Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine

Do you remember when 10fps seemed like a super-fast continuous shooting speed? I was in awe when shooting at 10fps with a new EOS-1D Mark III back in 2008. I felt like I was armed with a machine gun as I rapidly photographed superbikes on a racetrack. But EOS camera fps speeds move quickly. The electronic shutters in the EOS R5 and R6 mirrorless introduced 20fps last year, but now the new EOS R3 sporting hero offers an eye-wateringly fast 30fps. It was great to gets my hands on the R3 and shoot with it, and you won’t believe the incredibly clever AF, especially the new Eye Control AF. Read our comprehensive review on the EOS R3 on page 86. Learn all you need to know to make the step…

MANUAL MODE OLIVER SET his and Matthew’s EOS R5 and R6 cameras to Manual mode, so that they could dial in exposure settings without them being affected by the cameras built-in metering systems. This meant that if the light changed, their images would become brighter or darker, which meant that checking the rear LCD for a decent exposure was crucial. They also set up Raw shooting to give them a little leeway if the exposure was off when it comes to post. KEY CAMERA SETTINGS ALTHOUGH SHOOTING at sunrise, Oliver likes to go to areas that are still in shade, as once insects, like dragonflies and damselflies, are hit by the sun they start to warm up and become much more active, which makes sharp shots and focus stacks much…

MATTHEW’S COMMENT Oliver’s insight and knowledge with the macro insect world is so comprehensive and I was happy to soak it all up like a sponge – I didn’t think I could learn so much in a single day! While I’m an amateur wildlife photographer and can photograph mammals and birds no problem, I’ve always found it difficult to get good results with close-up images. I had invested in a ringflash kit to help me take macro images, but watching Oliver get amazing results with just natural light means that I’ll be selling it all as soon as I get home! Thank you so much PhotoPlus for the incredible experience, after the session I now feel like a more well-rounded wildlife photographer and look forward to putting my new skills…

The full picture DIGITAL FULL-FRAME sensors are so-called because they’re close in size to old 35mm film, hence the title ‘full’ frame. Full-frame Canon EOS cameras, like the EOS R5 and 5D Mark IV, have 24x36mm sensors, however Canon also makes DSLR and mirrorless cameras with a smaller APS-C sensor, measuring 22.3x14.9mm. These smaller sensors still produce fantastic image quality superior to bridge cameras and smartphones – that have even smaller sensors – but they still fall short of full-frame. When using lenses on any of Canon’s APS-C cameras, such as an EOS 90D or 7D Mark II, you’ll need to multiply the focal length by 1.6x to work out the focal length equivalent, as the sensor is smaller your lenses will feel more zoomed in. Whereas with full-frame, you…

Canon EOS 5D Mark II around £280 CANON’S 5D Mark II was way ahead of its time when it launched in 2008 for £2299. You can now pick it up for about 10 per cent of its original price, as we’ve seen some used models online for £280! With a 21.1Mp sensor and dated specs, it’s long in the tooth now, and we suggest finding the extra money if you can to upgrade to the 5D Mark III for better quality of life and tech improvements. But if you’re on a strict budget, or would rather put your money towards lenses, the 5D Mark II is a good deal. Canon EOS 5D Mark III around £599 LAUNCHED ALMOST a decade ago, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark III is still a remarkable…

01 EMBRACE THE SUNLIGHT Why not embrace the hard light look? Ask your subject to turn their face to the sun and lift the chin, so that the eye sockets are not in shade. Look for butterfly lighting under the nose (where the shadow cast by the nose forms a butterfly shape). 02 USE FILL FLASH We can use a flash to gently fill the shadows on a sunny day. Our flash should be close to the same angle as the camera. A hotshoe-mounted Speedlite can also work well. Try using the flash in ETTL mode and Spot metering to set the exposure off the face. 03 LOOK FOR NATURAL BOUNCE Look for sunlight bouncing off bright surfaces, like white walls. Bring the subject’s face in close to the surface,…

There are three main parameters that make up your camera’s exposure: aperture is the diaphragm of blades inside the lens that open or close to let in more or less light, then you have how long the shutter is open for, shutter speed, and lastly you have ISO values. ISO stands for International Standards Organisation, the company that standardized values of light sensitivity for rolls of camera film back in the day. In modern digital cameras, ISO has a similar function, but you don’t have to switch rolls of film to achieve different ISO speeds as digital cameras allow you to do all of this at the press of a button. ISO determines how sensitive your camera’s digital sensor is to light. A low ISO value, such as 100 (the…

STEP 1 EXPAND YOUR ISO Canon cameras usually have hidden ISO values. On our 6D Mark II we went into the Shooting Menu (red camera menu) and chose ISO Speed Settings, then went into ISO Speed Range and set the lowest to L(50), which is a full stop lower than base 100. We set the Maximum to H2(102,400), one and a third stops more than the native ISO40,000 tops out at – it’s a great way to give yourself more shooting options. It’s also worth opening your aperture as wide as possible and using a tripod or monopod as well as Image Stabilisation to get a sharp image. If you’re shooting handheld boost your ISO until you have a shutter speed of 1/100 sec to give yourself a decent chance…

01 CANON EF 16-35mm f/2.8L This lens covers everything from ultra wide 16mm to standard wide angle 35mm, making it ideal for classic landscapes. It also has a wide maximum aperture of f/2.8 – great for those low-light scenes. 02 CANON EF 24-70mm f/2.8L This is a souped-up kit lens for full-frame DSLRs with a versatile zoom range of 24mm wide angle and 70mm short telephoto, all at f/2.8, so it’s great for everything from portraits to landscapes. 03 CANON 70-200mm f/2.8L Some landscape scenes work best when you zoom in with a telephoto lens like a 70-200mm. This lets you pick out interesting scenes within the scene, and compress the perspective as well.…

If you find it hard to choose your favourite shot from a series of similar images, then consider how this was even harder in the days of film. One of the methods used to check and compare shots back in the day was a contact sheet. This was a handy way of displaying an entire roll of film on a single sheet of paper, and in times gone by it was an important part of the creative process for photographers. While it might be obsolete in practical terms, it’s still an interesting visual effect to try. Here we’ll pay homage to the contact sheet and show you how to recreate the look on a sequence of shots in Affinity Photo. We’ve supplied a contact sheet template, see download link below,…

As well as being able to crop images that you’ve taken in software, your camera may also allow you to resize and crop photos in-camera that have been saved as JPEG or HEIF files. You’ll find these options in the blue Playback menu, although cropping is not available on some models. Resizing simply reduces the pixel count of the image and allows you to save it as a new image at a smaller file size. That can be useful if you want to share images online when you’re on location, for example. But it doesn’t help with the framing and composition. Cropping does allow you to alter the look of a photo, though, and if your camera offers post-shooting cropping, you’ll be able to choose the aspect ratio, and change…

BEING ABLE to display a grid in the viewfinder of a DSLR is useful, as it allows you to check the image is level on the fly, rather than having to activate Live View and look at the rear screen. By the time you’ve done that, the moment for a picture may have passed. The black lines of the grid can be hard to see though, particularly when you’re taking photographs of a dark scene or shooting in low-light situations. But here’s a trick: take your finger off the shutter release button and press the AF point selection button. Not only will it make the AF points glow red, it’ll also light up the grid lines too. PART 7 Next issue: Get creative with colour using your Canon EOS camera…

BRIAN SAYS… Focus peaking and the focus guide are both used to achieve accurate focus when manual focus is used. You need to select manual focus on the lens, or in the camera menu if you lens doesn’t have an AF switch. Focus peaking and the focus guide must be enabled from the AF2 menu on your camera. Focus peaking adds a coloured overlay over the parts of your shot that are in focus. You can choose red, green, or blue overlays. As you adjust the focus the highlight changes to show what is in focus. The focus guide is an AF target that you can place in the frame. It uses three triangles to show whether your focus is in front of or behind the subject, and changes to…

What is the ratio setting on the Canon Speedlite 430EX III-RT used for? Adam Joinson, Hemel Hempstead BRIAN SAYS… Speedlites like the 430EX III-RT that can control other units with radio or optical wireless make it simple to control the balance between two or three groups of flashes. Sender units on the camera control group A and group B remote units independently. It’s common to use group A to light the subject from one direction, and group B from another. If the Speedlite on the camera also illuminates, it is included in group A. The ratio control determines which group is the main light and which is the fill light. The scale runs from 8:1, 4:1, 2:1 and the same in reverse. 8:1 means group A would be 3-stops brighter…

After being rolled out to select Canon pros at the Tokyo Olympics this year, the new Canon EOS R3 speed demon is now available to professionals at large – and Canon’s latest mirrorless camera threatens to be the most capable all-round tool for working pros today. While it’s not technically a replacement for, or even an equivalent to, the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III (as this is ‘only’ a 3-series camera rather than a flagship 1-series), it technologically leapfrogs the 1D X Mark III in virtually every department. It also stakes a bold claim as the best professional camera thanks to its 6K Raw video, blistering and blackout-free EVF, 30fps shooting, and its peerless AF system that now enables you to move focus points by simply moving your eyeball. There’s…

Macro lenses are generally designed to be high-precision technical optics. As such, they’re usually ‘flat field’ lenses that have no field curvature, so if you shoot a flat object from front-on, the whole of the surface covered by the image frame should be rendered sharply. Similarly, distortion is usually very minimal or virtually non-existent, especially with macro lenses that have a focal length of 60mm or more. As our graph shows, however, there’s a slight variance of barrel and pincushion distortion amongst the lenses on test.…

What to look for Canon EOS cameras Canon splits its EOS DSLR lineup into entry-level, enthusiast and pro ranges; the 4000D is the most basic, the 850D and 77D for intermediates, the 80D and full-frame 6D Mk II for more advanced enthusiasts, while the 7D, full-frame 5D and 1D lines have pro-level features. With more expensive models, expect greater handling, more robust build quality (weather-sealing and magnesium-alloy shells), more advanced features, and full-frame rather than APS-C image sensors. Over the page, we also have the full-frame EOS R mirrorless cameras, the EOS RP as an ‘entry-level’ and more affordable option, the EOS R and R5 for serious photographers. Plus not forgetting Canon’s smaller compact system (also mirrorless) APS-C EOS M camera range. ENTRY-LEVEL CANON EOS 4000D TESTED IN ISSUE 140…

Choosing lenses Key factors to watch out for THE MAIN factors to consider in a lens are its focal length, maximum aperture, and whether or not it’s full-frame compatible. We’ve categorized lenses by focal length range – from wide-angle to telephoto. The larger a lens’s maximum aperture, the ‘faster’ it’s considered to be. Zooms are more flexible than primes, but tend not to have such fast maximum apertures. Full-frame lenses will also work with ‘crop-sensor’ EOS DSLRs, but crop-sensor lenses aren’t compatible with full-frame cameras. For Canon EOS R System mirrorless cameras you need dedicated Canon RF lenses. Contacts Canon www.canon.co.uk Peleng www.digitaltoyshop.co.uk Samyang www.samyang-lens.co.uk Schneider www.linhofstudio.com Sigma www.sigma-imaging-uk.com Tamron www.tamron.co.uk Tokina www.tokinalens.com Zeiss www.zeiss.co.uk…

01 WINNER JUVENILE RED KITE BY EDWARD PAYNE This is a wonderful animal portrait with the red kite looking directly down the barrel of the lens. It’s also full of sublime autumnal colours and leaves that perfectly complement the bird’s brown feathers. Edward’s framing works terrifically well, placing the subject right in the middle of his composition making for an unforgettable shot. Lens Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM Exposure 1/1000 sec, f/2.8, ISO250 02 GANNET BY NICK CLAYTON Nick’s done a stellar job at isolating this beautiful gannet from its background with a long telephoto 500mm lens and wide aperture of f/5.6. His focus on the gannet’s eye is spot-on, and the shallow depth of field has blurred the foreground and background into a fantastic wash of colour,…

Give it a road test IF YOU’RE able to test the camera in person before buying a used model, take the opportunity to look for any major dents or dings and scratches on the camera screen. Don’t be too worried about scratches to paintwork on the body, as this is usually just superficial, but can be a good bargaining chip to push the price down a little bit. If you’re buying from an online store, like MPB or Wex, they usually do a good job at showing the camera from several angles and listing any sort of damage. Take pictures with the camera to make sure it’s all working as it should and that the mirror isn’t faulty on DSLR cameras. You could also take a picture of a bright…

One of the golden rules for portrait photography is that you shouldn’t shoot people in direct sunlight. Without clouds to diffuse it, the light from the sun is very hard-edged. We’re likely to get strong shadows over the face, squinting subjects and greasy hot spots on the skin. As such, many photographers would put the camera away, wait for cloud cover, or come back at the magic hour. However, the sun can be a wonderful source if we know how to work the angles and manipulate the light. The main challenge with direct sunlight is the strong contrast it creates in our subject. The difference between the brightest and darkest part of the subject is so great that the shadows can look impenetrably dark. We need to find a way…

01 RETOUCH THE SKIN Hard sunlight portraits tend to require more retouching, because the hard light more clearly shows pimples and rough patches of skin. To fix this, open in them Photoshop and make a new layer then grab the Spot Healing Brush tool, set it to ‘Sample All Layers’ then paint to remove small any small imperfections. 02 REDUCE HOT SPOTS Direct sunlight can create oily-looking hot spots on skin. Make a new layer, then grab the Brush tool, hold Alt and sample a nearby skin colour. Hit 3 for 30% brush opacity, then paint over the hot spot. Try reducing the layer opacity a bit, set the blend mode to Darken and add a touch of noise with Filter>Noise>Add Noise. 03 TRY A MONO CONVERSION Portraits in sunny…

Having a good quality lens is arguably more important than a good camera body. This is especially the case when it comes to landscapes, as features like 4K video, high burst rates and in-body stabilization aren’t hugely essential, however a super sharp and fast lens are. While landscapes are synonymous with wide-angle lenses, rules are made to be broken, and, indeed, standard focal lengths and even telephoto lenses can produce outstanding results. In fact, many working Canon professionals favour telephoto lenses for landscapes over wide-angle optics, as your focal point is more easily lost within a wider field of view. The focal length of your lens is easily explained: the lower the number, like 16mm, the wider the field of view. While the higher the number, like 200mm, the narrower…

Creating the perfect blend of colours or the correct exposure can be tricky – especially when you have to edit around uneven tree lines, or a messy mixture of tones. However, there’s a way to make specific edits without hours of painstakingly brushing in masks. When using the Radial Filter, Graduated Filter, or Adjustment Brush in Adobe Lightroom Classic, you have the option to introduce a Range Mask into the mix. A Range Mask gives you the ability to limit your adjustment to a certain set of qualities. There are three possibilities: Luminance, Color and Depth. But we’ll specifically be looking at how to use Color and Luminance in this Lightroom editing tutorial. You can download the Lightroom_before. jpg image, or use one of your own shots to follow along…

There are lots of tools in Photoshop and Lightroom for adjusting the look of your black and white photos and most of them are easy to get the hang of. In fact, more often the challenge lies in committing to a certain monochrome look, especially when there are so many sliders and settings to choose from. Should you go for this bold contrasty look? Or will a subtle matte effect be more suited to your photo? How about adding a vignette? Or opening up the shadows? Or dropping the blues? And so on. It’s the age-old editing conundrum: stick or twist. Thankfully there are features that can help you overcome image-editing analysis paralysis. One such tool is Profiles. They’re ideal for monochrome lovers, as they give you one-click treatments in…

01 MAKE A BOX Open the supplied contact_sheet.png file into Affinity, then go to Document>Rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Next, we’ll create frames to snap each of our images to. Grab the Rectangle tool from the toolbar and drag a shape over the top left frame. 02 COPY THE RECTANGLES Get the Move tool, hold Alt and drag the rectangle to make a copy. Position this over the next frame. Keep Alt-dragging to make copies for each of the frames. After, drag the bottom layer to the top of the stack, so the film border is in front of everything else. 03 MAKE A CHILD With the Move tool, click on the first frame to select the relevant layer. Pull a shot into Affinity. It’ll appear as a layer above the…

More advanced EOS cameras, including the EOS R5, EOS R6 and EOS 5D Mark IV have an additional ‘Add cropping information’ function available in their Custom Functions menus. This allows you to select an alternative aspect ratio from a selection of options based on popular medium-format and large-format film cameras, such as 6x6cm, 4x5-in and 6x7-in. The main difference between this collection of aspect ratios and the ones that you can select in the main menu is that the image is always saved at the original 3:2 aspect ratio, regardless of whether you’re shooting JPEGs or Raw files. Two vertical lines will be displayed on the image as a guide to the new aspect ratio, but you’ll always be able to see the full image. When you open the image…

One of the very first things they teach you in Composition School is to make sure the horizon is level. To help with this, many EOS cameras come with an electronic level that shows if the camera is tilted. You can reveal the level by hitting the INFO button to cycle through the different info screens. It can also be viewed on the rear screen during Live View shooting or in the electronic viewfinder of a mirrorless camera. Although it’s easy enough to correct the level in postproduction – it takes just a couple of seconds in Lightroom or Photoshop to rotate an image, after all – it’s better to get it near-perfect in-camera. Doing it digitally, after you’ve taken the shot, will inevitably lead to the image being slightly…

Our Canon expert Brian explains how to update the firmware of your camera to get all the latest and greatest features Macro pictures of natural subjects deserve special treatment to showcase the details and delights that nature provides. Canon’s Digital Photo Professional is a great tool for extracting the max quality from Raw files. DPP works with the capability of every EOS camera’s Raw files, drawing the best from them, while retaining their true representation of the natural world is easy with DPP. When working with hi-res images, DPP simplifies the process of converting Raw in to fabulous finished shots. The main tools to refine your images are sharpening, contrast, and saturation. These are delivered by choosing an appropriate Picture Style and, where needed, adjusting of highlight and shadow detail…

BRIAN SAYS… With the camera default settings, the AF points or group of points are displayed in the viewfinder as black squares. For one-shot AF, points that are in focus change to a larger square once focus has completed and locked. If you use Servo AF, then AF points continuously update as the camera or subject moves. The camera can illuminate the AF points with a slowly flashing red light. In low-light conditions the red light briefly illuminates the AF points to make them clearer to see once focus is locked with one shot AF. For Servo AF, the AF points won’t illuminate, but you can turn this on. Press the Q button when in the VF illumination menu to enable the illumination with Servo AF. The result is a…

MATTHEW BUTCHER, YORK SAYS… I took this photo of a common seal on a day trip to Ravenscar, North Yorkshire. It took some time to get close enough, even with a zoom lens, to get the shot. My patience and quietness were repaid when the seal obliged with this pose. Having got the shot, I gently backtracked away so as not to disturb the seal any further. The shot was taken using Aperture Priority, and with manual focus. I used Photoshop Elements 2020 to process the image, adjusting the contrast brightness and saturation levels, then cropping the shot to focus on the seal. BRIAN SAYS… There’s a lot to like about this photo. You did well to get close enough, and I like the expression on the seal’s face that appears…

Whether you shoot sports, weddings, portraiture, wildlife or news, the EOS R3’s blackout-free EVF, 30fps stills, and 6K Raw video mean that you never miss a moment of action or detail. While the improved AF performance, coupled with ghostly-good Eye Control AF, ensure that every shot is focused exactly where you want it. The choice of split CFexpress / SD cards for memory is the only real foible, as the slower speed of SD inhibits things like 4K 120p and clashes the 30fps shooting down to 24fps – and doesn’t play well with buffering. As for the 24.1Mp resolution sensor, it feels pitch-perfect for the sports and news photographers this camera is squarely aimed at. 50Mp is great, but if you’ve ever had to upload hundreds of hi-res files to…

To test real-world performance, we use lenses in all sorts of lighting conditions, for indoor and outdoor shooting scenarios. We check for good build quality and handling, smooth and precise operation of all controls, and we test the speed and accuracy of autofocus. We typically test full-frame compatible EF lenses on a range of full-frame and APS-C format bodies, whereas EF-S lenses that are designed specifically for APS-C format bodies are only tested on cameras like the EOS 90D and 7D Mark II. EF-M and RF lenses are tested on respective EOS M and EOS R type mirrorless bodies. In-camera corrections for chromatic aberrations, distortion and peripheral illumination are disabled throughout testing, this helps reveal the true performance of each lens. We also run a full range of lab tests…

As with distortion, levels of colour fringing are minute with the macro lenses in this test group. Lateral chromatic aberration is generally negligible, even towards the extreme edges and corners of the image frame. Naturally, this can be automatically corrected in-camera or when editing Raw files in Digital Photo Professional, when using recent and current Canon cameras with own-brand lenses, as well as with the Sigma 70mm Art lens.…

What to look for Canon EOS mirrorless cameras When it comes to choosing mirrorless EOS cameras over DSLRs, there are pros and cons to consider. Canon’s full-frame EOS R cameras are packed with the very latest tech including IBIS, Animal AF and 20fps via the electronic shutter in both the EOS R5 and R6. Without the mirror, R bodies are smaller than their DSLR equivalents (but only a fraction lighter). Compared to Optical Viewfinders on DSLRs, using an R’s Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) is slower to focus due to lag and refresh rates, yet focusing via Live View with AF points all over the touchscreen is better. EOS R cameras can also use the next gen Canon RF lenses and their superior image quality (and superior size), but most R cameras…

CANON PRO NAME: OLIVER WRIGHT CAMERA: CANON EOS R5 BASED IN Garforth, Leeds, Oliver has embraced Canon’s latest mirrorless full-frame cameras, now shooting fantastic macro imagery of wildlife, plants and flowers with his EOS R5. A climbing accident back in 2010 was the catalyst for Oliver realizing his passion for photography, in particular wildlife. 11 years later and Oliver runs events with Canon and promotional videos. He’s had multiple highly commended images in the British Wildlife Photography Awards and is the perfect pro to teach Matthew about macro. www.oliverwrightphotography.com APPRENTICE NAME: MATTHEW FARRUGIA CAMERA: CANON EOS R6 MATTHEW IS a student dispensing optician in his final year, from Peterborough, and loves to get out and about with his newly acquired Canon EOS R6 full-frame mirrorless camera. He’s an amateur wildlife…

BANDED DANDED DEMOISELLE THE SUN was rising behind some foliage, which softened the sun and it allowed me to capture one of my favourite insects with the sun rising behind it at the same time. DEWY DAMSELFLY THIS WAS a stacked shot during the heaviest dew I have seen this year. I love how the compound nature of the eye is magnified in the drops and also how the grass background is refracted. AMETHYST DECEIVER FUNGI I LIKE this image as an example of why macro can be worked on all year. Here, I gently illuminated the mushroom with a small LED panel to make it pop against the forest floor.…

If you’ve been into photography for any amount of time you’ll likely be familiar with the term ‘full-frame’, which refers to the size of the digital sensor being close to that of a piece of old 35mm film. So if you’re not shooting on a full-frame camera does that mean you’re not getting the ‘full’ picture? In short, yes! In this guide we take a deep dive into what makes full-frame so special and why professionals love to shoot with this larger digital format. Full-frame chips are huge! Canon’s full-frame sensors are about 160 per cent larger than it’s more budget-friendly APS-C counterparts, and over 21 times larger than a 1/2.5 inch chip, which is found in many smartphones and compact cameras. Canon makes its own bespoke full-frame sensors for…

Lens compatibility CANON HAS two full-frame lens mounts for its digital cameras, EF and RF for its DSLR and mirrorless cameras respectively. Be sure to pick up lenses that fit your camera before purchasing to make sure it’s all compatible. EF-S lenses won’t be compatible with Canon’s EF mount and EF-M lenses, for its mirrorless APS-C cameras, won’t be compatible with the full-frame RF lens mount. Whether you’re buying Canon or 3rd party optics, be sure they’re for EF or RF mount to avoid any heartache. EF to EOS R mount adapters WITH MORE people switching over to Canon’s full-frame EOS R System mirrorless, a lot of photographers are using the Canon EF-EOS R Mount Adapter to use the EF lenses with the new mirrorless RF mount. EF lenses tend…

Be prepared. A scouting motto, but also a mantra for a successful photographic career. I can’t tell you the amount of times I have changed angles entirely on a shoot, but when opportunity comes knocking for you, it is foolish not to grasp it. I have run yearly photographic experiences shooting Cappadocia’s incredible landscape since 2016. I've also seen the demographic of tourists change considerably, all because of viral posts on Instagram highlighting an impossible dream – styled shoots with beautiful girls wearing flowing dresses, surrounded by a hundred balloons, bathed in luscious golden light. Alongside the salt pools at Pamukkale and the mosques in Istanbul, Cappadocia is a premier export for Turkey’s tourism industry. The desert landscape is made of layers of sedimentary rock, the fallout from no less…

01 FLASHES WITH SUNLIGHT Some might think of flash as a tool to use for extra light in dim conditions, but bright sunlight is one of the best times to bring out a flash. The flash gives us lots of creative options, as we can use it to create dynamic cross-lighting like this, or gently fill in the shadows for a more natural look. 02 CROSS LIGHTING The key to shooting portraits in the sun is to reduce the contrast over subjects. The flash lets us do this by filling in shadows. Our subject has her back to the sun, so it creates bold highlights along the edge of her figure. Positioned opposite, the flash lifts the shadows on the face and body. 03 EXPOSE FOR SUNLIGHT The sunny f/16…

WHEN SHOOTING flash-lit portraits in sunlight it can be tricky to blur backgrounds. The problem is our shutter speed which, when coupled with a flash, is often restricted to a max flash sync speed around 1/200 sec. If we use the sunny f/16 rule (page 45), then with a shutter speed of 1/200 sec, even if we drop to ISO100, we could only open the aperture up to f/11, which isn’t wide enough for a shallow DoF (as the inset image below shows). The solution is to use a flash capable of high speed sync. This pulses the flash, enabling higher shutter speeds and wider apertures (1/4000 sec with aperture f/2.5 in the shot on the right). There are catches – camera and flash have to be compatible, and it…

CANON’S LATEST cameras give you plenty of JPEG and Raw image quality options. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the group that created the now standard digital image format. Raw, on the other hand, isn’t an acronym, it literally means the ‘raw’ data straight out of the camera as it isn’t compressed or processed in-camera. On our Canon EOS 6D Mark II body a large JPEG file was just 1.4MB, while the highest quality Raw file was 24.7MB, so you have more exposure data to play with when editing. VIEW THE VIDEO WATCH VIDEO ONLINE http://bit.ly/pp_184_2…

01 ULTRA WIDE ANGLE Super wide and fisheye lenses will capture big scenes, making it possible to include foreground, midground and background. But you need to get closer, and they’re prone to barrel distortion at the frame edges. 02 WIDE ANGLE Zooming in to 35mm, we still have a wide angle of view, wider than 50mm (equivalent to what the human eye can see), although we lose much of the barrel distortion seen at super-wide focal lengths. 03 ‘STANDARD’ FOCAL LENGTH 50mm is often called ‘standard’, as it has a similar angle of view as the human eye, meaning images look more natural. Anything below 50mm is considered wide angle and anything above is called telephoto. 04 TELEPHOTO Telephoto lenses help you zoom into the frame and bring distant objects…

01 CHOOSE YOUR TOOL Select the Graduated Filter, Radial Filter or Adjustment Brush tool and make your selection. We used the Graduated Filter tool to lighten the dull grey of the background, however, we wanted to ensure that the bird remained untouched. 02 USE LUMINOSITY RANGE MASKS To ensure that the adjustment tool only affected the background, we went to the Range Mask drop down menu and selected Luminance. Then, we used the Eyedropper tool to select the background, so that only those tones are affected. 03 REFINE YOUR SELECTION Using the Eyedropper tool affects the Range slider. You can then manually adjust this slider until you’re happy with the results. The larger the range, the more of your selection will be affected by the adjustments you’ve made. 04 EXPERIMENT…

01 OPEN INTO CAMERA RAW Navigate to your image in Adobe Bridge, right-click and ‘Open in Camera Raw’ (or if you’re in Photoshop, go to Filter>Camera Raw Filter). Go to the Basic panel and click the Profile Browser grid icon at the top right. This houses all the profiles in different sets. 02 CHOOSE A B&W PROFILE Scroll down to the B&W Profile set and hover over the profiles to see how they affect your image. Each will affect colours and contrast in various ways. We’ve chosen the B&W Orange Filter profile, which makes the yellow grass bright, contrasting with the hippo. 03 ADJUST THE AMOUNT Each profile effect has an amount slider that lets you control the strength (except the Adobe Raw and Camera Matching sets, which are only…

PHOTOGRAPHY WAS not Christian Anderl’s first choice of career. Among his seven previous jobs were roles in hotel management, architecture and a host on Austria’s leading radio station. He also had a stint in military service. Now firmly established as one of his country’s best-known portrait photographers, does Christian think any of his former jobs had a positive impact on his photography? “All of them did in one way or another,” he replies. “Interesting photographs tell interesting stories, so I guess everything you go through, learn or experience can only improve your photography and your ability to tell better stories.” Of greater significance was the day nearly 10 years ago when a doctor told him that he might not have long to live. Christian was in his mid-30s when he…

In part six of our series: We’ll explain how you can use your Canon EOS to help compose perfect pictures When it comes to arranging the elements in a photo, the things you choose to leave out of the frame are just as important as those you include. This means that the size and shape of the frame itself is one of the fundamental choices that you need to make before you take a shot. By default, your EOS camera records images with aspect ratio of 3:2. The aspect ratio can also affect the resolution, as anything other than the full 3:2 option will reduce the number of pixels used to record a photo. With a JPEG, the aspect ratio that you choose is what you’ll end up with when…

One useful in-camera tool that can help with framing a shot is the Grid Display function. This enables you to superimpose a selection of grids over the image that can help you to line elements up, keep vertical and horizontal lines straight, and work out where to place objects within the frame. It’s widely available across Canon’s EOS range of cameras, although with some models there are fewer grids and if you’re shooting on a DSLR then it may only be visible when using Live View mode. Some advanced DSLRs, such as the EOS 90D and 5D Mark IV, enable you to show the grid in the viewfinder. To activate this, head to the ‘Viewfinder display’ option in the yellow Set-up menu. You may also be able to display the…

IF ONE thing can help to make life easier when it comes to composition and framing, it’s getting an unobstructed view of the image. The optical viewfinders used in Canon’s DSLRs are bright and clear, but the Live View display (and the EVF in a mirrorless EOS camera) has a few advantages. For a start, they are brighter in low light and you always see 100% of the image. Well, I say 100% of the view – with all the info displays activated, there’s a lot of detail to see past. Activate the electronic level display screen, for example, and you may also get the histogram along with all the other shooting info too. You can edit the detail displayed on these screens though. Look for ‘Shooting info disp’ in…

SPEED UP YOUR WORKFLOW You can reduce the amount of adjustments in DPP with a good choice of settings in the camera. For Picture Style, you want to pick Fine Detail – a little extra sharpening for natural history macro shots is a good idea. If your camera has a clarity setting increase this too for improved micro contrast that helps enhance details. CANON DPP SOLUTIONS 01 SELECT THE RIGHT PICTURE STYLE Picture Styles determine how colour, contrast and sharpness are applied to a Raw image. DPP uses the camera setting set value, and many photographers use auto. Fine Detail was newly developed for the 50Mp EOS 5DS and, in my view, has better colours than the Standard style. Once selected you might want to adjust shadow and highlight settings.…

In-camera multiple exposure combines two or more separate shots to make a combined image. Multiple exposures hark back to the days of shooting several frames on a single piece of film. It’s one of the rare situations where you can create a single Raw image that would not be possible any other way. If your camera doesn’t have the multiple exposure function, you can use DPP or Photoshop to combine your individual frames. Some cameras have a basic multiple exposure capability with average and additive blending, but more advanced models also have dark and brightness blending modes. Some devices allow up to nine frames to be combined, and you can use an image from the memory card as a base image. More advanced cameras have two different modes of multiple…

01 Canon RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM An affordable tele zoom for EOS R cameras £699/$649 www.canon.co.uk YOU’RE looking at a new compact, versatile and competitively priced RF telephoto zoom lens for Canon EOS R-series shooters wanting to capture sports and wildlife without breaking the bank – or their back. At 79.5x164.7mm in size and weighing only 635g, the new RF 100-400mm is more portable than Canon’s existing Canon RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM, and four times cheaper! Yet it still offers up 5.5 stops of optical image stabilization and a Nano USM focus motor for smooth, fast focus. 02 Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM Light on the pocket, and fits in it too! £319/$299 www.canon.co.uk MEET CANON’S first ultra-wide RF-mount prime lens; a super-small, super-fast, super-light and super-affordable lens…

With such a tight DoF in macro photography, it’s impossible to get three-dimensional objects sharp all over, unless you employ some trickery. The technique of focus stacking enables you to shift the point of focus throughout a series of shots, which you then merge together to form a single composite image. You generally need to alter the focus manually, or use a macro focus rail like the Manfrotto pictured, but some Canon cameras, including the 90D, RP, R5 and R6 have an automatic focus bracketing feature built-in. What’s more, later versions of Digital Photo Professional (V4.10 and above) have a Depth Compositing function, which can take care of the merging process.…

Canon delivers with its new RF 100mm macro. Build and handling are fabulous and the Spherical Aberration control ring and oversized 1.4x magnification, and spectacular image quality take it all to another level. But it only works on EOS R-series mirrorless cameras. Same goes for Canon’s RF 85mm, which is superb if you can settle for a 0.5x max magnification. For full-frame and APS-C DSLRs, the Canon EF 100mm L-series and Tamron’s 90mm are top optics. The Canon is sharper in general shooting, but the Tamron draws level for close-ups and is less expensive. If on a tighter budget, the Sigma 105mm is the choice. It has a regular stabilizer, but works well for general shooting, sports and wildlife photography. Tokina’s 100mm atx-i 100mm is a more conventional macro lens,…

Letter of the Month In the 1980s I purchased a range of new Canon FD lenses for my AE program camera. I loved the detailed, rich images and the solid, beautifully damped action with quality glass, which I enjoyed using into the 1990s. With the age digital and autofocus, I put the lenses away, but could not find satisfaction with any new camera. Thankfully, mirrorless Canons came to my rescue. My wife (bless her) found my old FD lenses and, after research, I bought a used, but perfect, Canon M5. I learned that adaptors with lenses can affect the images, but Fotga have created an adaptor that allows the detail and rich colours to shine. Infinity focus is available (at the end of the focus stop on all lenses) and…