Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i N-Photo: the Nikon magazine

1 CAMERA SETTINGS Laurie says… My go-to settings are Manual mode, Raw, Centre-weighted metering and the desired white balance preset. I’ll use manual focus if the subject is still or Single-point AF and AF-C if it’s moving. Continuous-high is useful for sudden bursts of action and I’m not afraid to boost ISO, if needed. 2 BALANCING ACT Laurie says… I work hard to get my images right in-camera to minimize editing, and that means setting the white balance manually. Today Neil used presets such as Cloudy and Direct Sunlight, but I will even go so far as to dial in the Kelvin value myself to get the exact colour temperature that I require. 3 ACCURATE EXPOSURE Laurie says… I always enable RGB Histogram and Highlights via Playback Display Options in…

Eternal Triangle JOSHUA HERMANN Due to their watery habitat, cypress tree develop a triangular base and root protrusions called cypress knees. As Joshua paddled amongst the trees one foggy morning the triangular trunks stood out in a symmetrical fashion. Camera: Nikon D850 Lens: 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 Exposure: 6 secs, f/8, ISO64 Blossom YUSHEN SU Taiwan alpine rhododendron only grow above 3000m and only blossom April to May every three years, so it’s not easy to shoot! Yushen waited until midnight for the rising Milky Way. Camera: Nikon D750 Lens: 16-35mm f/4 (foreground) + 20mm f/1.8 (sky) Exposure: 2 secs, f/9, ISO640 + 90 secs, f/4, ISO6400 Medley of Shapes MENGGUO LI Mengguo shot this view of the wonderfully geometric DUO Galleria, a new building complex in the Bras Basah Bugis neighborhood…

Light painting isn’t a technique you’d normally associate with portraiture, but with a few simple skills you can create fantastically surreal people photos. You don’t need lots of gear for this either, just a tripod, a dark room, a willing subject and a torch or other light-emitting device that you can use to ‘paint’ with. When it comes to choosing a light source for your painting, there are all sorts of torches, light wands and dedicated tools out there for you to choose from. But one of the most interesting is a fibre-optic brush. This is a technique inspired by the portraits of Gunnar Heilmann, who uses a fibre-optic light brush to incredible effect. The fibres split the beam from a normal torch into lots of tiny points of light…

1 Tweak colours You might find afterwards that the images have a heavy colour cast. It’s best to shoot in Raw so you can change the white balance and other settings in post-production. You can also target and adjust the hue of individual colours using the Color Mixer panel in Camera Raw/Lightroom. 2 Blend several frames Light painting can be tricky to judge, so you might want to combine the best parts from several photos into one. This isn’t hard, as long as the frames are in alignment. Select an area, copy (Cmd/Ctrl+C) and paste in place (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+V). If you want just the light trails to show, set the blend mode to Lighten or Screen. 3 Increase Clarity If the trails initially look like they’re a bit weak then you can try increasing…

Peter Lindbergh: Untold Stories is an exhibition curated by Peter Lindbergh before his untimely death in 2019. Lindbergh spent two years selecting 161 images from his four decade-spanning career in which he immortalized some of the most celebrated women in fashion, cinema and beyond, including Nicole Kidman, Charlotte Rampling and Uma Thurman, as well as many of the supermodels who defined the 1990s – including Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. He worked with a Nikon F5 and Nikon 50mm f/1.4 or Nikon 85mm f/1.4 lens for the majority of his images in the days of film, and in his later years used the Nikon D4 and Nikon D5 to shoot portraits. With photographs from the early 1980s to 2019, the exhibition offers new and unexpected insights into the work of…

Camera: Nikon Df Lens: 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 Exposure: 1/800 sec, f/14, ISO1250 MISSION: Seek out and capture unique day-to-day activities during a trip to Antigua, Guatemala PHOTOGRAPHER: David Hicks LOCATION: Antigua, Guatemala KIT USED: Nikon Df, Nikon AF-S 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR WEBSITE: www.hixposure.co.uk The country’s name means land of the trees and it’s where the world’s first chocolate bar was created. I was in Antigua, Guatemala. Although lovely, with its interesting cobbled streets arranged in a grid, it’s also surrounded by the menace of several volcanoes. There are more than 30 in the country! I’m a street photographer by nature. I love to walk the streets, hang out on corners and chat to whoever about anything. I like humanity. From human beings to anything with a human touch. I like…

The only camera manual you’ll ever need… In this first instalment of Nikon Know-How, we’re going to explain everything you need to know about ‘focal length.’ A major benefit of a DSLR or Z-series mirrorless Nikon is the ability to use a variety of lenses suited to particular photographic situations. ‘Telephoto’ lenses make distant subjects larger in the picture, while ‘wide-angle’ lenses take in more of the scene. Specifying the focal length numerically makes it easier to compare different lenses. Focal length is measured in millimetres. The range around 35-50mm is considered ‘normal’, or ‘standard’, as it roughly matches your field of vision. Wide-angle lenses have shorter focal lengths than this. Their wider view enables you to get more of a scene into your shot – good for big landscapes…

1 Be prepared Switch out of the wind to avoid dust reaching the sensor. Have the new lens handy to minimize the time your camera’s innards will be exposed for. 2 Get started Switch off your camera and lie it on its back. With your left index finger pressing the lens release button, use your right hand to turn your lens clockwise. 3 Remove your lens Lift the lens clear and place it safely to one side. Remove the dust cap from the lens mount of the replacement lens and put it on the one you’ve just removed. 4 Line up the lens Line up the white dot on the camera with the white dot or mark on the lens you’re going to attach. On some third-party lenses the dot…

WINNER: BEST TILT & SHIFT LENS Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-D Shift £1249/$1079 Tested in issue 125 * WHAT WE LOVE Perspective Control or ‘tilt and shift’ lenses are formidable tools for architectural, landscape and even close-up photography, stopping buildings appearing to lean inwards towards the top and giving optical control over depth of field, shrinking it to isolate a main subject or extending it to keep everything in a scene looking sharp. This Laowa is a particularly wide-angle example of the breed, expanding the field of view while also keeping distortion to a negligible level, and it’s available in both F-mount and Z-mount options. * WHAT’S MISSING? Control over aperture and focusing is a purely manual affair, and there’s no data communication between the lens and camera body. * WHY UPGRADE? You can…

This issue hits the newsstands just as we all take a well-deserved festive break. It’s a time for reflection as we look back on the year past, and various levels of lockdown aside, it’s been a pretty good one when it comes to kit. We bring you the best that 2021 has brought us in our annual Gear of the Year roundup. Also in our Gear section, we test the svelte Z 40mm f/2 and explain radio flash triggers, with our pick of five of the best. With winter well and truly upon us, we enlist the advice of explorer and travel photographer Dave Williams, who shares his tips for shooting snowy scenes, winter wildlife and, if you’re lucky, capturing the majesty of nature’s most amazing spectacle, the Northern Lights.…

1 SLOW IT DOWN Laurie says… The motion blur will depend on both the length of your exposure and the speed your subject is moving, so it’s not an exact science. I like to start very slowly by attaching a polarizer to remove a couple stops of light, shooting at ISO100 and dialling in a super-narrow aperture. 2 FIND A FOCUS MARKER Laurie says… Using a dark filter on a dark day can confuse your AF system and cause it to hunt. You can get over this by finding a marker on the same focal plane as your subject and focusing on that either completely manually or via AF first and then switching to manual. 3 EXPERIMENTATION Laurie says… Slowly increase your shutter speed as you shoot and pay attention…

A 365 project couldn’t be easier; you capture one photo every day for a year. And yet, as anyone who’s ever embarked on a 365 project will know, the simplicity of the premise doesn’t account for the extreme commitment required to capture a photo every single day for 365 days straight… Think about that for a moment. It doesn’t matter whether your camera’s kaput, you’re getting married, you’ve broken your shutter finger, you’re on holiday, you’ve had bad seafood or your first child’s being born, you’ve got to get that picture. But as is often the case with photography, the key to success is planning. If you know what you’re going to capture during busy weekdays, a sizeable portion of the pressure is off. And if you simply don’t have time…

Landscapes will often benefit from local adjustments to pull out detail, enhance colours or reveal textures in specific parts of the scene. One way this can be achieved is with layer blend modes. These are often thought of as a means to combine two or more images into one, but blend modes can also be hugely useful for enhancing colours and tones in your photographs. In this project we’ll look at how to use blend modes in combination with other tools and adjustments to enhance the famous landscape of Meteora in Greece. We’ll break the scene down into different areas – trees, sky, buildings, rocks – and apply tailored edits to each. Whatever the type of landscape you choose to edit, it can usually be divided up in a similar…

1 Tripod Whether light painting a person or any other object, you need to use an exposure that lasts at least a few seconds in order to give you time to move the torch through the scene. As such, a tripod is vital to keep the camera still throughout the long exposure. 2 Self timer Keep in mind that any stray light from the fibre-optic brush will show up in your exposure, so be in position with the brush on the face before you press the shutter. If you’re shooting this alone, use the camera’s self timer or a wireless release to trigger the shutter. 3 Fibre-optic brush You can use any kind of torch for light painting, but a fibre-optic brush lets you create a wonderful array of glowing dots and lines…

Camera: Nikon D850 Lens: 70-200mm f/2.8 Exposure: 1/100 sec, f/11, ISO64 MISSION: Capture images that convey the intense speed and action-packed nature of motor sport PHOTOGRAPHER: David Harbey LOCATION: Milton Keynes, UK KIT USED: Nikon D850, 24-70mm f/2.8E ED VR, 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR, 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR, Sigma 100-400mm f/5-6.3 DG DN OS | C INSTAGRAM: @davidharbey_photography WEBSITE: www.harbey.co.uk As a keen motor sports enthusiast, it seemed only natural when I expressed an interest in photographing what I was watching. I received a Zenit EM for my 21st birthday and this soon gave way to an Olympus OM2n, which I used to take photos at Le Mans and RAC Rally stages in the mid-1980s (you can see some of those photographs on my website). After a gap to…

Each month we’ll set an assignment to help you turn theory into practice. To recap, when you change your focal length, you’re also changing the angle of view. At a short focal length of 18mm, you can fit more of the scene into the frame, compared to using a long focal length of 200mm from the same spot. However, focal length isn’t merely a simple cropping tool – it also has other creative effects on your picture. For instance, it indirectly affects perspective. Photographing subjects up close with a wide-angle lens makes foreground objects look larger, while using a telephoto at a greater shooting distance creates a compressed perspective, making things at different distances appear closer together. Focal length also affects depth of field, which you can use to great…

1. Winter Wandering BY ELENA PARASKEVA This stunning entry isn’t just a technical masterclass, it’s also incredibly captivating due to the strong narrative. Why is this child out in the cold and what are they looking at just beyond the frame? The lighting is sublime – the warm candlelight contrasts against the cool blue hues and the catchlights in the subject’s eyes compel the viewer to ponder where they’re looking. Camera: Nikon D810 Lens: 85mm f/1.4 Exposure: 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO64 2. Stuck in a Rut BY KNUT M SELMER Battling deer are surprisingly difficult to frame. Get the angle wrong and the subjects will only occupy a letterbox portion of the image. These reindeer fill the frame because the right-hand subject is doubling back on itself. Crucially, both animals’…

Many Nikon cameras come with a built-in pop-up flash, but while this is a convenient way to add a blip of light, they’re not very powerful. A Speedlight gives much greater range, but being anchored to your camera limits your creative options. Taking your Speedlight off-camera enables you to light subjects from any angle – this once meant tethering the flash to the camera with a cord, but in this wireless age, such restrictions are no longer necessary. Radio transmission Being able to liberate the light from the hotshoe for off-camera effects is great, and being able to control multiple lights from one unit for complex flash setups is even better. There are generally two flavours of wireless trigger – optical and radio-frequency. The former is built into many Nikon…

WINNER: BEST BUDGET STANDARD PRIME Nikon Z 40mm f/2 £249/$297 Tested is issue 132 * WHAT WE LOVE Full-frame shooters can feel a little envious of the small and perfectly formed Z 28mm f/2.8 SE for DX-sensor mirrorless Nikons, but this new lens is the perfect pick-me-up. Weighing in at a mere 170g, it’s unfeasibly lightweight for an FX format prime and, while it’s pretty much the same size, weight and effective focal length as the DX format Z 28mm, it’s also a full f-stop faster. Image quality is really quite nice and, despite its lightweight build and low-budget price, the lens feels like a high-quality and durable item, complete with weather-seals. * WHAT’S MISSING? One thing that’s missing is a lens hood, as Nikon doesn’t include one with the…

THE PRO NAME: Laurie Campbell CAMERA: Nikon D5 Laurie has spent his career documenting Scotland’s wildlife almost exclusively. He hails from Berwick-upon-Tweed and was bit by the wildlife photography bug in 1972. In 1985 he turned pro, having studied photography at Edinburgh’s Napier University, and has since amassed a picture library of close to 200,000 images. He’s authored and illustrated a variety of books, and has won a plethora of awards. Neil is learning from one of the very best: www.lauriecampbell.com THE APPRENTICE NAME: Neil Wallace CAMERA: Nikon D7200 Scotland-based Neil comes from a farming background, but it was driving HGVs on the continent that prompted him to delve seriously into photography. He wanted an excuse to work among nature again and was curious about the digital revolution, so he…

Shooting in the cold comes with its own set of rules. If we know what those rules are, we can learn how to apply them and, where applicable, when to break them. For the past few years, I’ve turned my travel photography specialism to cold destinations and aurora-filled skies. I’ve explored Arctic tundras, scrambled up mountains, driven endlessly in search of dark skies, and lost myself in some of the most beautiful landscapes the planet has to offer. When we think of the cold, we often think of Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, and so on. Those aren’t wrong, but we can experience these conditions much closer to home. Scotland offers some amazing vistas and, geologically, the mountains that run through it are the same mountains that call Norway home. With mountain hare…

The festive season is upon us and it’s a time for gathering with friends and family, sharing gifts with our loved ones and, above all, stuffing ourselves silly. But wait! Before tucking into yet another mince pie, the smorgasbord of edible delights that festoon dining tables at this time of year affords us an ideal opportunity to try our hand at food photography. So for this tutorial, we’re using a variety of commonly found Christmassy treats to try some classic foodie photo techniques. It’s not enough to simply photograph each individual dish on its own, but you need to create miniature ‘sets’ for each shot. A natural wooden table works well for your mini-studio ‘floor’ to place everything on, and you’ll need a variety of rustic-looking props, plates and serving…

Whether you prefer to deliver them in person or send online, a personalized Christmas card is a wonderful way to share both season’s greetings and cherished photos with friends and family. In this project we’ll look at how to create a Christmas wreath collage using a selection of photos. We’ll fill the shape of the wreath with our photos, then fine-tune the collage so that everything fits together neatly. This involves fundamental layer skills, simple masking techniques and selections. We’ll begin here with a wreath shape, which can be downloaded for free from www.pixabay.com (search for wreath_3005547). We can use this wreath shape as a base to add our own images, then bring everything together with masks and text. Key to creating this effect is Photoshop’s Frame tool. This enables…

Torch and brush Our fibre-optic brush works in combination with a normal torch. The torch is attached to the end of the brush (we used a makeshift cardboard tube to connect the two together). The fibres split the beam into many tiny points of light that dance and move as you flick the brush. Colour the light We can add different colours to our fib-reoptic brush by using pieces of coloured tape or gel. We taped these to the rear of the brush. Experiment with various different colours, and try using two colours at once by taping each over one half of the beam. Use manual exposure The right camera settings for this will vary depending on the power of your torch, but a good place to begin is in…

STEVE SCHAPIRO Profile ● Born in New York in 1934, Steve Schapiro began taking photos at the age of nine, when he picked up a 127 Kodak at summer camp. ● With ambitions of being a writer, he switched to photojournalism and began his freelance career in 1961, after training with W. Eugene Smith at his fabled Jazz Loft in Manhattan. ● In the 60 years since, Steve’s photographs have been published on the pages and covers of LIFE, Look, Time, Vanity Fair, People, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated and many other international titles. ● He is best known for his coverage of the US civil rights movement, including the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, which ended with the candidate’s…

Q Is the DX crop mode of my Z 7II only intended for use with DX format lenses? Hazel Sullivan A I’m a big fan of the DX crop mode, which is one of the ‘Choose image Area’ options in the Z 7II’s Photo Shooting Menu. It’s useful when shooting with DX (APS-C format) lenses, designed for cameras with a smaller image sensor, but much more besides. You often don’t need the mighty 45-megapixel resolution of the Z 7II, whereas the DX option delivers more manageable 19.5-megapixel images. The DX crop mode also gives you a 1.5x magnification in ‘effective’ focal length, for example boosting the range of a 70-200mm lens to 105-300mm, extending your telephoto reach with no loss of aperture rating, unlike when using a teleconverter. It also adds…

Lab tests explained Sharpness A chart with multiple sharp boundaries is photographed, the extent of blur at the centre, mid and edges showing how many line widths per picture height the lens can resolve. Simply put, the bigger the numbers the sharper the lens. Fringing Chromatic aberration is visible as purple or green fringing around high-contrast boundaries, caused by different wavelengths being focused on different areas of the sensor. The larger the number, the worse the score. Distortion A lens that bulges towards the edges of the frame produces barrel distortion, shown as a negative score. Pincushion distortion produces a positive score. A score of zero indicates no distortion. Our awards in a nutshell The best performance, design and value A product that gives you more for your money The…

Nikon is pretty well stocked when it comes to native Z-mount 35mm and 50mm prime lenses, with the high-performance Z 35mm f/1.8 S, Z 50mm f/1.8 S, super-fast Z 50mm f/1.2 S and Z MC 50mm f/2.8 macro offerings already on the market. The Z 40mm f/2 is something a bit different. The focal length falls between the two more mainstream camps and is ideal for casual shooting with a full-frame camera, while also giving a fairly natural perspective on DX format bodies like the Z 50 and Z fc, where it has a 60mm ‘effective’ reach. It’s compact, lightweight and affordable, tipping the scales at just 170g and costing barely more than half the price of the Z 50mm f/1.8 S-line lens. Key features Like some other Nikon Z-mount…

WINNER: BEST DSLR Nikon D780 £1890/$2297 Tested in issue 109 * WHAT WE LOVE Mirrorless cameras aren’t for everyone and many photographers still prefer the feel (and freedom) of a DSLR in their hands. For our money, the Nikon D780 is the best of the breed, boasting the purity of a stellar optical viewfinder, native support for Nikon’s hugely diverse range of F-mount lenses and a 2260-shot battery life that knocks any mirrorless camera out of the ballpark in terms of stamina. We especially love the fast and unerringly accurate 273-point hybrid phase/contrast autofocus system based on the image sensor, inheriting a major advantage from mirrorless camera technology. * WHAT’S MISSING? It’s naturally incompatible with Nikon’s latest range of high-performance Z-mount lenses, but there are plenty of epic F-mount optics to choose…