Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i N-Photo: the Nikon magazine

Slow it all down For beautiful blurry effects, shoot subjects in motion using a long exposure Fast-moving subjects require an extra-fast shutter speed to freeze the action. A shutter speed of 1/200 sec sounds fast, but if there’s any significant movement in either camera or subject, it’ll usually result in blur. One of 1/2000 sec is more suited to fast-moving subjects like birds. The problem with freezing movement is that we can lose the sense of speed that is so vital to the shot. This is why sports and action photographers will often look for ways to imply the speed, perhaps by including a spray of water, or hair billowing in the wind. Another way to give images a sense of movement is to use a slow shutter speed, so…

01 Merge the shots Go to File>Automate>Photomerge. Select Files from the menu, and navigate to your images. In the dialog, leave Auto selected and tick Blend Images Together. 02 Neaten things up When your panorama has been created you’ll see blank areas at the edges, so crop to remove these. Right-click on any layer thumbnail in the Layers panel and select Flatten Image. 03 Fill in the gaps If you have small blank areas at the edges, you can fill these with the Clone Stamp tool if they don’t contain lots of detail. Alt-click to sample pixels, and clone these into the blank areas.…

QUICK TIP The palm of your hand makes a quick and surprisingly effective low-tech alternative to using a p roper bounce card! 01 Control the exposure Set the flashgun to its i-TTL mode and it will take care of the exposure for you. It’s best to set your Nikon to manual mode, though, setting a shutter speed of around 1/60 sec and a wide aperture to stop the background being too dark. Setting ISO400 or even 800 will also help in this respect. 02 Bounce the light Check the colour of the ceiling as this can add a nasty tint to the shot; white is ideal, but off-white will do. We’re used to things being lit from above, so ceilings provide natural-looking illumination. You can bounce the flash off a…

01 Cut it out Using scissors, cut out a section of the drinks can (be careful as the edges will be sharp). Make sure it’s small enough to fit into the inside of a body cap. Push a needle through the metal until it just pokes through. The smaller the hole, the better. 02 Drill and stick Drill a hole in the centre of the body cap. It should be bigger than the pin prick. Tape your pricked metal to the back of the cap, making sure the pinhole lines up with the hole in the body cap. Attach the cap to the camera. 03 Choose a subject Anything with vibrant colour will make a good subject. The lack of a lens means there’s reduced clarity in your photos, so…

01 Full beam ahead The most important tool you’ll need for light painting (after your camera) is the torch itself. You’ll need one with a strong beam, able to reach the distant landscape. We used a 1,000,000-candle-power torch, and took extra batteries with us in case the ones in the torch ran out. 02 Make it quick To speed things up, turn off long exposure noise reduction (found in the Shooting menu on most camera bodies). Long exposure noise reduction takes a second black frame with the shutter closed to record the noise generated by the image sensor, doubling the time each shot takes. 03 Lock the focus Place your camera on your tripod. Autofocus is difficult in low light, and since the AF lamp built into your camera won’t…

01 Pixel dimensions This is the physical number of pixels that make up your image. 02 Document size The size your image will be when printed, and its resolution in pixels per inch (ppi). Most printers give their best quality at 300ppi. 03 Resample image Tick this box if the image needs to be resized (or ‘resampled’) from its current size (which might be way to big for your paper or frame) to a smaller (or bigger) size for printing. You can then type in the size you want your print to be in the fields above. There’s little loss in quality when printing smaller, but if you want a larger print than you have pixels, this comes at a price of diminished quality, as the missing pixels have to…

01 Edit on import To save you the hassle of assigning keywords to individual shots, you can add them to a batch as you import them and apply preset effects to process your photos’ colours and tones during the import process. This enables you to spend less time organising and more time shooting. 02 Face Swap This useful and easy-to-use tool enables you to combine different expressions from a batch of family portraits in a few clicks to create a composite shot in which everyone looks their best. The merged faces on our test image were seamless, and we were really impressed with the results! 03 New portrait enhancements The new Eyebag Remover automatically locates and reduces puffy areas under the eyes with a quick drag on a slider. The…

When most people think of photographing moving subjects, they assume speed is a factor – the kind of velocity that puts demands on both the camera (in terms of the shutter speed) and your ability to use it rapidly. What actually counts as fast depends to a large extent on the subject. Conventionally – and it is just a convention, no more – action that can be caught without blur at 1/125 sec is generally considered average, while speeds of 1/250 sec and above are thought of as ‘fast’. Of course, this isn’t fast for Nikon D-SLRs, which can go up to 1/4000 or even 1/8000 sec; what makes it ‘fast’ is the photographer’s own reaction time, which is something you can improve with practice. Incidentally, using Live View is…

In last month’s article on capturing the moment we saw a classic moment in photography: a horse with all four of its hooves off the ground. I say classic because it was in 1878 in California that photographer Eadweard Muybridge, commissioned by a wealthy patron, used an early form of high-speed photography to show what the eye had never previously been able to see: this precise, mid-air moment. This frozen in mid-air quality made it special, and things thrown in the air have the same quality. Put almost any photographer in front of a scene where something is being thrown a short distance (so that it stays in the frame), and they’ll try to catch the same mid-air moment, usually the peak of the parabola. There is some logic in…

Nearly 400 kilometres north of Norway’s capital city of Oslo lies Dovrefjell National Park, a vast and pristine wilderness. This is the domain of the musk ox, a stocky beast with a massive head and thick coat adapted to the worst extremes of the Arctic climate. Four years ago, Roy Mangersnes spent a week in Dovrefjell for the sole purpose of photographing and filming these impressive beasts. “The musk ox is an Ice Age giant,” says Roy. “They used to wander up there alongside the woolly mammoth, 40,000 years ago. The plan was to spend one week in the field to capture the essence of the life of the musk ox. I wanted really rough weather with gale force winds to get that shot.” Working in the first week of…

Super-telephoto lens L1180, $1400 www.nikon.com ■ Current Nikon super-telephoto zooms run up to the 400mm mark, like the 80-400mm VR and top-flight 200-400mm VR II. This new lens pushes this to 500mm, in line with the previous generation of Sigma and Tamron lenses. However, both of these independents are now making super-telephoto lenses that stretch to 600mm, so Nikon is still playing catch up in that sense. In terms of size and weight, the new Nikon falls between the Sigma 150-600mm C (Contemporary) and S (Sport). It’s a handful at 108x268mm and 2.3 kilograms and, unlike many constant-aperture telephoto zooms, the physical length increases at longer zoom settings. Fit the lens hood and the whole package extends as much as 44cm from the camera body. With its constant-aperture design, the…

THE CONTENDERS 1 Gloxy GX-F990 N TTL £130, $200 2 Metz mecablitz 52 AF-1 Digital £180, $320 3 Nikon SB-500 Speedlight £195, $250 4 Nissin Di866 MKII Professional £200, $315 5 Nikon SB-700 Speedlight £230, $325 6 Metz mecablitz 64 AF-1 Digital £300, $480 7 Phottix Mitros+ TTL Transceiver £330, $400 8 Nikon SB-910 Speedlight £340, $545 Not just there for life’s darker moments, a flashgun can make a massive difference to the quality of lighting, even under the midday sun. Indeed, they’re particularly useful for softening or eliminating unsightly shadows in sunny-day portraits. However, whether you’re shooting against a backdrop of night-time city lights, stepping indoors for some interior shots, or competing with the beaming sun, successful flash photography is all about balance. Trying to work out how much…

Quite a bare-bones affair, the SB-500 is the only flashgun in the group to lack both an LCD info screen and a zoom feature (hence the single line in the graph on the right). It also has a relatively low Gn (24), and runs on just two AA batteries instead of the usual four. Pretty much all adjustments need to be made via the host camera, and compatibility is limited with some older D-SLRs, including D2 and D3 series D-SLRs, the D50, D70, D80 and D200. One positive is that the SB-500 is the only flashgun in the group to feature a constant LED light as well as a flash. This is good news if you spend a lot of time shooting closeup stills and movies. In flash mode, you…

This is the new flagship flashgun from Metz. It has professional-level enticements including a Gn 60 power rating, 24mm to 200mm motorised zoom range, -9 to 90-degree bounce and all the flash modes you could possibly want, including a programmable repeat mode. Everything’s accessible via an oversized colour touchscreen. Other pro-level features include a sync terminal and a power input socket – the latter for attaching an optional external power pack. Unlike with other flashguns on test, flash output can be adjusted down to 1/256th instead of 1/128th, which can be helpful when using wide apertures at close range. A neat extra feature, matched only by the Nissin, is a secondary flash tube, which is great for adding a little direct flash when you’re using the main flash head in…

Photography is art, and art is all about personal expression. Armed with a camera, you have the freedom to express yourself in whatever way you choose. You can take pictures of anything and, despite what you may have heard from various competitions, judging panels, teachers or social media forums, the idea of what makes a ‘good’ photo is entirely subjective. A photo doesn’t need to be pin-sharp to be good. It doesn’t need to follow the rule of thirds, or be taken under perfect light, or have the highest number of pixels. All it has to do is to speak to you, to capture something that is beautiful, or important, or that may otherwise have been lost. Conventions and rules are there to be broken. On this the great photographers…

Compose with your heart rather than your head Challenge yourself to approach a new scene without preconceptions on how it should be photographed Here’s a true story: a landscape photographer was running a workshop and one of the attendees mentioned that he didn’t like a certain location because there wasn’t much foreground interest. Now, this was a spectacular spot (Dartmoor in Devon), but rather than attempting to capture the scene in all its unique rugged beauty, the learner concluded that a landscape photo must fit certain criteria to be any good, whether or not those criteria reflect the landscape in front of them. There’s nothing wrong with foreground interest, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the default. The point is, it’s easy to fall into a routine, to begin a shoot…

Shoot ’em up Aim straight up at buildings and structures to celebrate their bold angular shapes The most successful architecture is usually a perfect marriage of form and function, but with architectural photography we can dispense with the function and celebrate just the form. One way this can be achieved is to reduce the structure to a series of surfaces, textures and shapes. Stripped of context, the structure takes on a more abstract form. Find an unusual angle, such as looking straight up from the base of a tall building, and perhaps use a wide-angle lens to emphasise how the lines recede into the distance. You might want to try a monochrome conversion, as this helps to emphasise patterns and shapes, and can bring out interesting textures, but bold blocks…

THE MISSION ■ To photograph long exposures from a moving car TIME NEEDED ■ 30 minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Wide-angle lens ■ Car mount ■ Car NEXT ISSUE… The world in motion Shooting a long exposure from a moving car might sound borderline impossible, but the results can be spectacular. The key is to mount the camera securely to the car first. With the camera attached, the car will remain sharp in the shot no matter how much it moves around on the road, while any passing lights will blur into stunning light trails. This is great for showing off the bright lights of a big city from a totally new perspective. The easiest…

THE MISSION ■ Transform a portrait using Photoshop’s Liquify and Warp tools to turn an adult into a grumpy child! TIME NEEDED ■ 30 minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ Photoshop CS5 or above NEXT ISSUE… Create a cubist animal portrait Photoshop offers a whole bag of tools and tricks that makes pulling portraits into new shapes as simple as dragging your mouse. In this tutorial, we’ve taken inspiration from Cristian Girotto’s surreal series of portraits, which reveal the inner child of fully-grown adults. To reverse the ageing process, it’s worth thinking about the differences between a child’s face and an adult’s face. In general, children have smaller noses, less defined cheeks, chubbier features, bigger eyes and flatter…

Canon and others ▪ Make sure the image you’re going to print is set to grayscale: go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. ▪ Click File>Print and make sure Printer Manages Colours is selected. ▪ There is nothing unique to set for printing in monochrome on Canon and most other printer drivers. ▪ Go to Step 11 of our main walkthrough and the printer driver will do the rest for you. Epson ▪ It doesn’t matter if your image is grayscale or colour, you can print it as monochrome either way. ▪ Click File>Print and make sure that Printer Manages Colours is selected. ▪ In the printer driver, make sure you set Enhanced Black and White; you may also choose Warm or Cool Tone print. ▪ Go to Step 12 of our main walkthrough…

PROFILE ■ Vipul is taking stunning scenic photographs, but wants to take it further, and develop his own style. Photography was first introduced to me after I had to cut back on my favourite hobbies of painting and cooking when I started a new job four years ago. I found taking photographs was not only relaxing, but also helped me socialise away from the office, and make new friends. I think I’m able to shoot landscapes quite well, but I’m still learning how to shoot single-subject images, like solitary trees, with deep contrast. I’m currently using a Nikon D5100, mostly with the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, in combination with a Hoya R72 Infrared filter. Composition and contrast are what I concentrate on with my black-and-white images. Adding a touch of…

Modern camera sensors can now have their sensitivity amplified to almost obscene levels. A D4S, for example, can shoot at a maximum ISO of almost half a million, admittedly at serious cost to image quality. Yet with fast action in low light, this isn’t quite the solution it may be for slower, or completely, static subjects. The reason is that when the action itself becomes the subject, we want more than ever to be able to see these details cleanly and crisply. This is where flash comes in, even for die-hard flash-phobes like me. Rear-curtain flash (where the flash fires at the end of an exposure rather than at the beginning) is often the way to go if you’re shooting moving subjects in low light, because it works on two…

Really long exposures, in the order of a quarter of a minute up to several minutes, need strong ND filters of several-to-many f-stops. Most filter manufacturers produce filters in a variety of strengths, and a set of three or four will give you flexibility, enabling you to combine two or more as necessary. Here’s what you need for long exposures: ▪ A set of ND filters ranging from around three stops to about nine stops will enable you cope with most daylight situations. ▪ Tripod (needs no further comment). ▪ Always work at your lowest ISO. ▪ So as not to waste time, it helps to have a rough idea of which strength of filter to reach for first. As a rule of thumb you can start with that old-fashioned…

VERDICT For power, versatility and shooting at anything other than very close range, the Nikon SB-700 Speedlight is a clear winner. Even so, the Limelite LED panel is useful for close-ups and still life images, and it’s sufficiently affordable that you might consider buying two or three for multi-lamp set-ups that provide more illumination. Naturally, a constant light is also useful when you’re shooting video, whereas the SB-700 would be completely useless.…

Born and raised in Lincoln, Mike Maloney says his love of photography began when he received a Kodak 127 camera from his parents for his 10th birthday. In his teens he went to work as a tea boy for The Lincolnshire Chronicle, but it wasn’t long before his enthusiasm for photography gained him more attention than his tea-making… So how did the tea boy become a photographer? The Head of Advertising at The Chronicle said, “I see something very good in you. I think you’d be very good in advertising.” So I went home and told mum and dad. Dad said, “No, no, none of that nonsense. You want an apprenticeship,” because that was the logic in the 1960s. So I went into the print side as a compositor, a…

Old-fashioned picture frames are just so passé. By contrast, acrylic prints have a thoroughly modern look. We’re testing acrylic prints from six online labs, all of which offer regular photo printing as well as photo products. Typically, making acrylic prints involves creating a print and then mounting it behind clear acrylic. The result is a durable, sleek image that you can hang directly on the wall. In some cases holes are drilled through the acrylic at each corner, into which posts are inserted to lift the artwork away from the wall and create a floating effect. We’ve chosen a different method for the contenders here, in that the wall fixings are attached to the back of the prints; this enables the print to be lifted away from the wall, but…

01 Straight on With the flashgun mounted in the camera’s hotshoe and the flash tube aimed straight ahead at the subject, images tend to look rather flat and two-dimensional. There aren’t really any subtle shadows to give modelling, while the shadows behind the flowers are very dark. 02 Bounce mode Bouncing the flash off the ceiling has produced a much softer and more natural-looking lighting effect. The dark shadows on the wall have been banished, and there are some subtle shadows creeping in under the leaves to give a more three-dimensional look. 03 Off-camera For this final shot, we used the flash off-camera, connecting to the hotshoe via a coiled cable. We positioned the flashgun slightly higher and to one side of the flowers, and we added a diffusion dome…

Professional by name, the Nissin is mostly professional by nature as well. It has a full set of advanced flash modes including programmable repeat; a sync terminal; external battery pack socket; solid build quality; and some smart extras. For example, it’s the only flashgun to match the Metz mecablitz 64 AF-1 in offering a secondary flash tube for adding direct fill flash in bounce mode. There’s a colour LCD screen around the back, and the display rotates automatically depending on whether you’re shooting in landscape or portrait orientation. As you’d expect, the Nissin also supports full wireless master/slave functions. Compared with other ‘pro’ flashguns, the motorised zoom has a relatively limited range of 24mm to 105mm, but the maximum power rating of Gn 60 looks impressive, at least on paper.…

There’s plenty to get excited about in this flashgun, with its high-end features that include a full range of flash modes – programmable repeat among them. Build quality is excellent, pro-grade additions include a sync terminal and external power sockets, and the flashgun comes with a diffusion dome. The 24mm to 105mm zoom range isn’t exactly generous, but bounce and swivel run from -7 to 90 degrees and 180 degrees to both left and right respectively. Wireless connectivity gets a real boost with the inclusion of a built-in RF (Radio Frequency) TTL transceiver. This enables remote triggering of multiple master and slave flashguns without the need for a ‘line of sight’ optical path. The control panel is also easy to use, thanks to a four-way pad that’s particularly intuitive. Performance…

01 EMP, Seattle Dale Johnson, USA “In my home town of Seattle is the Experience Music Project (EMP), a museum designed by Frank Gehry and made from sheet metal in various colours. In front is a sculpture called Grass Blades, which are tall steel structures painted to look like bamboo. I cropped in tight to remove the surroundings, leaving an abstract image of colours and shapes.” www.500px.com/drjhnsn Nikon D300, Nikon AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, 1/250 sec, f/8, ISO200 02 Tczew Bridge Grzegorz Lewandowski, Poland “This picturesque bridge connects the towns of Tczew and Lisewo on the banks of the Wisla River. I was attracted to the repeating patterns in the metalwork in the morning sunrise, and the silhouetted figures added some nice detail.” www.fotosopot.pl Nikon D700, Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G…

Centre your subject We’re told never to place the subject in the very centre of the frame, but, as with all rules, there are exceptions… ‘I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport Bill Brandt One thing that often separates the amateur snap from the enthusiast’s composition is the placement of the subject. Non-photographers will often thoughtlessly plonk the subject in the middle of the frame, whereas those of us who have heard of basic compositional rules like the rule of thirds and the golden ratio know better – the subject looks more visually pleasing when placed off-centre on one of the third lines. Or does it? The answer is, it depends what you want to say about a subject. A central subject gives images…

THE MISSION ■ To shoot and stitch together a panoramic landscape image TIME NEEDED ■ One hour SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Tripod ■ ND grad filters ■ Photoshop CS5 or above Panoramas are always a big hit with landscape enthusiasts. They’re the perfect way to capture a sprawling vista without using an ultra-wide lens, or cropping your image (and therefore losing lots of data). In this project we’re going to show you just how easy it is to shoot and create stunning panoramas. To capture a panorama you first need to shoot a sequence of images, moving or rotating the camera slightly between each shot. You’ll need to use a sturdy tripod, and ensure that…

01 Suck it up! Use the mount to attach your camera to the side of your car. Make sure the surface of the car is clean first, and check that the suction mounts are firmly attached. While shooting, wrap the camera strap around your wrist, just in case anything does come loose. 02 Go wide Shoot with a wide-angle lens so the car is included in the frame. Drive through busy, brightly lit areas, such as city centres, or along motorways and other long, straight roads. If you haven’t got a suction mount, you can always set up a tripod in the back. 03 Go long You may need to experiment with shutter speed, but 4-8 secs is a good starting point. To allow for the length of the exposure,…

THE MISSION Take evenly-lit portraits indoors, and add a catchlight TIME NEEDED ■ 15 minutes SKILL LEVEL ■ Anyone can do it ■ Some tricky aspects ■ Advanced technique KIT NEEDED ■ D-SLR ■ Flashgun ■ AA batteries ■ White card ■ Rubber band NEXT ISSUE… Get to grips with intervalometers The pull-out bounce card found on most modern flashguns is perfect for achieving bright, flattering shots of people indoors when you need to work quickly. (See this issue’s Big Test on page 118 for more on bounce cards). If you’re shooting in low light you generally have three options: you can use a tripod and a long exposure; increase the ISO to shoot handheld; or add lighting. If you’re taking pictures of party-goers, forget the first option, as your…

01 Paint with colour We bought some gels to alter the colour of the light we were painting with. You could buy professional-grade plastic gels, but we used cheaper overhead projector acetate sheets to cover our torch. We found them for only ￡4 online. We fixed them to the torch with a rubber band. 02 Clip ahoy! Given the imprecise nature of light painting, the settings you use will not be clad in iron, so look at your histogram to check if the shadows or highlights are being clipped. If the graph is stacked up against the walls at either side, then this data is irrecoverable and you’ll want to reshoot.…

01 Set print size Open printing_start.jpg. Let’s make an 8x10-inch print. Click on Image>Size. Check the Resample Image and Constrain Proportions boxes. Set Resolution to 300 pixels/inch (360 if you have an Epson printer). In the Document Size drop-down, select Inches. Change Width to 10. 02 Cut to fit Now the Height is only six inches and we wanted an 8x10-inch print. You could uncheck Constrain Proportions and set the Height to 8, but this will stretch the image. You could crop some off the length of the image, or go with the reduced height and trim the paper later. We’ll go with 6x10in. 03 Resample the image Now look at the top line of the box – Pixel Dimensions: 15.4M (was 18.7M). This tells you that your image has…

A Six modules let you focus on tasks such as organising or printing. The Adjustment module enables you to reveal missing tones, correct colour balance and sharpen your shots. B Sort your files in the Library module by popping them into custom albums. By assigning keywords on import you can choose to display photos containing specific tags. C You can edit a virtual copy of your shot so that the details in the original file will always be available. D Here you can display a large image and a filmstrip of thumbnails, or jump to a thumbnail view. E The Edit module boasts the Face Swap tool, which solves the problem of family photos that are spoiled by one person blinking. PhotoDirector 7 helps you streamline your workflow and edit…

PROJECT INFO MISSION To promote the beauty of Ireland across the world and have fun with photography PHOTOGRAPHER Pawel Zygmunt AGE 35 LOCATION Old town, County Dublin, Ireland KIT Nikon D750, Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 IF EX DG HSM, Tokina AT-X 16-28mm f/2.8 Pro FX, Lee filters WEB https://500px.com/PawelZygmunt I’m a Polish-born amateur photographer currently living in Ireland. I discovered my passion for photography around ten years ago. My journey in photography started when I bought my first camera at, as we called it in Poland, the ‘Russian bazaar’. It was a sort of market place where people from the Soviet Republics sold low-quality gear made in the USSR. My first ‘proper’ camera was a Zenit 12XP. Six years later I bought my first D-SLR, a Nikon D200, with which I…

One of the most critical things about speed is its onset: how fast or unexpectedly it comes upon you. Preparedness and anticipation are both key to dealing with this, but you don’t always get plenty of warning. There are some moments that you can anticipate, yet, because of your viewpoint, give no warning for when to shoot. The shot on the right, taken in London’s Chinatown, features one of more than 80 fibreglass telephone boxes, commissioned as part of a citywide art project. In this case, there was a traditional red telephone box next to it, and I wanted to juxtapose the two. The viewpoint I chose gave a frame that was filled with phone boxes, and I felt it needed a passer-by to bring it to life. My vantage…

When you have a fast-moving subject, one critical issue is your camera position in relation to the movement. Things move slower in the frame if they’re heading towards or away from you, faster if they’re moving at right-angles to you. This falcon is a case in point: in the shot on the left, only the wing tips blur at a modest 1/250 sec with the camera steady, but in the diving sequence, it is flying at almost 100 miles per hour, and is only sharp thanks to a combination of downward panning and a shutter speed of 1/500 sec. This may make the head-on shot seem simpler to take, but focusing on a subject that’s coming straight towards you is much more demanding.…

JARGON BUSTER Key terms explained RAW FORMATS Different digital camera manufacturers use different formats when capturing an uncompressed (RAW) file. RAW files from all Nikon D-SLRs have a .NEF suffix; RAW files from some Coolpix cameras have an .NRW suffix. SIDECAR FILE Any adjustments you make to a photo in Capture NX-D are stored in a separate file. This lives in an NKS_PARAM folder in the same folder as your edited image. All Nikon D-SLRs enable you to select so-called Picture Controls, which effectively apply some in-camera processing to your images. The Portrait Picture Control, for example, gives skin a subtly smoother look, while the Landscape Picture Control boosts blues and greens. Landscape also increases contrast to help details stand out. Picture Controls such as Flat produce a photo with…

While you can shoot portraits in almost any location, having your own studio can help a photography business appear more professional. It also makes it easier to control the lighting, background and style of your images, enabling you to give your customers the images you and they want. However, a studio will bring extra costs and responsibilities compared to other types of portrait photography. HOME OR AWAY The first thing you’ll need to consider is whether you are going to set it up at your home, or rent (or buy) a separate building. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Setting up a studio in your home, whether it’s a spare room, garage or even a dedicated building on your land, can be a cheaper and easier option than…

This Metz flashgun looks pretty basic from the rear, but don’t let that fool you. Instead of featuring lots of buttons that could be hard to use or even to see in the dark, the Metz has a touchscreen. You can therefore simply poke your way around the flashgun’s extensive menu, making it quick and easy to access the settings you want to alter. Upmarket attractions include the usual bounce and swivel head with a 24mm to 105mm motorised zoom, a built-in wide-angle diffuser and a reflector card. As this is a reasonably low-budget option, it lacks the Gloxy’s programmable stroboscopic mode, but it does feature full wireless master and slave functions, which are compatible with Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. Performance As with the Gloxy, the maximum power output of…

The SB-700 boasts -7 to 90-degree bounce, full 180-degree swivel in both directions, a 24mm to 120mm motorised zoom and full wireless master and slave modes. The usual wide-angle diffuser and reflector card are built into the head, and the flashgun is supplied complete with a diffusion dome and colour filters. Cleverly, the SB-700 is also able to automatically detect when the dome or filters are fitted. The maximum power rating of Gn 38 is significantly lower than in some other flashguns on test, but we’ll come back to that later. Considering the level of sophistication in most areas, it’s surprising that you still need to select the host camera’s spot metering function to enable TTL instead of TTL-BL flash mode. Less surprising, given the relatively inexpensive price tag, is…

Nikon’s top-flight flashgun (until the new SB-5000 launches), the SB-910 includes all of the SB-700’s features, like its three illumination patterns (standard, even and centreweighted), and a visual indicator on the LCD screen for flash tube temperature. It also comes with the same extras, including a diffusion dome and colour filters, and like the SB-700 it can detect when they’re attached to the flashgun. Pro-grade additions include a sync terminal and power input socket for an optional external battery pack, greater output power and a programmable repeat mode. The motorised zoom has a range of 24mm to 200mm. The SB-910 is larger and heavier than the SB-700 but the standard of build quality feels very similar. The control panel uses a set of context-sensitive buttons for intuitive adjustments of modes,…