Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i N-Photo: the Nikon magazine

I recently had the pleasure of watching our long-standing columnist and all-round photography legend Joe McNally speak at The Photography Show. I say speak, but it was more of a performance – a masterclass not just in photography, but in having the audience eating out the palm of one’s hand. His trick? Well, it helps that he’s just about the nicest guy in the business, and his genuine humility and self-deprecating sense of humour don’t hurt, but what really stood out was the simplicity of his approach. Photography is all too easy to overcomplicate, but Joe – with the help of a model and an assistant plucked from the audience – took a point ’n’ shoot snap and turned it into a polished, beautifully lit portrait in a dozen very…

Do you look at your shots and wish they were sharper? You might think you need a new Nikon, but the quality of your images isn’t just down to the resolution of your camera’s sensor or even the quality of the lens. In fact, the higher the resolution, the more obvious any blur or softness can be. So, before you start thinking about upgrading your kit, take a look at our top 20 tips for sharper results. From eliminating camera shake to mastering focusing and using the right settings, this essential advice will help you get the most from your existing gear. It will also mean you’ll get the best results if you do decide to upgrade your kit later.…

11 MASTER SHALLOW DEPTH OF FIELD Isolating your subject by blurring the background (and foreground) is one of the most effective ways that you can add impact to your shots. The contrast between the sharp areas and the blur can make the subject appear sharper, even if the sharpness is only relative. Depth of field – how much of the scene is sharp – is affected by three variables; the focal length of the lens, the aperture you have selected, and your distance from the subject. To get a shallower depth of field you can use a longer lens, set a wider aperture or get closer to the subject – or a combination of all three. Remember, though, that as well as blurring the background, you need to make sure…

The mission To create a seamless panorama in Adobe Camera Raw Time 10 minutes Skill level Beginner Intermediate Advanced Kit needed Photoshop CC There’s an increasing amount of crossover in editing tools between Camera Raw and Photoshop itself, and the panorama merging tools are a perfect example. It’s now possible to create seamless panoramic images straight from Camera Raw without having to open Photoshop at all. There are advantages to doing it this way, partly because it is faster and partly because you get some interesting and highly effective merging tools. Using Camera Raw is especially efficient if you shot your original images in the Raw format, because there’s little point in converting them and opening them in Photoshop to merge them when you can do it as a single…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Light entertainment? As an amateur photographer, walker and countryside services volunteer, I read with concern your Big Project feature ‘Shoot a Light Stream’ (N-Photo #70). Win a Manfrotto Advanced Rear backpack! Write our Star Letter and you’ll win a versatile Manfrotto Advanced Rear backpack, which is brilliant for photographers on the go. It meets most airline carry-on baggage limits, and has room for your DSLR and three lenses, plus a laptop. It’s even got space to carry a travel tripod securely. For more details visit www.manfrotto.co.uk Releasing quantities of activated light sticks above a waterfall in the dark and collecting them all up after taking photographs from a tripod? To collect all these sticks from fast-flowing water, deep pools and slippery rocks – the environment of…

Another inducement to keep going is when you anticipate the makings of a shot. Anticipation, however, can take you only so far, for two reasons. First, you may not have got it right, and the situation doesn’t unfold as you thought. Second, whatever you anticipate is not going to be as interesting as the unexpected, so you still need some luck. That’s where the psychology of shooting can be a little curious. Time and again, there’s the temptation to stop short, to be satisfied with an image that ticks just most of the boxes, not all. The culprit, as I see it, is simply being too decisive. Sounds contrary? Decisiveness can indeed be a fault in shooting, because it tends to close you off to chance details and happenings. It…

Profile When he retired from The Sunday Times in 2000, Chris Smith was regarded as one of the most influential and admired sports photographers of the 20th Century He covered every major international sporting event, including seven Olympic Games, from Munich in 1972 to Atlanta in 1996 During his 50-year career Smith was named British Sports Photographer of the Year on four occasions and was twice winner of the individual Sports Picture of the Year prize. "I was in the gym one day when in walked The Beatles. I think it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to Clay As he approaches his 80th birthday with an exhibition at the National Heritage Centre for Sporting Art in Newmarket, UK, Chris Smith has every reason to…

1 TAKE CARE WITH YOUR TRIPOD Using a tripod is the perfect solution for getting pin-sharp results when using long shutter speeds, but not all tripods are created equal. You can’t expect a cheaper, lightweight model to offer the same stability as a heavy-duty alternative. But there are some basic techniques that you can use to get the sharpest results possible, whatever type of tripod you have. The first thing is to use the thickest leg sections first to achieve the height that you want, and also to avoid raising the centre column, if possible. Many tripods also have a hook on the bottom of the centre column, which you can add a weight to (such as your camera bag) to help stabilize the tripod. Once you’ve got the tripod…

16 MASTER UNSHARP MASK The name of this sharpening technique is a throwback to old-fashioned printing technology, but it’s still one of the most useful and effective ways to sharpen your images in Photoshop CC or Elements. You have three main controls in the Unsharp Mask filter dialog box, and the settings you apply will vary depending on the particular image. The first is the Amount slider, which you should generally try to keep between 80 and 120 to avoid over-sharpening. Then there is the Radius slider, which controls the area around the edges in the image that will be sharpened. You should keep this below 3 pixels to avoid haloes and artefacts. Finally, there’s the Threshold slider, which should be kept at a low figure, such as five or…

Teach Yourself Flash Part 12 The mission Capture water drops as they splash into the air Time Two hours Skill level Beginner Intermediate Advanced Kit needed Flashguns Remote release Tripod Pipette Dish Ever wondered how to create those water drops that seem to magically hang in mid-air? It’s not Photoshop trickery; you just need some simple ingredients to concoct your very own drop shot. The principle is simple; by releasing a drip into a bowl full of water you can create a perfect spherical splash with concentric ripples that propagate outwards. With the camera set to the flash’s sync speed, it’s not the shutter that freezes the water drop but the flash of light. A typical burst of flash lasts between 1/30000 and 1/1000 sec, which is much faster than…

The mission Make your subject float with Photoshop layer masking skills Time One hour Skill level Beginner Intermediate Advanced Kit needed Tripod Sturdy platform Lights (optional) This is one of those photo tricks that makes viewers think, ‘How did they do that?’ The answer is surprisingly simple and, like all the best Photoshop techniques, the real skill begins in-camera. To create a seemingly levitating figure we capture two different versions of the scene – one with the person perched on a stable support and the other of the empty scene. Both versions need to be perfectly aligned. So the actual camera technique is easy, we just use a tripod and take two shots – one of our subject, another without them or their perch. Then we piece it together in…

Mission: To shoot the culture of Cuba with Light & Land Photographer: Paul Richards Age: 70 Location: Leeds, UK Kit: Nikon D810, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8, Nikon Coolpix P900 Having been lucky enough to have won the competition featured in issue 62 of N-Photo in association with Light & Land, to go on a photo tour of Cuba, I nearly didn’t make the trip. I had been waiting for some major surgery for over a year, and guess when I found out the surgery was pencilled in for? Yep. Right in the middle of the tour. So I cancelled the operation and went to Cuba instead. My only problem was that I could hardly eat or drink anything (imagine being in a five-star hotel in Havana and not…

We’re now into the 12th and penultimate month of our year-long photography contest, which features a different theme each month, with all shortlisted images being put forward for the coveted title of N-Photo Photographer of the Year. The theme we set last issue was ‘portraits’, and as you’ll see from the photos on the following pages, we had some stunning entries. If you feel inspired by these images, our next and final theme is ‘spring’. As always, you can enter or vote for your favourites at www.photocrowd.com/contests The monthly competition prize is a £100 voucher for online printing specialists WhiteWall, while the Crowd Vote winner will receive a bundle of photography guides. The overall N-Photo Photographer of the Year, meanwhile, will win a Nikon D500 and a metre-wide acrylic print…

This series of images comes from two events held on fells in the UK’s Lake District last year – the Catbells Festival of Light (near Keswick) and Striding Edge by Torchlight (at Helvellyn, near Glenridding). Catbells Festival of Light was held in April 2016 to raise money for the victims of the earthquake that devastated Nepal in 2015. Around 500 people took part, heading up the fell in the dark and carrying head torches to light the spine of Catbells mountain to create a light spectacle. The annual event of Striding Edge by Torchlight was a smaller-scale event to raise money for the local Mountain Rescue team. It took place on a cold and windy but clear night in November 2016, with 50 people taking up the challenge. Lakeland Mountain…

The best Nikon images from the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition HIGHLY COMMENDED – WILDLIFE IN GARDEN Surprise Vyacheslav Mishchenko, Ukraine I knew of an overgrown pond in a leafy forest that would be an ideal breeding location for tree frogs. I visited many times in spring until I captured the perfect shot. This involved waiting in silence whilst listening for the sound of their mating calls. Nikon D7000, 105mm f/2.8, 1/1250 sec, f/3, ISO500 HIGHLY COMMENDED – PORTFOLIO The Colours of Autumn Paul Mitchell, Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, England Burnham Beeches, a National Nature Reserve and Special Area of Conservation in Buckinghamshire, is a diverse, ancient habitat with heathland and marshland as well as deciduous forest. I love visiting throughout the seasons, but autumn is by far my…

WHERE TO GET CAPTURE NX-D It’s made for Nikons, and it’s free! Capture NX-D is available as a free download from Nikon at http://nikonimglib.com/ncnxd As new Nikons are introduced, Capture NX-D should be the first software to support them. Different light sources have different colour temperatures. As a result it can be a challenge for your Nikon to capture accurate colours. For example, tungsten bulbs add a warm orange colour cast to the subject, which can make skin tones look too orange. Daylight, on the other hand, will produce a cooler cast, bathing the scene in a wash of blue. Your Nikon’s Auto White Balance (AWB) setting attempts to counteract these warm or cool casts, by cooling down or warming up the image until white areas are free from any…

February, 1977 • Athy, County Kildare, Ireland • Nikon F John Minihan is best known for the now-iconic photo of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, taken in 1980 in the garden of the nursery where she worked, the morning sun backlighting her, her legs silhouetted through her skirt. But it is a series of stark pictures of a wake, taken three years earlier in his hometown of Athy, Co. Kildare, that John regards as more significant to his career as a photographer. The body of the woman lying on her bed is Katy Tyrrell. Above her is a small portrait of the daughter who predeceased her and on the extreme right of the picture is a sheet shrouding the mirror in the room. “The reason I choose this image is…

Often referred to as ‘the most available light’, a decent flashgun is an amazingly versatile camera accessory. It can make a huge difference to the quality of lighting in almost any scenario, from night-time shots and gloomy interiors, to portraits on a bright sunny day. What’s more, all of the flashguns tested are fully dedicated to Nikon cameras With TTL (Through The Lens) metering, dedicated flashguns can team up with your camera to enable correct exposures in all sorts of shooting conditions. The system works by using a brief pulse of light, fired by the flashgun prior to the actual exposure. This is reflected from the subject and passes through the lens, after which it’s measured by the camera’s metering system. The camera then communicates the correct setting back to…