Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine

When I’m stuck behind a slow-moving learner driver on the road, I try to remind myself not to get angry – after all, we all have to start somewhere don’t we? The same goes for Canon users, we all have to start our DSLR photography journey somewhere. With this in mind, our main Canon skills guide this month is a DSLR Starter Pack for newbies who need to get to grips with their new EOS camera and learn basic Canon camera craft. There’s also great techniques for those more advanced amateurs who need to refresh their Canon camera skills. See page 28 to get stuck in. Also in this issue, our Apprentice spends a lovely morning learning how to photograph lavender fields with great Canon pro, Guy Edwardes. From wide…

APPRENTICE NAME: GARETH COOPER CAMERA: CANON EOS 5D Mk III BASED in Deal, Kent, 47-year-old Gareth is a keen amatuer Canon photographer, who first shot with a film SLR, the Canon AV1. Later he went digital and bought his first DSLR, an EOS 350D, but it was a new full-frame 5D that was a game changer. In 2010, he became a full-time wedding photographer, but now Gareth enjoys shooting landscape, wildlife and macro photography. www.viewbug.com/member/GMCPhotographics CANON PRO NAME: GUY EDWARDES CAMERA: CANON EOS 5DSR LANDSCAPE, nature and travel photographer Guy, 43, is based in Dorchester. He has a passion for conservation and capturing the beauty of the British Isles. He’s been a full-time professional photographer for 25 years. Guy runs workshops all over the world, including lavender fields in Provence.…

PROVENCE THIS view near the town of Salt has many of the elements that make Provence so special – lavender, old farmhouses, winding roads and of course beautiful light. I shot this distant scene at 135mm on my EF 100-400mm to exclude the featureless sky. ROWS OF LAVENDER LONG rows of lavender are spectacular, but they often need a focal point to aid composition. This isolated stone barn was the perfect subject. I used a telephoto lens at wide open aperture to throw the foreground lavender out of focus, creating a feeling of depth. SUNSET FIELDS of lavender look absolutely amazing when backlit at sunset, but it’s practically impossible to capture the full range of tones in a single photograph. For this shot I blended seven exposures using the excellent…

1 Camera discipline BY CORRECTLY holding and supporting your camera, as well as your body, you will get the sharpest pictures and prolong the life of your kit. Make a “V” with the thumb and forefinger of your left hand, creating a cradle for your lens. This provides stability and minimizes strain on the mount – crucial when using bigger lenses. Tuck your elbows into your ribs, bracing your arms and keeping the camera steady. Slow your breathing and squeeze the shutter instead of stabbing it. If shooting crouched, get onto one knee and brace your elbow on your thigh. 2 Choosing color space BEFORE IT can take pictures, your camera needs to know how to colourize them. You have a choice of two formats, each with pros and cons.…

Of all the tools available in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin – or indeed in the entirety of Photoshop – the Graduated Filter is one of the most useful, especially for landscape photographs. The tool allows you to make a linear adjustment over part of your photo, creating a transitional blend of tones. Anywhere beyond the first point that is defined will be entirely affected by the tonal settings you input, with a gradual fall-off determined by the length of the line you drag. As such, it enables you to create enhancements to areas of your photos. It’s useful for balancing a scene in which one part might be darker or brighter than another. With landscapes, this can occur when we include sky and land, as skies tend to be brighter.…

“My sessions are child-led,” she says. “I see what the children want to do and then work out interesting ways to photograph it. This way the pictures are meaningful for the family and reflect their lives rather than my preconceived ideas of what would make a good picture.” One of the benefits of this approach is that the children often come up with ideas that are beyond what Helen would have imagined, as in this case with young Harry. She continues: “When Harry said, ‘let’s pour buckets of cold water over our heads’ who was I to disagree? It was hilarious, and I love his expression, laughing so much as the water pours down. I used a shutter speed of 1/320 sec, which was fast enough to capture detail but…

A passion for photography, classic literature and fine art, along with a love of landscapes and a romantic mind, all inspire me to create my photographic projects. Often a project starts with a classic novel I’ve read, and I visit The National Gallery regularly to take inspiration from the masterpieces there. My images often have a painterly feel, a softer focus that gives them a romantic mood. Once I’ve chosen what I’d like interpret, whether that be a work of art, novel or poem, I begin looking for a location. I usually visit to photograph different points in a location before going with a model to shoot. Then I put the costume together, researching period styles of the time. I design, style and make the clothes for my shoots, drawing…

How to master bracketing Discover how taking a range of bracketed shots can improve your photography Bracketing involves taking a number of shots of the same subject, but adjusting a camera setting each time to produce a difference between them. It can be done for either technical or creative reasons: for example, you may choose to try a range of different apertures to see which one delivers the best depth of field, or shift the white balance to see how it affects the overall mood. Adjusting the exposure is the most common type of bracketing. Here, each picture in a sequence is made brighter or darker than the previous. There are broadly three reasons you might want to do exposure bracketing; as a safety net to ensure you get one…

Macro lenses are one of the more popular purchases for photographers building their kit bag up. After the telephoto zoom that brings distant subjects closer, the humble macro lens makes small things appear much larger. The first time you see details in your photos that you’ve never captured before is rather special. As a short telephoto, the macro lens is also ideal to make flattering portrait photos. More than just the close-up of an eyeball, you can capture great looking pictures of the whole face or person. The telephoto has the effect of pleasingly compressing the facial features for flattering results. Being a prime lens, you’ll find the need to zoom with your feet, instead of a zoom ring. Since the field of view is constant, you’ll soon learn how…

The Canon EF 85mm f/1.4L IS USM stole the show in our super test of portrait lenses, in issue 140. It’s a big, chunky lens that combines an 85mm focal length with a wide f/1.4 aperture rating, plus a highly effective image stabilizer. Sigma’s new 105mm beats the Canon for telephoto reach, matches it for aperture width, but ditches stabilization. Dubbed the ‘bokeh master’, it aims for top sharpness across the entire image frame, along with super-smooth creaminess for defocused areas. If you thought the 950g weight of the Canon 85mm lens was heavy for a prime lens, you might be surprised that the Sigma weighs in at 1645g and comes with a tripod mounting ring. The complex optical design is based on 17 elements, laid out in 12 groups.…

(PC/Mac) £85.56/$79.99 This is very much the ‘amateur’ version of Photoshop, with a simplified, family-orientated interface and a heavy emphasis on beginners and novices, but there’s plenty here for enthusiasts too. Photoshop Elements 2018 is actually two programs not one. It consists of the Elements Organizer and the Elements Editor, which do work together but can also work as standalone programs. The Organizer can browse your photos folder by folder, but it also offers albums for bringing your photos together ‘virtually’ and some good search tools. You can add tags (keywords) in the normal way, but it also offers Smart Tags which identify common subjects automatically, saving on time. From the Organizer, you can open images directly in the Editor, which has an eLive mode for inspiration and tutorials, a…

(PC/Mac) £99/$129 Essential, £159/$199 Elite DxO PhotoLab is the replacement for Optics Pro, adding local adjustment tools to make it a more powerful all-round photo-editing solution. You use the Organize window to browse your image folders and carry out basic filtering and housekeeping tasks. It’s pretty basic, but is perhaps enough for many photographers. The Customize window is where the real editing work is done, using either preset effects or manual adjustment tools. DxO PhotoLab supports a large number of camera Raw formats except, annoyingly, Fujifilm cameras, due to technical differences with Fujifilm sensors. Lens correction profiles are applied automatically, so your corrected and optimized images are ready for export without you having to do a thing. You can also make manual adjustments, but PhotoLab quickly gets rather technical. With…

(PC/Mac) £48.99/$49.99 Affnity Photo is sold at a budget price point, but it has the tools and the features and the power to compete with Photoshop head-on. It was launched originally as a Mac-only product, but now it’s available in a Windows version too. Serif designed Affnity Photo from the ground up for professional users. It might be cheap to buy, but there’s nothing cheap about its execution. It matches Photoshop for selection, masking and layer tools, and Serif has focused particularly heavily on the retouching market, with cloning, healing and retouching tools, an Inpainting tool for automatic object removal and a dedicated Liquify persona (workspace) for localized image distortion effects. These Personas are part of the whole Affnity Photo workflow. The Photo persona is where the regular image-editing work…

MASTERING MANUAL MODE “GARETH wouldn’t always shoot in Manual mode, choosing Av mode instead sometimes, so I emphasized that controlling the aperture and shutter speed independently would give him greater control,” says Guy. “With our cameras set up on a tripod, so camera movement wasn’t a problem, I got Gareth to set the ISO to 100 for the best-quality shots, and set a narrow aperture of around f/16 for sharp scenic photographs.” BETTER EXPOSURES GUY explained the importance of referring to the histogram for better exposures. “The histogram display in Playback mode gives you an accurate guide to your exposure. Watch out for the graph ‘clipping’ either end, which means a loss of detail in the shadows or highlights. By shooting in Raw, you have more latitude to reveal detail…

01 LATIDOAMERICA BY JAVIER ARCENILLAS (LUZ) Arcenillas wanted to document the heart of uncontrolled violence in Latin America, and the social and political factors that aggressively reinforce that violence, as well as the determination to end it. His series won Third Prize, Long-Term Projects. In this image Roberto Arturo Adonay Antonio, allegedly a member of Mara 18 (an international criminal organisation that originated as a Los Angeles street gang), arrives at a pre-trial detention center in Usulután, El Salvador. Lens Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM Exposure 1/125 sec, f/4.5, ISO200 02 SACRED NO MORE BY JASPER DOEST Taking Second Prize (Stories) in the Nature category, Doest portrays the habituation of protected Japanese macaques. Here, at a tavern north of Tokyo, they perform for guests. Portrayals of famous actors and…

6 Mode du jour THE MODE dial dictates how your camera shoots. Manual (M) gives you full control of the aperture and shutter speed; Aperture value (Av) and Time value (Tv) enable you to set the former or latter respectively, with the camera automating the other. Program, Automatic, Creative Auto and Scene modes are automated. Bulb mode enables exposures greater than 30 seconds, while you can save your frequent settings to a Custom mode. 7 The ins and outs DISCRETELY PLACED on your camera body are a number of inputs and outputs for various connections. Depending on your model you can find a USB port to connect to your computer (to transfer files without removing the memory card), microphone jack, headphone jack (to monitor audio levels), HDMI port (to connect…

21 Update your firmware JUST LIKE your smartphone, it’s important to make sure that your camera is using the latest firmware. This ensures that it incorporates the latest fixes and that it remains fully compatible with all the newest lenses – and all the other kit and software that updated their firmware. 22 Co-ordinated imagery FAMILY HOLIDAYS, travel photography, location work, general file indexing – whether you’re shooting away from your home base or you just want a better way to filter and sort your images and videos, enabling the GPS functions on your camera enables you to geotag your files. You can even track entire journeys, which is great for road trips and photography walks. 23 WARNING! Extreme camera hack IF YOU really want to unlock all the capabilities…

The best child portraits usually come about when the kids are doing something they enjoy, not when being told to pose. Most kids love being in the water, so it’s a great environment to get out your camera. Underwater scenes can be wonderfully vibrant – there’s the rich blue tones, shimmering bubbles and eye-catching reflections on the surface, and then there’s the dynamic, weightless poses made possible by the water. So whether you’re on holiday somewhere hot with an outdoor pool, or you’re lucky enough to have access to one closer to home, shooting underwater photos of your kids can result in great portraits. Also, with a few inexpensive items, it’s possible to do it on a budget. But, the pool can be a perilous place for cameras, so we…

Going through an old loft or browsing the stands at a car boot sale can be a goldmine, as you discover all kinds of weird and wonderful lenses that are just begging to be given a second lease of life. On top of that, a lot of vintage lenses possess real character, from unique vignetting and bokeh to the way they render contrast and colour. Old lenses are also a great way to shoot at apertures like f/1.2 at a fraction of the cost of today’s modern equivalents. Here, we’re using a couple of M42 mount lenses. The Pentax/Asahi Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 goes for about £100 on eBay. It produces a shallow depth of field with creamy bokeh, and possesses a unique colour cast thanks to its radioactive thorium…

Sometimes, even after lots of preparation with the white balance and colour settings in-camera, your final photo can lack punch. This could come down to a variety of different factors including lighting conditions, lens flare or innate limitations in the image sensor. It’s handy, then, that you can adjust colour in such a powerful way using the handy Lightroom CC 2018. The Color panel is laid out in an intuitive way that makes it easy for even the beginner to navigate. From the top we see White Balance, Vibrance and Saturation. In Lightroom CC 2018 we also have a redesign of the Color Mixer, which makes it easier to selectively adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminance settings of any individual colour channel as you wish. If you get stuck, Adobe…

Back when I was a young boy, a visit to the zoo was an incredibly memorable event. Sixty years later, a visit to the zoo is still memorable – especially when you have the opportunity to visit Australia’s premier open-plains zoo. Recently, my wife (who is also my photographic assistant) and I visited the Taronga Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia. The 300 hectare site, originally the home to a World War Two army camp, opened in 1977 as the sister facility to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney. It’s an open range sanctuary that provides a vital role in programmes for rare and endangered species. Our goal was to get in a day of animal photography, which involved trekking the six-kilometre circuit that meanders through both natural…

Eddie Keogh Canon Ambassador, professional sports photographer and official photographer of the England football team, Eddie Keogh, gives us a glimpse in his kit bag… “The industry refers to our profession as visual storytelling for a reason” Any aspiring sports photographers believe they need to attend highprofile sporting events and travel to exotic places to take interesting and great photographs – you don’t. Despite having attended the Olympics, Wimbledon and World Cup Finals (namedrop), some of the best pictures I’ve taken have been during Sunday league football matches at my local park. To take great photographs, attitude is key. You need to get out and about as much as you can. If photography isn’t your full-time job but you want to improve, then you need to use your evenings and…

Lens Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM Exposure 1/20 sec, f/8, ISO200 The Dalesman in watercolour LIZZY THOMAS, YORKSHIRE SAYS… I was on holiday with my husband when we visited Ribblehead Viaduct. I felt the need to try and get a photo for my husband, so we stopped or rather squeezed into the side of the road, and my husband said, “I’ll give you a shout when I hear it coming.” I was distracted by some lambs in the field and started to photograph them when I heard the shout. I panicked, zoomed the lens and aimed at where the train was moving and took a few frames. When I got home I thought I had nothing until my daughter said, “that’s a pretty good one.” BRIAN SAYS… From…

Photoshop is often used as a yardstick for judging all other photo editing programs, but is that really the right way to look at them? It’s unlikely any other program will be better at being Photoshop than Photoshop is (naturally), but there are many programs that do things Photoshop doesn’t. For example, a lot of people don’t like subscription plans. It’s the only way to get Photoshop now, but many photographers would prefer to pay a single licence fee in the old-fashioned way. And while Photoshop is very slick and efficient, it does demand a certain technical knowledge that beginners might find intimidating. And it’s true that you can create almost any effect you can imagine in Photoshop, but often only with a great deal of work and expertise, where…

(PC/Mac) From £9.98/$9.99 per month Lightroom is an all-in-one image cataloguing, Raw processing and editing program that makes the perfect partner for Photoshop. Lightroom can take care of all your everyday organizing and image enhancement needs while Photoshop tackles the complex pixel-based processes that Lightroom can’t. Lightroom has the same editing tools as Adobe Camera Raw, including powerful lens and perspective corrections, local adjustments, tone and colour tools, effects, plus support for plug-ins and external editors. If your main work is photo enhancement rather than manipulation, you might not need Photoshop at all. But Adobe has made things more confusing by splitting off the ‘old’ Lightroom, now called Lightroom Classic for regular desktop storage, and introducing a new, slimmed-down Lightroom CC which stores all your photos online. With Lightroom CC…

(PC/Mac) £78 (converted)/$99.99 Photo RAW 2018 is perhaps the single most complete solution of all the programs here. It has a built-in hybrid browsing and cataloguing module that gives you fuss-free exploring of your image folders but more powerful search tools if you need them; a Develop module for processing Raw files; an Effects module with a huge library of one-click preset effects; a set of powerful Filter tools for creating your own, and even a Layers module for combining images with layers, masks and blend modes. All of this is done non-destructively, so if you want to go back at any time and tweak or remove your adjustments you can, and you can create virtual ‘Versions’ to try out different settings without having to duplicate the original image. ON1…

If you’re a newcomer to the world of Canon DSLR photography, here’s a warm welcome to the greatest hobby in the world. And if you’re already a dedicated Canon shooter, we can’t wait to show you how to get the most out of your camera. Yet the world of digital photography can be a minefield to navigate at the best of times. Ask even a seasoned Canon user to explain the difference between Adobe RGB and sRGB and you’re almost guaranteed to hear an “Um…” before they answer. So to expect a newcomer to know which colour space to choose when they first take their camera out of the box is a bit of tough one, to say the least! No matter how long you’ve been taking photographs, you can…

11 Capturing movement or creating motion WAVES ON the beach, waterfalls crashing, dancers in the groove – not all your subjects will be static. You have two choices when photographing movement: you can either arrest the motion, to capture a snapshot frozen in time, or you can create an impressionistic blur of the movement in full flow. This is controlled via shutter speed. Choosing a fast shutter, like 1/1000 sec, will freeze motion; while slowing your shutter speed right down, say to 1/20 sec, will create blur. You can also try adding flash to crystallize your frozen moment or, with dancers, to capture a sharp image at the end of your whirling dervish blur by using the rear curtain sync flash mode. 12 Back button focus YES, IT feels different…

We’ve met many readers over the years who are petrified of using lights. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as you might think. In fact, think of using lights as the best situation – as you have full control of your lighting conditions and, therefore, full control over your photos. We’re aiming to capture some still life images with really soft, gentle lighting and minimal shadows. By using Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4 flash heads with two 66cm square softboxes, we’re able to create a lovely, soft light. Always remember: the bigger the light source, the softer the light. Which means less shadows and more flattering light – great for still life, as well as portrait photos. We’re shooting a ‘flat lay’ shot. Whether for a photo of a desktop for…

Getting a successful panning shot – where you track a moving subject, panning the camera as it moves, in order to turn the background into a motion blur – can be very difficult to achieve. Just ask anyone who’s tried shooting birds inflight! Fortunately, Photoshop Elements has an incredibly powerful tool that enables you to add a ‘Speed Pan’ effect to your images. Even better, it is one of the program’s Guided modes, meaning that it’s an intelligent process that walks you through a series of simple steps that even a complete newcomer to post production will find to be rather straightforward. The effect is very convincing and will enable you to turn your static images of cars, birds and sports into dynamic action shots. Using the starter image we’ve…

THE EARLY 20th Century actor and comedian W. C. Fields once famously remarked: “Never work with children or animals!” But for London-based family photographer Helen Bartlett, children are her primary focus, “Bring them on!” she declares, and the more the merrier… How long have you been specializing in family portrait photography? About 14 years. When I started out I wanted to be a family photographer but when you’re starting out you do a bit of everything, including shooting weddings, but I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t enjoy weddings. In fact, weddings and family photography happen on weekends mostly – weekends and school holidays are my busy time – and after a certain point you’ve got to specialize, so I got rid of the weddings and it’s been 99 percent…

(PC/Mac) From £9.98/$9.99 per month So why would anyone hate what’s widely regarded as the world’s best photo editing software? One reason is that it’s become associated with underhand or unhealthy photo-manipulation, though that’s the photographer’s responsibility, not the software’s. Perhaps more importantly for photographers, it was Adobe’s decision to make it a subscription-only product. This means the only way to get Photoshop now is to subscribe to one of Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plans, which many object to on principle, even though it’s dramatically cheaper than the old ‘perpetual licence’ version (which still brought an upgrade cost every couple of years). However, Photoshop is slick, powerful and constantly improving. Its support for selections, masks and layers is unmatched, making it the tool of choice for complex composite images. That being…

(PC/Mac) £116 (converted)/$149 Alien Skin Exposure X3 is not as well known as most of the programs here, but deserves to be. It’s a subtle, powerful and efficient all-in-one photo editing and browsing tool that specializes in analog film effects and comes with a huge library of simple one-click preset effects. These are created using a combination of manual adjustments, so you can modify an existing effect or create your own completely from scratch – or you can just use Exposure X3 as a regular photo editor, thanks to its tone and colour tools, cropping and cloning options. It also supports layers and masks, so you can blend in different adjustments or even potentially combine different preset images effects. It does not support image layers, though, so you can’t create…

£289/$299, or from £18/$23 month on subscription Capture One was originally a tethered capture and editing tool for Phase One’s medium format cameras. However, it’s long since evolved into a much more powerful and broad-based standalone tool that does almost exactly the same job as Lightroom. Like Lightroom, Capture One Pro offers a database-powered image catalog with powerful organizational and searching tools. You can browse your images by folder and group them together in Collections (or Smart Collections based on search criteria). But Capture One Pro also offers a ‘Sessions’ workflow designed specifically for tethered studio photography but also very well adapted for culling, rating, editing and exporting images from a shoot. There are differences in the editing tools. Capture One Pro works in a single window rather than in…

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GPS that birdie! Following on from James Artaius’ excellent article on Geotag-you’re it (Project 4 in issue 142), I would like to share my experience with readers. I have had a feeding station in north Gwent for many years now and like all wildlife photographers you hope for that one special species to turn up. One Friday afternoon, out of the blue, I could see a bird in the distance and just could not believe my eyes! As a keen birdwatcher for over 40 years I quickly realized it was a Hooded Crow, mainly found in Scotland and Northern Ireland and certainly not on a valley’s moorland. With my Canon 7D Mk II and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L lens, I got my shot before the bird set off. I quickly contacted…