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

Underwater photographer Brian Skerry talks about his life’s work shooting denizens of the deep See page 96 It’s an expensive business, this photography lark, but this for this issue’s lead feature we dig out the scissors and Sellotape and knock up our own DIY photo accessories from everyday items for creative shoots without spending an arm and a leg. See page 18. In our Skills section (p33), we share our top techniques for everything from shooting winter seascapes and long-exposure landscapes to focus-stacking macro shots for super-sharp close-ups, and show you how to think on your feet at events where the action is outside your control as we photograph a Lancaster bomber while on a WWII re-enactment day. We also put A4 and A3+ printers through their paces (p112), try…

COMMISSIONED – Design – Single Heart of Winter by Nick Hall NON- COMMISSIONED – LIFE -SERIES Japanese Night Taxi Signs by William Green NON-COMMISSIONED – Life – SERIES – BEST IN CATEGORY Inner Values on the Hook by Florian W. Mueller COMMISSIONED – EDITORIAL – SERIES – BEST IN CATEGORY Hazda Hunters by Nick Hall NON-COMMISSIONED – PORTRAIT – SERIES – BEST IN CATEGORY Playing with Food by Phil Fisk COMMISSIONED – ADVERTISING – SINGLE Parallel Lives by Ben Stockley NON-COMMISSIONED – ENVIRONMENT – SINGLE Harvey Realtor by William Green NON-COMMISSIONED – ENVIRONMENT – BEST IN CATEGORY Salt by Jason Hawkes COMMISSIONED – DESIGN – SINGLE Lake Braies by David Short AOP AWARDS 2017 The AOP Photography Awards is only open to Professional Photographer Members of the Association of Photographers…

“If you’re lucky enough to have a new Nikon D850, then it’s even simpler thanks to the camera’s Focus Shift Shooting mode A macro lens enables you to focus extremely close to a subject so it is reproduced as life-size on the camera sensor, opening up a world of incredible detail that is impossible to see with the naked eye. The trouble is, however, that at such close focusing distances depth of field becomes extremely shallow, and will be a matter of millimetres, even when stopping down to a narrow aperture. So all that exquisite detail is lost in all but a very narrow band of focus. The solution is focus stacking. Take a series of shots, each at a slightly different focus distance, then combine the images together, taking…

ACTOR’S PORTFOLIO THE PRO... NAME Ania Pankiewicz CAMERA D750 Ania Pankiewicz is a professional photographer specializing in actor headshots. Originally from Poland, she studied Media and Social Communication at the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Ania started her professional photography career in New York working as a retoucher for a fashion retailer, after which she relocated to the UK to work for a national television channel in Manchester, before going freelance as a photographer and finally setting up her own studio in Bolton. www.aniapankiewicz.co.uk THE APPRENTICE... NAME Ian Marshall CAMERA D810 Ian is an IT solution architect for Yorkshire Water and has recently taken a hands-off role at work. He’s finding that photography is easily filling that hands-off time and providing him a creative outlet. He started shooting landscapes a…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Widen your angles I would like to make two comments on your review of wide-angle zoom lenses in the October issue (N-Photo 77). In the summary it says “don’t rule out the Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5…” Yet this lens does not feature in the review article. Secondly I notice that no mention is made of any of the Tokina wide-angle zooms. I am currently considering such a purchase for my Nikon D7200, and it would have been nice to see how it compared with the lenses tested. I also remember that Tokina lenses were omitted from a previous review in N-Photo which also prompted a similar letter from a reader at that time. I hope that this omission can, this time, be corrected in a future article.…

Another film processing technique from the motion picture industry is a ‘bleach bypass’ also known as ‘skip bleach’, in which the step for removing the silver by bleaching is skipped. In other words, the original silver layer remains on top of the processed colour, so as you might imagine, the result is a denser black, accompanied by higher-contrast and muted colours. Well, yes, very much a throwback to the days of film, but as always there’s a digital version… several, in fact. But what value was there in this? It was a not-as-intended distressing technique invented by cinematographers in their search for a unique look. Probably the best-known case was Saving Private Ryan by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. He added it to other techniques including a shutter speed much shorter than…

Lightroom CC may have the convenience of full cloud storage, but Lightroom Classic is the one with the most editing power, and is still the best bet for photographers with a large, locally stored image catalogue. If you’ve used previous versions of Lightroom you’ll be right at home with this one because very little has changed. If you haven’t used Lightroom before, however, it’s worth explaining the interface and workflow in a little detail. First, Lightroom is based upon an image catalogue, a searchable database of all the photos you import. This is where it gets its power and flexibility, which is much greater than a simple folder browsing tool like Adobe Bridge. Organization, searching and filtering When you import photos, you don’t necessarily have to move them from their…

Jargon buster GAMUT In the context of printing, this is a term for the ‘colour space’ or range of colours that it’s possible to produce using the inks installed in a printer. CHROMA OPTIMIZER Similar to a lacquer or clear varnish, this is a coating that’s applied with pigment-based inks, to give a smoother finish on glossy media.…

Building on the five-ink lineup of the TS6150, the TS9150 (or TS9155 in red) takes the total to six, with an additional ‘photo blue’ cartridge. The aim is to reduce the occasionally grainy appearance of bright blue in photo prints. It leapfrogs the intermediate TS8150 in the new PIXMA range (TS8120 in the USA), both of which have the same six-ink lineup, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, memory card slot and facility for printing on white-faced CDs and DVDs. But while the TS8150 has a 4.25- inch colour touchscreen, this one has an oversized 5-inch touchscreen and adds Ethernet into the connectivity mix. There’s even a range of ‘creative filters’ you can apply when printing photos. Performance Much faster than the Canon TS6150 in standard quality mode, the TS9150 is almost…

Running on eight dye-based inks, the Pro-100S is engineered to deliver exceptionally smooth, top-quality output for both colour and mono photo prints, on glossy, semi-gloss and lustre papers. Build quality feels suitably ‘professional’, with a very sturdy chassis and highgrade components throughout. Connectivity is good as well, with built-in USB 2.0, Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Indeed, cloud-based printing compatibility is the main upgrade over the original Pro-100 model, as with the update from the Pro-10 to Pro-10S. As with the other competing A3+ printers on test, there’s no facility for printing direct from memory cards, nor a built-in scanner. Performance There’s no beating this printer for colour and mono photo printing on glossy, semi-glossy and lustre paper. Tonal range is excellent with superb definition in bright highlights and dark lowlights alike.…

Comparison table HOW THE SYSTEMS COMPARE What’s good: Superb build quality, exceptional print quality, reasonable purchase and running costs. What’s bad: Long-term fade-resistance isn’t as good as with pigment-based prints. Our verdict: There’s nothing to touch it for glossy print quality, and matte prints look great as well. For the ultimate in glossy photo quality for both colour and black-and-white, and excellent results on wide-ranging media, the Pro-100S is the perfect choice. It’s reasonably priced for a large-format printer, both to buy and to run, and is much faster than competing pigmentbased printers. If you need pigment ink for maximum anti-fade longevity, the Pro-10S wins out against the Epson P600, although the latter’s roll feeder is a bonus. If you’re content to limit your maximum print size to A4, the…

There’s no getting away from the fact that photography is an expensive hobby, and splashing out on a new Nikon DSLR is only the beginning of it. Extra lenses start in the hundreds of pounds (or dollars) and quickly move into the thousands for the best-quality optics. Flashguns, tripods and camera bags aren’t exactly cheap either; then there are all those other miscellaneous accessories and paraphernalia that can dispose of your disposable income at quite an alarming rate. But there is another way. With a few bits of cardboard, tape, tinfoil and other bits and bobs that you can find around the house, you can fashion your own cheap and cheerful kit. Or you can spend a few quid – rather than a few hundred – on inexpensive but surprisingly effective…

What you need for longexposure landscape photography is a set of neutral density filters of different strengths that screw on to the end of your lens, right? But the problem with that is you have to carry around a pouch of filters, depending on the circumstances you’re shooting in. However, you can eliminate the need for all that clutter by carrying a single variable neutral density (ND) filter in your kit bag. A variable ND enables you rotate the front of the filter as you would a polarizer to increase its light-blocking power. The optical quality of these filters generally isn’t quite as good as standalone neutral density filters, but they’re good enough for most situations. So use a long shutter speed with a variable ND filter to blur moving…

You head off for the day to an event or a re-enactment with no prior knowledge of shooting positions, exact weather conditions, or even what there will be to shoot. So how do you know where to start to ensure you have well-exposed, sharp shots of your day? That’s where we step in, with this guide to capturing the very best of your events day. We joined Nikon School UK at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre on their ‘Just Jane’ Nikon Meetup day, where the star of the show was one of the last surviving examples of the world-renowned Avro Lancaster bomber. There were multiple setups, with re-enactors, props, staged portrait sessions and even the chance to photograph the Lancaster bomber with its engines fired up and propellers turning. With…

Mission: Photograph the sea forts off the Kent coast from a pilot boat Photographer: Andy Stonier Age: 51 Location: Ashford, Kent, UK Kit: Nikon D810, Nikon 20-35mm f/2.8 Website: www.howlingbasset.com My initial start in photography happened when my school physics teacher started a photography club in the early 80s. From there I did A-level photography and began my first job as a cruise ship photographer. I worked on four cruise liners before living in New York for a spell where I worked as a photographer’s assistant. Then, after working as a photographer at Butlins, I became the photographer on the QE2. I left that job to work as a wedding photographer, but have a long background in shooting on the sea. I Googled the Maunsell sea forts and found the…

WATCH THE VIDEO WHERE TO GET CA PTURE 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. One way to make your photographs stand out from the crowd is to use Nikon’s free photo-fixing software to produce more eye-catching colours. However, if you boost all of the colours in a shot equally then you may end up with over-saturated photos that bear little resemblance to what you saw with the naked eye. Some areas in the image, such as a pale blue sky, might need a strong boost in saturation to give them more impact. However, Caucasian skin tones could end up looking too…

Profile • Brian Skerry has been a contract photographer for National Geographic magazine since 1998.• His work has also been published in Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, Geo, Paris Match, Esquire and the Washington Post.• He is an 11-time award winner of Wildlife Photographer • Brian is a Nikon Ambassador, a Fellow National of The Explorers Club and serves on the World Wildlife Fund’s National Council. www.brianskerry.com Oh, Mr President, I’d like to introduce you to Brian Skerry, the world’s greatest underwater photographer! Brian Skerry was preparing for the biggest photo opportunity of his life in August 2016: photographing President Barack Obama snorkelling above the coral in the northwest Hawaiian Islands. No other photographer would have access. What now sounds like a straightforward assignment was the result of many…

One of the main complaints people have about Photoshop, apart from the fact you can only get it on a subscription plan, is that it’s too difficult and complicated. Experienced Photoshop users would probably argue with that, but Adobe is nevertheless trying to reassure novice users with a new Learn panel that walks you through some basic image-editing operations. They really are basic, but perfect for someone coming to software like this for the very first time. New ‘rich’ tooltips that appear when you hover the mouse over a tool also help, and some of these feature animated GIFs that demonstrate how the tool works. Improved masks and selections Other new features include improvements to the Select and Mask tool to make selections more accurate and realistic, and an improved…

Canon led the way with five-ink printers that combine pigmentbased and dye-based black inks for effective document and photo printing, respectively. The new TS6150 (or TS6151 in white) continues the tradition, combining a reasonable purchase price with competitive running costs, especially if you opt for the XL or XXL cartridges. There’s a built-in scanner for easy standalone photocopying, via a 3-inch colour touchscreen, but no memory card slot nor the ability to print on white-face CDs/DVDs. Connectivity options include USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A rear paper tray accommodates 20 sheets of photo paper, of up to A4 in size. Performance Maximum print resolution is slightly less than in the Epson printers, at 4800x1200dpi compared with 5700x1400dpi. Even so, print quality is excellent with superb detail, smooth gradients and lovely colour…

Avoiding the need for replacing cartridges, this new Epson printer has deep ink tanks and comes with two sets of highcapacity bottles. There’s sufficient ink for up to 3,400 6x4-inch photos (800 A4). However, even after creating this many photo prints, the combined UK price of the printer, ink and paper is pretty much the same as for the Canon TS6150 on test. The Epson also requires an expensive up-front payment, instead of paying as you go. Scanning, photocopying and printing from memory cards is based on a push-button interface with a 2.7-inch screen, rather than the more usual touchscreen display. Large and small internal paper cassettes are supplemented by a rear single sheet feeder. Performance Printing is based on the same combination of pigment black and dye-based CMYK inks…

The Pro-10S looks virtually identical to the Pro-100S, but ditches its sibling’s eight dyebased ink cartridges in favour of nine pigment inks plus a ‘chroma optimizer’, which aims to give a smooth finish on glossy paper. Of the other nine cartridges, you get the standard six colours for photo printing, plus red and grey inks, and both ‘photo’ black and matte black, for printing on glossy and matte media respectively. Unlike in the Epson SC P600, the Canon printer has individual channels in the print head for both photo and matte black inks, so there are no issues of wasting time and ink when swapping between media types. Performance Excellent output quality combines superb accuracy for colour prints and fabulous definition for black-and-white photo prints, without any unwanted colour casts.…

WINTER AT THE BEACH We tend to think of a beach as a place for sunshine and swimming, but when it’s cold and blustery it can be just as exciting for photography. You might be met with a brooding sky, delicate frost, thick fog, even a full-on snowstorm. All these things can add to the atmosphere of your photos. It’s one of those things that sets us photographers apart from the happy snappers – everyone gets their cameras out on a fine day, but only a dedicated photographer would head to the beach in a snowstorm. Conditions such as these can imbue your photos with a different kind of mood and substance. There are other benefits, too. You’re likely to be the only one there, even on popular beaches. On…

WATCH THE VIDEO O ne way to present similarly themed photos is to merge them into a single triptych document. Our square snaps have been captured at a series of different locations, but they all feature the sun in the centre of the frame. By placing three similar photos into a single triptych we can create a useful new asset that can be used to enhance a range of Lightroom projects. As well as printing the triptych as a hard copy to frame, you could also use it as a banner in a web gallery, or as part of a Book module’s layout. In this walkthrough we’ll use the Print module’s cell tools to create a triptych layout, customizing the size and position of the cells, and then add three…

Nikon School photography workshops cater for every level of photographic ability, whether you are new to taking photographs, a keen amateur, or a professional. Nikon School offers a wide range of workshops suited to individuals wanting to learn more about photography or expand their creative horizons. Courses will help you improve your skills, develop your eye for a photo and learn to take control of your camera. Workshops are a mix of easy-to-understand theory and practical assignments. They’re attended by small groups of up to 12 delegates to ensure that everyone can benefit from the expert knowledge of tutors. From understanding your Nikon DSLR and lenses to image editing; from street shots to inspiring landscapes; the school’s workshops cover a variety of skills and subjects. Workshops take place at either the…

David Street shares his shooting processes for creating ethereal and inspiring abstract macro photographs with simple household items WANT YOUR PORTFOLIO REVIEWED? EMAIL YOUR SHOTS TO MAIL@NPHOTOMAG.COM When creating my macro images I often look for objects with strong shapes and highly reflective surfaces. I use glass, metal and plastic in my images because of the way these materials absorb and reflect light. I find glass is a beautiful material to work with as you can create complex images from very simple objects. One of the biggest challenges I face when creating my macro photographs is composition. The items I use feature awkward and unusual shapes. This makes it more difficult to create interesting compositions, as the objects usually need supporting, and in the case of Spoons [2], securing with…

Without a doubt, this (in recent years) has become a signature in Hollywood action drama, seen most often in interior and night-time scenes, to the point where it’s almost a clich’. Some people hate it. It’s a complementary colour combination, one of them tinting the darker background, the other tinting actors’ skin tones. Teal (as in duck) is the industry name for a mid-dark cyan trending toward green, and on the colour wheel its complementary is a deep orange. (Tip: Adobe have a wonderful free colour app called Adobe Colour CC that you can find on https://color.adobe.com.) It’s popular because it’s atmospheric, with some menace in the blue-green shadows, and the orange colour projects forward from it, adding some depth. There are many other combinations, depending on the mood wanted,…

The new Lightroom CC is a bold move by Adobe. For years we have dreamed of having all our photos available everywhere at full resolution, and editable on all our devices, but Lightroom CC now makes this dream a reality. Cloud synchronizing is possible in the old Lightroom, now rebranded as Lightroom Classic, but only up to a point. In the Classic version, you can share lower-resolution DNG versions in Collections chosen for cloud synchronization, but your full-res images remain on your local disk drives. Any editing you do on other devices is synchronized back to your desktop as processing instructions, but you can’t access your full library remotely, or full-resolution images. (See overleaf for a review of the new Lightroom Classic and more background information on what Lightroom does,…

When it comes to A4 format inkjet printers (8.5x11 inches in the USA), there’s been a growing trend to combine a pigment-based black ink for crisp document printing, with four or more dye-based inks for premium photo output on glossy paper. Moving up to larger format A3+ printing (13x19 inches), there’s a choice of printers that run on larger ranges of exclusively dye or pigment inks. Dye inks are fully absorbed into the paper, and tend to give a smoother, more even finish on glossy, semigloss and lustre photo papers. By contrast, pigment molecules are much larger and lay on top of the paper. This gives a less uniform and less shiny look to glossy prints, as well as requiring more drying time. Pigment inks are more robust in terms…

This is the only printer in the entire group that retains the time-honoured photo printing mix of CMYK plus light cyan and light magenta inks, all six inks being dye-based. That’s good news for photos and, while the usual downside is that mono text looks faint and greyish, the Epson manages to produce smart looking documents. Standalone photocopying and printing from SD/HC/XC cards is via a 2.7-inch touchscreen. The menu layout is intuitive but the screen itself is a bit small and fiddly to use. The output tray extends automatically for printing and, unlike with the Epson ET-7700 and XP-960, you can insert photo paper in the rear feeder without needing to wait for the printer’s say-so. Performance Typical of Epson six-ink photo printers, output looks bright and vibrant. Colour…

More compact and lightweight than the A3+ (13x19 inches) printers on test, this one has a reduced maximum page size of A3 (11.7x16.5 inches). That’s smaller, and a worse match for the aspect ratio of SLR photos. On the plus side, the XP-760 has an A4 scanner, memory card slots, and a 4.3-inch colour touchscreen for standalone printing and photocopying. Based on the six-ink, dyebased lineup the XP-8500 uses, this larger printer employs cartridges with even less capacity. For A3 photo printing, you’ll need to replace the cartridges with alarming regularity. There’s something to be said for the ET-7750 A3 version of Epson’s EcoTank printer in this case, although the purchase price is daunting at £690/$650. Performance Print quality from the XP-960 is virtually identical to that of the smaller…

Aiming for top-quality black and white as well as colour output,the P600 uses nine pigment-based inks including four black and grey inks. Unlike in the Canon Pro-10S, ‘photo black’ and ‘matte black’ cartridges share a channel in the print head. Switching between glossy and matte media means you need to purge the channel of ink and replenish it with the alternative type. This takes over five minutes and wastes ink. The P600 comes complete with a roll feeder that enables you to create prints with the aspect ratio you want, even stretching to panoramic prints. High-capacity cartridges are a good match for large-format printing, containing nearly three times as much ink as that for the Epson XP-960. Performance On glossy paper, prints look rather less smooth than the Canon Pro-10S…