind behind Asylum of the Birds and The Theatre of Apparitions. The shift began in 2016, when Ballen received a Leica SL as a gift. For an artist whose visual universe has always been defined by graphic shadows and haunted greys, colour wasn’t just a technical change – it was a philosophical one. In Spirits and Spaces, colour doesn’t soften Ballen’s world, it heightens its absurdity. Flesh tones become garish. Murky…

Founded in 2009, Viltrox is a relative newcomer to the photo industry. But recently, its lenses have garnered attention thanks to their attractive prices and impressive image quality. This bodes well for the AF 85mm F1.4 Pro FE, which is the first full-frame optic in the company’s Pro lens range. It’s available in the Sony FE mount. Because of its flattering perspective and comfortable working distance, the 85mm focal length is a favourite with portrait photographers. Naturally, large apertures are also favoured for blurring backgrounds and giving subject separation, so this lens’s maximum aperture of f/1.4 ticks an important box, promising creative depth-of-field control and useful low-light capability. For context, an 85mm lens gives just 4cm depth of field at f/1.4 with a subject distance of 2m, while an f/1.8…

When was the club founded? 1888. What does your club offer to new members? New members are encouraged to try us out before fully joining and paying subscriptions. They can visit up to three or four times as a guest to get a flavour of the club. Describe a typical club meeting Over a month we will typically have a guest presenter, a talk from one of our members, a competition night, a members’ night, which might be a practical or how-to session. We often show an international salon or smaller national competitions (some of which our members will have submitted work to – and often they do very well). Most of our talks are on Zoom so people can take part at home or attend in person. The society…