Innholdsfortegnelse for June - August 2016 i Photo Review

The other day while looking through some pictures taken on recent photowalk I found myself feeling increasingly bleak about my efforts. There were one or two mildly interesting images, but even they felt tired, hackneyed and just too much like so many other pictures I’ve made over the years. It was an awful, dispiriting feeling and not at all the sort of thing that makes you want to go out into the world with your camera. As it happened production on this issue was gathering pace and the next day I found myself looking through the images Mieke Boynton supplied for the Inspiration feature you’ll find on page 10. A funny thing happened; her pictures got me thinking about inspiration and originality and how we get our ideas. In his…

The World Press Photo awards in 2015 saw an Australian photographer, Warren Richardson, take out the coveted Photo of the Year award. It's an extremely low-light image of a Syrian father passing his baby under a razor-wire fence on the Serbian-Hungarian border, taken at night on August 28. It also took out first prize in the Spot News category. An Australian winning the award is no biggie – the winner had to come from somewhere and 'plucky little Australia' has a long heritage of matching it with the world's best in photojournalism. What made this win truly unusual was that the image was ignored by the two publications it was submitted to. No-one would have even seen it if it hadn't happened to win WPP! Warren Richardson to a certain…

Aboriginal photographer Ricky Maynard has been documenting the lives of Indigenous people and their communities, mainly in his home state of Tasmania, since the 1980s. His work is in many major public galleries, archives and private collections. He received the Mother Jones International Documentary Award in 1994 and the Australian Human Rights Award for Photography in 1997. His latest series of photos, Saddened Were the Hearts of Many Men, was exhibited at Stills gallery in Sydney in March/April. Here he talks about that exhibition, his career in general and his commitment to the ‘true richness’ photography can have. How did you initially become interested in photography? I’ve always said that photography came to me, because I left high school at 16, travelled from Tasmania to Melbourne and answered an advert…

The best way to record trip memories you’ll be proud to share is by using pictures to create a coherent story. It doesn’t matter how that story will be conveyed, as long as you have a clear idea of the highlights of the trip and which of them are best to share in the method of your choice, be it an online gallery, a slideshow or a photo book. Choosing an appropriate sharing medium will dictate the format you’ll use and roughly how many images you need to cover the trip. Images shared in photo books require much higher resolution than those shared online. Settle upon your sharing method before leaving home. This will let you decide what types of pictures you’ll record and how you will manage them while…

The $25,000 National Photographic Portrait prize, organised in conjunction with the National Portrait Prize by the National Portrait Gallery, is one of the few big awards in Australia for both amateurs and professionals in open competition. The accompanying exhibition is equally ecumenical. There were 2000 entries and 49 finalists. This year, a typically Australian scene of children skylarking in the backyard by West Australian Elizabeth Looker has taken the top accolade. It features a photo of her niece and son. (Model release forms and fees shouldn't be an issue!) Looker is a self-taught photographer who had a career in commercial photography and then took a break to raise her children. The exhibition will travel throughout Australia in 2016–17, visiting the Dubbo Regional Gallery, Lovett Gallery (Newcastle), Port Pirie Regional Gallery,…

Almost since the first point-and-shoot digicams were invented, camera manufacturers have come to the aid of novice photographers by providing pre-set exposure modes to help them select appropriate aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings for popular photographic genres. The first of the ‘Scene’ pre-sets were for portrait, landscape and sports photography. But it wasn’t long before night portrait and night landscape pre-sets were added, and it’s not uncommon for modern cameras to provide separate pre-sets covering fireworks, candlelight, sunset and dusk and/or dawn. But it hasn’t stopped there. Since camera manufacturers figured out they could ‘stack’ multiple exposures with in-camera processing we’ve seen Handheld Twilight, HDR (high dynamic range) and Anti Motion Blur modes, each of which uses multi-frame recording to create a single image with less noise, an expanded…

While Levels adjustment is often the first step photographers use for adjusting parameters like brightness, contrast and colour balance, when you want those adjustments to be subtle, the Curves control should be the tool of choice. Like Levels, the Curves adjustments are based upon a histogram, which can be globally adjusted through the default RGB channel, or each colour channel can be adjusted individually. But unlike Levels, which only provides adjustments for black, white and midpoints, Curves can be controlled with any number of points. This makes the Curves function a very powerful tool. In the dialog box for Curves adjustments, shown on this page, the horizontal axis plots the input (original image values), while the vertical axis plots the output (adjusted values). The diagonal line (curve) maps inputs to…

Get Tiny  http://bit.ly/pr68ne1 If you publish images to the web, you’re well aware of the need to keep file sizes to a minimum; after all, the smaller the file size, the quicker an image pops up in a viewer’s web browser. Unfortunately, the more you compress a JPEG to save on the file size, the worse it looks because you’re throwing away information. TinyPNG.com’s free service (up to 20 images at a maximum of 5MB each) will compress PNG and JPEG images noticeably while only minimally affecting the quality. We tried it with a picture we’d already optimised using the latest edition of Photoshop and can report our file size dropped another 20% without suffering any noticeable deterioration. Good Advice  http://bit.ly/pr68ne2 From July 2012 to October 2013, photographer Zack Arias…

‘I think I'm looking for photos that speak the loudest’ As the sun drops to the horizon and the evening clouds over Broome begin to glow in the last light, odds are that Mieke Boynton and her best mate, Banjo, will be watching it from just the right stretch of beach. She’ll be holding her remote shutter release and he, being a blue healer/kelpie cross, will likely be standing just behind his mistress. On her tripod, a Nikon D810 and a 21mm Zeiss will be angled perfectly to capture the unfolding sky show. ‘He’s the best photography dog in the world,’ Mieke says. ‘He’s very intelligent and very patient. He actually walks behind me so he doesn’t put footprints in the sand – he’s learned that I get very upset…

Photographer and videographer Michael Hurren’s typical work week is a blur of video shooting, editing, planning and even the odd spot of set-building (he’s a qualified carpenter). But come the weekend, the lifelong 4-wheel drive enthusiast is as likely as not to have an eye glued to the dust-caked viewfinder of an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II as he covers another event on the off-road racing calendar. Proprietor of Melbourne-based Filmic Productions, Michael’s commercial work is mainly focussed on the production of video clips and ads for social media campaigns from the likes of Corona and Nissan. Challenging and rewarding as the commercial work is though, the former off-road competitor’s passion for shooting dirt racing – in all its forms -- runs deep. ‘I use the Olympus a lot for…

Back in Issue 66 we challenged photographers to ‘think inside the square’. We asked for images to be cropped to a square aspect ratio – and to include something square. Frequent contributor Andy Parkee really kicked the winning goal with his square-rich soccer net study, but first runner-up Bob Todd wasn’t too far off the pace either. Robert Zappia was in an industrial mood this time around and the ever reliable Susan Shanta (whom we profiled last issue) managed to make us smile again with her windows scrubbing virus cleaners. Both Andy Parkee and Bob Todd picked up honourable mentions as well, the former for a well spotted aging fencepost and the latter for a still life with nectarines. See www.photochallenge.com.au for all selected images. WINNER Untitled by Andy Parkee…