Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i N-Photo: the Nikon magazine

01 Skyfall Balázs Czakó, Hungary “I shot about 800 pictures of this thunderstorm, and in this one I was lucky enough to capture a lightning bolt. It was crazy standing there with all my equipment, yet without a drop of rain falling on me. Thunderstorms are one of my favourite subjects, and I think this is the most powerful picture I’ve taken of one.” www.facebook.com/CzakoBalazsPhotography Nikon D600, Nikon AF-S 14-24mm f/2.8G ED, 1 sec, f/22, ISO50 02 The One Jason Law, New Zealand I was on Koekohe Beach at low tide well before sunrise. Typically this location is more suited to shooting at high tide, when the water flows around the famous Moeraki Boulders, but as I was wandering in the darkness this ‘eye’ effect leapt out at me from…

One thing that the D3000 and its more recent variants are renowned for is that they bend over backwards to be beginner-friendly. Everything is made as simple as possible – there’s even an interactive ‘Guide’ shooting mode to help newcomers make their first tentative steps in D-SLR photography. By definition, however, if you’ve been using one for a few years, you’re no longer a beginner. You’re more likely to be yearning for something more sophisticated. The next step up is a camera like the D5300, or the newer D5500, reviewed in this month’s Big Test (see page 122), but you might prefer to leapfrog those ‘upper entry-level’ bodies and go for something more advanced. The affordable option Nikon D7200 £880, $1100 A real cracker of a camera, this is currently…

Sometimes a single kit lens with a new camera just isn’t enough, and dealers often tempt you with a bonus telephoto zoom to seal the deal. With Nikon DX cameras, the bonus lens in question is likely to be the AF-S DX 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED, or the newer Mk II edition that features the same retractable design as the 18-55mm VR II kit lens. Thanks to the 1.5x crop factor of DX format cameras, the maximum effective focal length is a useful 300mm. However, if you upgrade to an FX-format 70-300mm lens, you’ll get a massive effective telephoto reach of 450mm. This rivals the range of a big super-telephoto lens on an FX camera, while keeping size and weight well under control. Go super-sized Upgrading from a DX body to…

THE MISSION Capture stunning light trail images using burning wire wool TIME NEEDED ■ One hour SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Tripod ■ Remote release ■ Wire wool ■ Metal whisk ■ Rope or string ■ Matches or lighter ■ Sand or water NEXT ISSUE… Sketch with light using a pocket light like a pen Red hot glowing embers raining onto the walls and floor is reminiscent of a scene inside an iron works. However you don’t need an industrial building for this – you can create a blazing trail of metal sparks in your garden, as we’ll show. This tutorial involves setting steel wool on fire, so obviously the crucial thing here is to take…

Ever fancied your own portable photo studio? Well, you can win just that if you enter our fantastic competition, thanks to our friends at Lastolite and Manfrotto. Whether you want to shoot portraits or products, stills or video, the prize bundle has everything you could possibly need, from studio lights, background and reflector, to a tripod, geared head, video light, micro arm to hold gear in place, and even a heavyduty roller bag to transport kit between locations! Just look at this little lot… WORTH £2000! 01 MANFROTTO MK055XPRO-BHQ2 The MK055XPRO-BHQ2 kit comprises a 055 threesection aluminium tripod and magnesium XPRO Ball Head with 200PL plate. The tripod features 50 per cent more rigidity than previous models, and the Quick Power Lock system ensures your equipment is fully stabilised under…

PROJECT INFO MISSION To capture breath taking moments of light PHOTOGRAPHER Tracey Whitefoot AGE 40 LOCATION Not tingham, England KIT Nikon D300s, D800, Nikon AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, Nikon AF-S 16-35mm f/4G ED VR, Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM, Lee filters, Manfrot to BeFree tripod WEB www.whitefootphotography.com I’ve been interested in photography since I was young, but it wasn’t until I quit my sales job in 2006 that I took it up fulltime. It’s been hard work, and a very steep learning curve, but I’ve built up a thriving business as a commercial freelance photographer in Nottinghamshire, in the UK. In 2010, once the pressures of launching my own business had eased off slightly, I started to take landscape photography seriously. Until then I had been shooting on…

We reserve the right to edit any queries for clarity or brevity. You can also write to us at N-Photo Magazine, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, UK, BA1 1UA ■ Keep your copies of N-Photo neat and tidy with our bespoke binder. Each stores a year’s worth of your favourite photo magazine – and costs from ￡9.99! Order yours today at… www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/n-photo-binder * Star Letter IT’S A SMALL WORLD  I was interested in your article on creating a world in miniature in issue 49. I bought my Nikon D3200 just under two years ago with the intention of taking interesting photographs of places I visit. I went on a trip to Hamburg to visit my son who told me about a wonderful place called Miniature Wonderland (www.miniatur-wunderland.com). It’s a fantastic…

JARGON BUSTER RAW A JPEG is processed in camera, so information has already been discarded – think of it like a shorthand description of a scene’s colours and tones. An uncompressed RAW file still contains all of the information captured – in other words, it gives you access to the whole story. D-LIGHTING Your Nikon and Capture NX-D have a D-Lighting setting that can help lighten up underexposed backlit shadows. When shooting highcontrast landscapes you could try to capture an evenly exposed scene using your Nikon’s Matrix metering mode. This will cause your camera to analyse light readings across the whole scene and then capture an ‘average’ exposure. This compromise approach may enable you to capture a more balanced exposure, but it can still lead to blown-out highlights that are…

Last issue we looked at shooting weddings as a guest or second shooter (see page 144 for how to get a digital back issue if you missed it). We don’t recommend you rush into shooting alone: the photography is crucial to many couples and they’ll be very vocal if they’re not happy with your work. If you go into it without being ready, you could kill your reputation before you’ve really got started. Once you have built up a portfolio of images and got a good idea of what is involved in shooting weddings, you’ll be ready and keen to go it alone and set up a wedding photography business. Many photographers start out thinking that it will take a short time to get started, and that it will only…

DX-FORMAT D-SLR £280, $450 www.nikon.com Nikon D3200 Key facts Image sensor and processing At its launch, the D3200 had the highest pixel count of any DX-format Nikon, but it’s since been matched by all of the D-SLRs in this group. It is the only one that retains an optical low-pass filter. The image processor is also a generation older. Autofocus The Multi-Cam 1000 phase-detection autofocus module is ubiquitous in Nikon D3XXX-series cameras. It has 11 AF points with one cross-type point at the centre (able to resolve detail in horizontal and vertical planes). The spread of AF points across the frame is pretty far-reaching. Continuous shooting With a maximum burst rate of four frames per second, the D3200 has the slowest continuous drive rate in the group. On the plus…

DX-FORMAT D-SLR £500, $700 www.nikon.com Nikon D5300 Key facts Image sensor and processing The D5300 shares the D3300’s sensor resolution, fourth generation EXPEED image processor and lack of a low pass filter. However, the D5300 gives you the option of capturing RAW images in 14-bit colour depth as well as just 12-bit. Autofocus The D5300’s Multi-Cam 4800 autofocus system is more sophisticated than the Multi-Cam 1000 module fitted to the D3200 and D3300. It has 39 separate AF points instead of 11, and nine cross-type sensors instead of one. In our tests, it was much better at tracking moving subjects. Continuous shooting The five-frames-per-second maximum drive rate matches that of the D3300 and D5500, and you can keep firing for 100 shots in JPEG quality modes. In RAW mode the…

Your window onto the working life of a professional photographer The first time I saw an Apollo butterfly (Parnassius apollo) high in the French Alps my world stood still, and I have been seeking them out ever since. Towards the end of the day is the best time to photograph Apollo butterflies, when they settle on thistles in alpine meadows and feed on nectar. In the past I had always used a telephoto macro, but because I am often in the business of revealing how smaller creatures relate to their wider surroundings, and therefore telling a story, I began to hatch a plan to photograph the Apollo in its natural haunts using my wide-angle macro. This way I could set it among the high mountain peaks and get a shot…

The most natural and well-trodden upgrade path leads from DX- to FX-format shooting. Not only does full-frame photography give you more control over depth of field, but it also enables you to use Nikon’s vast array of top-quality lenses as nature (or, at least, Nikon) intended. Without the 1.5x crop factor of DX bodies, wide-angle lenses stay wide and standard lenses don’t stray into short telephoto territory. Of course, the flip side is that if you want mighty telephoto reach you’ll need to use a comparatively big and hefty super-telephoto lens. The bigger, clearer viewfinder image of an FX camera can also be a major bonus for accurate composition and manual focusing. “NOT ONLY DOES FULL-FRAME PHOTOGRAPHY GIVE YOU MORE CONTROL OVER DEPTH OF FIELD, BUT IT ALSO ENABLES YOU…

Starting from scratch, many of us buy a D-SLR kit with a standard zoom, then add a telephoto zoom for long-range shooting, and stop right there. We go longer, but we don’t go any wider. It’s missing a trick, though, because fitting an ultra-wide-angle lens can literally add a new perspective to your photography. Put your eye to the viewfinder and there’s an instant wow factor as you realise just how much more you can squeeze into the frame. For DX-format cameras especially, ultra-wide zooms are much more prevalent than primes. It’s perhaps a little curious, as many photographers only tend to use these lenses at or near their shortest focal length, to maximise the viewing angle, so they never get the most out of the lens’s zoom capability. But…

TEACH YOURSELF LIGHTROOM PAR T 12 AFTER THE MISSION ■ To learn how to use Smart Previews in Lightroom TIME NEEDED ■ Ten minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ Lightroom 5 or later NEXT ISSUE… Adjust colours for perfect reproduction As we revealed in issue 43, Lightroom can gather photos from a variety of locations, such as your external hard drives, into its Catalog. It then creates and stores standard-resolution previews of each imported photo on your PC or Mac, while the original, high-resolution images are kept on your hard drives. This enables you to save valuable disc space on your machine. If you plan to use a laptop to edit your photos while you’re away from home,…

THE MISSION Process an image to make it look like it was shot on infrared film TIME NEEDED ■ 20 minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ Photoshop CS5 or above NEXT ISSUE… Create a festive ‘snow bulb’ montage In traditional film photography, infrared film is sensitive to infrared light, rather than the visible spectrum of red through to violet. It’s a colour that human eyes are unable to see, and the images produced with this special film have a glowing, dreamlike quality. Stripped of the usual spectrum of colours, images look monochrome, with things that reflect infrared light appearing much brighter. In particular, scenes that include trees or foliage take on an otherworldly quality, as the greenest leaves…

September, 2004 ■ Athens, Greece, ■ UK Nikon D2X Bob Martin has chosen a relatively recent image from the Paralympic Games in 2004 as the one that had the greatest impact on his career. He was already a very successful sports photographer when he travelled to Athens to cover the games for Sports Illustrated magazine, but he believes this photograph took his work a wider audience. “That picture massively changed my career,” he says. “I was pretty well known when I took that picture, but it legitimised me with the non-sports photographers, because it got used so widely, and because it won World Press Photo in the sports section.” Bob nearly missed the shot. He was on the catwalk above the pool for a strictly limited time. He’d made three…

COMPACT SYSTEM CAMERA £300, $495 www.nikon.com Nikon 1 J5 Key facts Image sensor and processing With a megapixel count of 20.8, the 1 J5 outstrips all other 1 series cameras to date, and the image sensor is backed up by a new EXPEED 5A processor. Autofocus and metering are carried out via the image sensor. Autofocus The hybrid autofocus system is fast and competent. Contrast-detection AF is split into 171 focus areas, and the central 105 areas also support sensor-based phasedetection AF. The camera decides how to combine contrast or phase detection, depending on shooting conditions. Continuous shooting The maximum burst rate of 60 frames per second is phenomenal. It’s a shame that the buffer depth of 20 shots in either RAW or JPEG quality modes means that you can…

DX-FORMAT D-SLR £600, $850 www.nikon.com Nikon D5500 Key facts Image sensor and processing The combination of a 24-megapixel image sensor (without low pass filter) and an EXPEED 4 processor is common to the D5500, D5300 and D3300. As with the D5300, you can select 12- or 14-bit colour depth when shooting in RAW mode. Autofocus The Multi-Cam 4800 autofocus module is shared with upmarket cameras like the D600 and D610. In the DX-format D5500 and D5300, however, the 39 AF points cover a larger area of the image frame, rather than being relatively central. Nine of the AF points are cross-type. Continuous shooting Again, the D5500 matches the D3300 and D5300 for maximum burst rate, at five frames per second. Compared with the D5300, the buffer enables capture of 14…

Professional Photography is a new type of photographic magazine. It isn’t affiliated to any manufacturer, club or society, and it isn’t aimed at amateurs that need practical instruction. It is, as its name suggests, a monthly magazine for professional photographers, but it’s also for anyone who just loves their photography. Over half of the 116 pages per issue are devoted to bringing you interviews with some of the greatest photographers out there – and showing you their images. We will also keep you up to date with the latest galleries, books, pro kit and news from around the world, so that you can keep abreast with what’s going on. Then in our unique business section, we bring you features on the marketing and services side of photography – sharing the…

They say the room for improvement is the biggest room in the world (‘they’ being the teachers that used to mark our homework). But they had a point. Even if you drive an Aston Martin DB10, the chances are there’ll be a better, faster, more glamorous DB11 just around the corner. Meanwhile, recent advances in digital camera technology have been both meteoric and relentless. You might have bought top-quality camera kit a few years ago, but it’s probably been overtaken by the march of progress. The latest cameras have better quality image sensors, greater power in their processors, and typically boast a host of improvements. Even if you’re renewing a camera with like for like, for example swapping a D3000 for a D3300 or a D5000 for a new D5500,…

QUICK TIP! If you don't have a tripod, you can set your Nikon to continuous shooting mode, and then hold down the shutter release to fire off a burst of bracketed images THE MISSION ■ Bracket highcontrast landscape images to ensure the best possible exposure TIME NEEDED ■ 10 minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ Nikon D-SLR ■ Tripod NEXT ISSUE… We get creative with a snow machine! Getting an even exposure across a very wide-angle landscape shot can be challenging, especially if you’re working in bright sunlight, when contrast is likely to be more pronounced. To help with this, all Nikon D-SLRs boast a feature called Auto Exposure Bracketing, or AEB. Bracketing essentially involves taking multiple versions…

THE MISSION Get to grips with slow sync flash TIME NEEDED ■ One hour SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Constant light ■ Flashgun NEXT ISSUE… Discover the benefits of intervalometers Capturing dance through stills photography can be a real challenge; the movement of a dancer has to be conveyed in a static image. Some photographers will photograph a dancer mid-leap, others will get the dancer to hold intricate poses. But there’s another way to capture dance: using slow sync flash photography. What does slow sync flash photography mean? Well, it’s the simple act of using a long exposure, combined with a flash firing at either the beginning or end of the period when the shutter is…

THE MISSION ■ Shoot nudes with studio lights to make the body look like an abstract landscape TIME NEEDED ■ Two hours SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Lighting kit with two softboxes ■ Sync cable or radio triggers ■ Black velvet NEXT ISSUE… Learn how to capture stunning star trails With a classic photographic subject like the fine art nude it can be hard to think of an original idea. One interesting approach is to focus on the careful positioning of arms, legs and torso so that, when viewed in isolation, they form their own simple compositional lines and shapes. Without the distraction of the face within the frame, you can transform the rise and fall…

PROFILE ■ 12-year-old Toby already has lots of experience with cameras, and is keen to improve. I really got into photography when my grandparents bought me a Nikon Coolpix L16 for Christmas in 2010, when I was just seven. It quickly became something that I took everywhere with me, and I still have it. In 2013, I decided I had outgrown it, and that it was time to move on to a D-SLR. I chose the Nikon D3100 because of its sturdy build, great image quality and beginner-friendly features. Nikon’s Guide mode was especially useful [see page 124 for more on this], and was there for when I struggled with any settings. I have since gone on to the D7000, staying with Nikon for the robust build and great image…

VERDICT The sensibly-priced Manfrotto kit is a favourite of many photographers, and with good reason. Its build quality is very good, leg and head adjustments are quick and easy, and the pivoting centre column adds versatility for macro and ultra-wideangle shooting. Spending five or six times as much on the Gitzo might seem like madness after all that but, if you want the ultimate in strength and rigidity even at very tall operating heights, it’s worth the money and should last a lifetime.…

Looking back, Greg du Toit can say with some satisfaction that he has more than fulfilled his childhood dream of living a life in the African bush among the continent’s iconic wildlife; however, wildlife photography was never in the original script, and Greg admits that it’s been a long, slow learning curve… Which interest came first, wildlife or photography? It was definitely wildlife. I’ve only been photographing wildlife for the last 15 years. From about the age of 10 I was pretty much obsessed with wildlife, and doing safaris in Kruger National Park, South Africa. I knew that when I left school I wanted to live and work in the bush permanently. So what was your first job? It was an apprenticeship with a company called Timbavati Wilderness Trails. It…

All-in-one compact cameras are all well and good, but for real creativity and control, you can’t beat a system camera. There’s no substitute for being able to fit the ideal lens for the shooting opportunity at hand, whether it’s portraits, landscapes, sports or something specialised like macro photography. D-SLRs don’t have to be big and bulky, as demonstrated by Nikon’s latest D3300 and D5500 kits – these come complete with 18-55mm VR II lenses, which have a retractable design to save stowage space. Their forebears are still on sale, too, so there’s also the option of saving cash by going for the slightly older D3200 or D5300. You could even make further savings by buying secondhand, from a retailer like Camera Jungle (www.camerajungle.co.uk), which kindly supplied a D3200 and a…

DX-FORMAT D-SLR £350, $500 www.nikon.com Nikon D3300 Key facts Image sensor and processing Unlike on the D3200, there’s no optical low-pass filter or anti-aliasing screen, which ensures better retention of fine detail. The 24.2 megapixel count is common to all the D-SLRs in the group, while the EXPEED 4 image processor enables higher maximum ISO values compared with the D3200. Autofocus The D3300 and the older D3200 use the Multi-Cam 1000 AF module. This enables autofocus with compatible lenses that have a widest aperture of at least f/5.6, and the 11-point AF coverage has a single cross-type focusing point at the centre. Continuous shooting A bit of a swings-and-roundabouts scenario, here: the D3300 has a faster maximum burst rate than the D3200, at five frames per second compared with four.…

THE VITAL STATISTICS HOW THE CAMERA KITS COMPARE On balance, the D5500 is the best camera in the group – just. Handling is excellent and the interface is wonderfully intuitive thanks to the LCD screen’s graphical shooting display and touchscreen operation. It also goes a long way to please enthusiast photographers, with a far-reaching custom settings menu for tailoring autofocus, exposure, timers and other shooting parameters to your chosen values. This is notably absent from the D3200 and D3300. The D5500 isn’t perfect, however, as we found it had a habit of slight over-exposure in matrix metering mode (a tendency also found on the D3200). The D5300 performs better in this respect, with more accurate and consistent metering, while it also pulls marginally ahead of the D5500 in most lab…