Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine

01 PEAK DAWN BY JAY BIRMINGHAM Jay has done a terrific job at photographing this iconic location, Mam Tor, in the Peak District. His composition is effective, positioning the horizon about a third of the way down from the top of the frame and using the wooden fence as a lead-in line to guide the eye towards the epic sunrise. He’s also done a brilliant job at retaining highlight and shadow detail in such a high-contrast scene. Lens Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM Exposure 1/6 sec, f/16, ISO100 02 GOLDEN STAG BY SAM RUSU Sam has caught an incredible wildlife photo here of a stag on a misty morning, bathed in wonderful golden light. He composition is strong, placing the stag on the left of the frame and looking towards the active…

06 Capture your adventures MOUNTAIN trekking is a wonderfully rewarding and adventurous outdoor pursuit that really gets your lungs pumping and creative juices flowing. Climb one of the world’s highest peaks, trek to Everest Base Camp or visit some breath-taking mountains such as the Scottish Highlands, the French Alps or the Dolomites in Italy for spectacular scenes. Capture the grand scale of the majestic mountains or the surrounding landscape with a wide lens to capture a true sense of your adventures. 07 Change your viewpoint CHANGE your viewpoint to capture a different perspective of your adventures. Take to the skies and shoot from the air by flying in a helicopter or hot air balloon over Cappadocia in Turkey, or wildlife roaming the Serengeti plains of Tanzania, for example. Alternatively, board…

Whether you want to capture your home, make images for a holiday rental site, help out with a house sale or simply create lovely architectural photos, interior photography is a great skill to learn. It can also be an enjoyable challenge for your camera and lighting skills. There are three key skills in interior photography. First there’s the composition. This isn’t just about picking the best camera angle and lens, it’s also about creating a clean, simple frame that shows the interior at its best. It might mean shifting the furniture, placing items in certain spots, or posing objects to create the most attractive whole. Next is the lighting. If the ambient light is good enough, then you’ve got lucky. More often than not, the ambient light will be too…

01 OPEN AS LAYERS First go through your images and select those that you’d like to use, then make any initial changes in Camera Raw. Once done, highlight the images in Adobe Bridge and go to Tools>Photoshop>Load Files into Photoshop Layers. Once open, go to the Layers Panel and click the eye icons to hide all but the bottom layer. 02 BLEND WITH MASKS Reveal the layer above and assess which parts you want to use, then hold Alt and click the Add Layer Mask icon to add a full mask to the layer. Grab the Brush tool, set colour to white then paint to reveal the parts you want. Next do the same to the layer above, then keep at it until you’ve blended the best lighting from each…

01 SIZE ISN’T EVERYTHING The RF 800mm f/11 weighs only 1260g and is 352mm when fully extended, and 282mm when retracted. It has a 95mm filter size; it’s the small f/11 aperture that’s enabled this diameter to be so relatively small, which makes the lens very portable. 02 USING AN RF 800mm To start using the RF 800mm lens you need to twist to unlock it, then extend the lens, and twist to lock it back in place. We used the RF 800mm on a Canon EOS R6, and this combination proved to be a very lightweight setup for shooting handheld. 03 SET AUTOFOCUS SETUP As we were setting out to photograph wildlife in the woods, we set up our R6’s AF using the Servo AF, AF method as Face…

Whether it’s the Red Arrows flying overhead at an airshow, the sun rising spectacularly over an amazing landscape, or the bride and groom being showered with confetti at a wedding, we often face a lot of pressure to capture that perfect moment. In our case, we wanted to photograph the famous Jacobite, also known as the Harry Potter train or Hogwarts Express, passing over the Glenfinnan viaduct in Scotland. In this project, we’ll show you all the tips and tricks we used to plan, shoot and edit the photos. You’ll discover how going the extra mile with your planning can pay off and deliver a postcard-perfect picture, and you can bring these skills to any important event you need to shoot. The equipment you use will, of course, vary depending…

If you know how to merge two photos, you can create all kinds of amazing images. It’s a useful skill, whether you want to make imaginative composites or for more everyday image editing. The standard approach when making a composite would be to use selections to isolate the subject, then a layer mask to remove the background. But this can be time-consuming. Sometimes there’s a quicker way. The Blend Options dialog lets us blend layers based on luminosity. In a way it’s a bit like a layer blend mode, but with far greater control. It’s ideal when you want to combine images like ours here, where one has a very bright background. Rather than painstakingly cutting out the person, all we have to do is go to the Blend Options…

A view of Venice David and his wife returns to the Floating City and capture its stunning landmarks In April 2019, my wife and I returned to Venice, for a three night stay. We had visited Venice one summer some years before, but because of the huge number of tourists we felt somewhat disappointed, and I vowed that we would return ‘off-season’. We visited when it was less crowded to photograph some of the sights. My prime targets were the Piazza San Marco, Rialto Bridge, The Bridge of Sighs, the colourful gondolas and any other opportunity that presented itself. On our first full day in Venice, we headed to the Piazza San Marco, hoping to get a photograph without too many people. I had made a grave miscalculation as it…

One of the biggest challenges when shooting in summer is how to deal with high contrast. The hard light of a sunny day can make it hard to take satisfying exposures, as the dynamic range – the difference between the brightest and darkest areas – is often too wide for your camera. Digital cameras have a fixed dynamic range, which means they’re capable of recording detail in areas that are several stops brighter and darker than the exposure set on the camera. On a clear day, the difference in exposure between the darkest and brightest parts of a scene may be exceed the dynamic range of the camera. There are a few ways to get around this, depending on the subject and the look you want to create. You can…

A circular polarizer is a great accessory to have in your bag when shooting summer scenes. It can cut down on haze in scenes, cut through reflections and give a boost to saturation – the perfect tool to make colourful beach scenes more vivid. This type of optical filter is not quite the indispensable tool it used to be though, as there’s a lot that you can do in RAW software to create similar results. It’s easy to darken a blue sky to make white clouds stand out, for example, or use the Dehaze setting in ACR/Lightroom to reduce atmospheric haze in photos. One thing it’s much harder, if not impossible, to replicate is the way a circular polarizer removes reflections. Use this filter when photographing at the coast or…

Process HDR images with DPP Discover how to produce images with an extended range of tones and details using HDR The human eye can see an incredibly wide range of tones in a single scene, far more than even the best EOS camera can capture. High dynamic range (HDR) photography captures a series of images at different exposures and combines them, adjusting the tonal range to create an image with an apparently greater range of shadow and highlight tones. Most Canon EOS cameras offer features to facilitate HDR photography, such as Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and dedicated HDR modes. With AEB, the camera automatically takes a series of shots, typically three but up to seven, ensuring that highlights, shadows and mid-tones are adequately captured across the image set. EOS cameras…

WEIGHING IN at only 120g, and measuring just 24.7mm in length, the Canon RF 28mm F2.8 STM is absolutely tiny for a full-frame lens – and indeed is the smallest Canon RF lens available. Given its tiny size and form factor, it is also a brilliant option for APS-C bodies like the newly launched Canon EOS R100 where it enjoys a 44.8mm equivalent focal length. Canon’s RF 28mm F2.8 STM boasts a customizable ring, toggled via a switch on the side of the lens between either manual focus or control ring mode (the latter enabling you to change exposure parameters like ISO, aperture, shutter speed). The lens construction is clever. Its six groups comprise eight elements, three of them aspherical – and featuring what we believe are Canon’s first ever…

There’s a wealth of super-telephoto zooms that you can fit to an EOS R System camera via an EF-EOS R mount adapter but, as an RF lens, the 100-500mm is naturally a perfect fit. It takes its cues from the well-established EF 100-400mm, also on test and is physically slightly longer but a little lighter. It adds an extra 100mm of telephoto reach, albeit with a slowing in aperture by two-thirds of an f/stop, to f/7.1. There’s nothing slow about its autofocus system however, which is based on dual Nano USM motors. The optical path incorporates no fewer than six UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) elements and one Super UD element, while the image stabilizer is rated at an impressive five f/stops, the effectiveness of which is further boosted when used in…

Sometimes 600mm just isn’t enough. Such as, if you’re trying to shoot small birds without getting too close and scaring them away before getting the shot, something a little longer gives you a better chance. Canon’s RF 800mm obliges with it’s extra-long focal length. It’s essentially a bigger version of the RF 600mm on test, with the same fixed f/11 aperture, autofocus and image stabilization systems. It also has a similar retractable design as the RF 600mm lens but with larger 102x282mm dimensions when retracted, stretching to 352mm in length when in use. It’s heavier too, but still very manageable at 1,260g. There’s virtually nothing to choose in image quality between the two lenses, so it really comes down to what focal length works best for what you most often…

Sigma’s flagship super-telephoto Sports prime looks pricey but it goes into competition with lenses like the Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS III USM which, at around £13,400/$13,000 are simply off the menu for the vast majority of us. At between a third and half the price, the Sigma is relatively affordable. There’s all the usual handling exotica of Sigma super-telephoto lenses, including dual autofocus modes with manual or auto priority, a three-way AF range limiter, dual optical stabilization modes, and custom modes that you can set up with Sigma’s optional USB Dock. It also adds AF-on, AF-lock and Focus recall functions with a Set button and optional audible beep. The top-grade optical path includes two FLD (Fluoritegrade Low Dispersion) and one SLD (Special Low Dispersion) glass elements. The 500mm is…

The Sigma 60-600mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports gives serious super-tele reach coupled with a comparatively huge 10x zoom range. This makes it ideal for scenarios when you need to quickly swap between standard and really long focal lengths, without the need to swap the lens on your camera body. The catch is that it’s big and heavy, weighing in at 2,700g. The optical path includes three top-grade FLD (‘Fluorite’ Low Dispersion) elements and one SLD (Special Low Dispersion) element. Fluorine coatings are applied to the front and rear elements, to repel water and grease, and the lens is extensively weather-sealed. Handling exotica is the same as in the Sigma 150-600mm Sports lens on test. Image quality and all-round performance are excellent, although sharpness drops off a bit at the…

FREE VIDEOS! In the next Canon Skills chapter… Abstract street photos Take lovely shots of coastal wildlife Wonderful windmills and landscape photo tips  New Photoshop CC and Affinity Photo image-editing guides PLUS ALL THIS… The Apprentice: Canon pro David Clapp teaches our reader to take top coastal shots in North Cornwall Profile: Siân Elizabeth, brilliant beauty and portrait photographer Super Test: We put eight standard zoom lenses through our lab tests ISSUE 207 ON SALE 25 JULY 2023 * Content subject to change…

BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE ON YOUR TABLET, PHONE, PC OR IN PRINT Limited back issues of PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine print editions are available on our new MagazinesDirect.com secure store at www.magazinesdirect.com/photoplus-magazine-single-issue But if you’ve got an iPad, Android, Kindle or Nook tablet, or iPhone or Android smartphone, you can download PhotoPlus back issues from the following digital edition options: • Got an Apple iPad or iPhone? Get the free PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine app in the App Store or at bit.ly/photoplus_app then browse through our back issues or subscribe through the app. • Kindle Fire or Nook HD? Simply search for PhotoPlus on Amazon’s Newsstand or in B&N’s Nook store. • Windows or Mac? Use Zinio to read PhotoPlus on your laptop or desktop computer or via the app! Go…

When it comes to travel, holidays and adventures, visiting the greatest places on earth with your camera is one of the biggest pleasures. Witnessing and capturing these incredible sights on a voyage of discovery is what travel photography is all about. Travel and adventure photography go hand in hand where the journey and destination can be an equally exciting experience with endless opportunities for creativity. The world’s your oyster in terms of its variation of landscapes, locations, and scenic wonders. Whether you visit new or familiar locations at home or abroad; travel to famous monuments along well-trodden paths; go beyond your comfort zone to extreme environments or explore your local patch, everything is an adventure worth capturing with your Canon EOS camera. Picture-taking opportunities can arise anywhere you are sightseeing…

11 Composition is king FRAMING an image well can make the difference between a good image and great one. There are several tools that work well in photography. Using the rule of thirds where objects in a scene are placed on a third of the frame, such as a horizon line, with two thirds landscape below and one third sky above can result in compelling images. Another option is to frame your subject within a frame or to use a leading line that takes the viewer’s eye to the main subject. 12 Work with the light I FIND natural light works best when capturing travel photos. Some of the best times of day to capture your travel images are during the golden hour when the light is softer and the…

Lens Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS USM Exposure 2 secs, f/11, ISO100 In 2016, I had the chance to go to the American South-West to assist in running a photo tour. Although I’m from the south-west of England, the location is completely unknown to me, yet seems familiar, probably from my wanderings in other deserts around the globe. The area in America encapsulates Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, with many of the photographic wonders in each state. This means a lot of miles, crossing into different states and stopping to take photographs at any time of day. The trip starts out with our flight arriving into Las Vegas. I have Chris and another David with me. We delight in our rental 4x4 and its ridiculous size, looking like the photo branch of…

01 TRIPOD With a static scene like an interior, we are free to light it in segments over several frames. Lock the camera on a tripod and move around the scene popping the flash. An easy way to fire it is to set up a selftimer to take 5 shots with a couple of seconds between each exposure. 02 CAMERA SETTINGS Our camera is set to manual exposure with aperture f/11, shutter speed 1/100 sec and ISO200. This gives us a good base exposure for the outdoor scene, but leaves the interior looking dim. From here, we can use our flash to lift different parts of the interior so it balances with the exterior. 03 FLASH HEAD Our flash is a single Godox AD300 head with a large parabolic umbrella,…

THE STAR of our interior scene here is the ornate fireplace, but during the shoot we weren’t able to light a fire. Thankfully, we can add a few flames later on in Photoshop with relative ease. First find a suitable photo of flames (we found a free image on Pixabay.com, search for image no.1241199) then copy and paste it into your image. Go to the Layers Panel and change the Blend Mode of the layer to Lighten, then hit Cmd/Ctrl+T to transform it and resize and position it in the fireplace. Next add a layer mask and paint black to hide any parts of the layer you don’t want to include. Finally, make a new layer, drag it below the flames layer and set the Blend Mode to Overlay. Grab the…

01 EXPOSURE: f/11, 1/40 sec, ISO3200 Fixed at f/11, when I was shooting in dark forests, I stuck trying to shoot at 1/40 sec. If I had an aperture of f/5.6 available, I would’ve been at 1/160 sec, or this would increase to more manageable 1/320 sec on an f/4 telephoto lens, or even faster at 1/640 sec on a top-pro f/2.8 lens. 02 EXPOSURE: f/11, 1/160 sec, ISO12800 The RF 800mm forces you to whack up the ISO in an attempt to get faster shutter speeds. I resorted to an ugly ISO of 12800 just to shoot at 1/160 sec. You can get away with ISO3200 and 6400 on cameras like the R6 without horrendous noise, but there’s a loss in image quality any higher. 03 EXPOSURE: f/5.6, 1/160…

01 TRIPOD FIXED IN POSITION When it comes to special landscape events such as a sunrise or train passing through, a tripod is great for locking off the composition and focus. For events like a wedding, though, you probably want to shoot hand-held to be more free-flowing. 02 LENS CHOICES We shot from high up on a hill to get an angle looking down on to the Glenfinnan viaduct where the train would be. We used a 70-200mm, but had it set to 70mm for a more loose composition, so we had more chance of including the steam in the shot. 03 CANON EOS CAMERA A camera with a high frame rate, such as the EOS R6 or R5 with their 20fps bursts, would definitely help capture high-speed events. Luckily,…

Part 20 of a series Before colour film, hand-tinting was a specialist job. Painters would painstakingly add splashes of colour to prints, or – in the case of moving images – directly on to the roll of film using tiny brushes. These days, we can add colour to our old photos by using a simple Photoshop technique. The Colorize filter can do much of the work for us. As one of the recently introduced Neural Filters, it uses artificial intelligence to recognize people and objects in a photo, then colour them accordingly. Like other automated tools in Photoshop, the command works brilliantly on some photos and less so on others. But even if the results aren’t perfect, the filter gives you a solid starting point for more manual edits. As…

01 PASTE AND POSITION Open Blend_1.jpg image, and hit Cmd/Ctrl+C to copy, then open the Blend_2.jpg pic and hit Cmd/Ctrl+V to paste them onto the sweet jar image. Drop the opacity of the top layer to position it. Grab the Move tool and use the bounding box to resize and reposition them. 02 USE BLEND OPTIONS Bring the layer opacity back up to 100%. Click the cog icon on the Layers Panel to open the Blend Options. In the Source Layer Ranges box click a point about 3/4 of the way along the line to anchor it, then drag the right point down as shown. 03 DODGE TO HIDE The majority of the background is now hidden, but there’s still an impression of the box our subject is sitting on.…

I am a very keen Canon amateur photographer who takes photos of steam trains in my local area, south Devon. Railway photography has been a passion of mine for many years. I enjoy taking photographs of all types of trains, both diesel and steam, but my main interest is steam trains. There are many great places to photograph mainline steam tours that are well worth going to. Every year we get some nice steam trains coming down on the mainline. Taking railway photos gives me an excuse to get out, to meet other photographers and to get more photos that I enjoy doing. My rail photography project gives me the chance to take more than just one photo. When I am waiting for the steam tour to come I will also…

A GROWING number of Canon EOS cameras allow you to save images as HEIF files rather than JPEGs, which gives you a little more dynamic range to play with. Shooting RAW files captures an even wider dynamic range, allowing you to pull back some detail in highlights and shadows that might otherwise have been lost. There are some in-camera functions that can buy you a little more detail in dark and bright areas. Auto Lighting Optimizer (ALO), a staple of EOS cameras since 2008, will automatically modify the shadows and highlights in high-contrast situations. But it doesn’t work with RAW files, and if you’ve used exposure compensation to make the image darker, then ALO may try to make things bright again – in which case you might wish to disable…

Summer is all about colour, whether it’s deep blue skies, vibrant accessories for the beach or summer food. Colour can be the foundation of a composition too, with blue, green and other cool colours receding in an image, and hot colours such as red, orange and yellow drawing a viewer’s eye into the image. If you shoot RAW then you’ll give yourself the most flexibility to edit the colours when you process your files. With JPEGs and HEIF files, you’ll need to play with the Picture Style setting in-camera to find a result that suits the subject. It might be tempting to select a more saturated colour profile, such as Landscape, but if you plan to make further edits in Lightroom, DPP or your preferred editor, then the Neutral and…

HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE TIPS The dynamic range of Canon EOS cameras is quite good, especially when shooting RAW images, so make sure you select at least 2EV when capturing images for HDR. It helps to work with AdobeRGB colour space for natural HDR scenes, because this has a wider range of green and blue tones than sRGB, so is ideal for our woodland scene. 01 CAPTURE BRACKETED IMAGES Select Aperture Priority mode, then enable AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) with an increment of about 2-stops. Set Drive to high speed, so images are captured as close together as possible. Press and hold the shutter and the desired bracketed images are captured. If using HDR mode, choose auto or +/-2EV for the dynamic range adjustment. 02 START HDR PROCESSING IN DPP With…

The Falls of Dochart TOMMY SIVES, DUNBAR, SAYS… I’ve been a keen amateur photographer for a number of years, with a pull towards all things water, including seascapes, rivers, waterfalls and lochs. I like long exposures to convey the movement of the water, and I keep an eye on tides and rain to heighten my chances of capturing any drama that unfolds. I’ve recently acquired a second-hand EOS 5D Mark IV, which allows me to get closer to the water than my old crop 70D would with the same lens. I wanted to get as low as possible without losing the flow of the river in the background. BRIAN SAYS… Getting down low has really helped your shot and the 16mm lens certainly gets a lot in the frame. A…

Less than a quarter of the price of Canon’s RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM zoom and much more compact and lightweight, the newer RF 100-400mm is a tempting proposition. Apart from the Tokina mirror lens, this one is the smallest in the entire group and, at just 635g, it’s little more than half weight of the competing Sigma and Tamron 100-400mm lenses. Typical of Canon’s non L-series lenses, the RF 100-400mm doesn’t have any weather-seals and the hood is sold separately, but build quality feels solid and there are plenty of enticing features. Autofocus is driven by a Nano USM motor which is super-fast for stills and delivers smooth focus transitions for movie capture. There’s a 5.5-stop optical stabilizer, boosted to 6-stop effectiveness with R system cameras that feature IBIS,…

A step up in telephoto reach from 70-200mm f/2.8 ‘trinity’ zooms, this is something new for Canon, delivering a lengthier zoom range but retaining a relatively fast and constant f/2.8 aperture. It’s not altogether ‘new’ though, as we’ve seen Sigma APO 120-300mm F2.8 EX DG OS HSM and its replacement Sigma 120-300mm F2.8 DG OS HSM Sports lenses in the past. Now obsolete, both of these lenses have come and gone. The Canon lens is nearly a kilogram lighter than the Sigma Sports lens, although still weighty at 2,590g and much more pricey. Highlights include super-fast Dual Nano USM autofocus, 5.5-stop optical stabilization and top-class L-series build quality and handling. It’s ideal for indoor or floodlit sports, wedding and event photography but has less telephoto reach than any other lens…

From the Sports sector of Sigma’s Global Vision line-up, this lens aims for all-out performance, with no concessions to compactness or keeping the weight off. As such, it’s noticeably bigger than the Canon RF 100-500mm on test, and weighs in at 2,860g. As you’d expect, the Sports lens incorporates all of the features from Sigma’s lower-priced 150-600mm Contemporary model. You therefore get dual autofocus modes, dual stabilization modes, a two-position autofocus range limiter switch and two custom modes. With these, you can alter autofocus speed, the amount of the stabilization effect that’s visible in the viewfinder, and more besides, via Sigma’s optional USB Dock. As well as being physically more imposing, the Sports lens has a more robust build. Its barrel and hood are made from metal rather than plastic…

There’s fairly little colour fringing with all of the lenses on test, throughout their respective zoom ranges. The EF 100-400mm is the worst of the group at its shortest focal length, but gives barely any colour fringing at mid to long zoom settings. As with own-brand Canon lenses, the Sigma lenses on test are compatible with in-camera correction for lateral chromatic aberration, further boosting their effective performance.…

Proving that super-tele primes can be small, lightweight and inexpensive, this Tokina is only a fraction of the price of all the other lenses on test. But there’s a catch. As a reflex or ‘mirror’ lens, it has just six optical elements, three of which have mirrored surfaces that bounce the light backwards and forwards in the relatively short barrel. As a ‘dumb lens’, there’s no electrical connection to the host camera. Indeed, the same lens is sold with a variety of different mounting plates to suit various cameras, including Canon EF, EF-M and RF options. Focusing is purely a manual affair and the aperture is fixed at f/8. Manual focusing is easy with mirrorless R-system cameras, thanks to the availability of a bright viewfinder image at f/8 and help…

What to look for Canon EOS camera ranges Canon splits its EOS range into mirrorless cameras and DSLRs. Its older DSLR line-up includes beginner, enthusiast and pro ranges; the EOS 4000D is the most basic, the 850D for intermediates, the 90D and full-frame 6D Mk II for advanced enthusiasts, and the full-frame pro-level 5D and 1D lines. Over the page are the two EOS mirrorless ranges: Canon’s smaller, older APS-C EOS M cameras, and Canon’s EOS R System APS-C and full-frame cameras that offer the very latest digital technology. The APS-C crop-sensor EOS R50, R10 and R7 are smaller, affordable entry-level options. While the EOS R8 up to the R6 Mark II, R5 and flagship R3 are full-frame for serious enthusiasts to professionals. Canon’s EOS R cameras are packed with…

Letter of the Month I’ve been buying PhotoPlus for about six months now, as a keen beginner and Canon EOS 90D user, it’s proved very useful in helping me understand how to use my rather complex camera! I like taking photos of pretty anything when I venture out and about. I have nice scenic spots near me up in the Brecons, and photogenic buildings and coastal places nearby, but still need to learn to take better shots of it all! I really enjoy your great Apprentice articles when someone gets to spend a day learning new photo skills under the guidance of an experienced Canon professional photographer. How I can maybe become a PhotoPlus Apprentice? David Reece, Cardiff Nice to know we’ve helped you with your 90D camera, David, and…

APPRENTICE NAME PETER LAU CAMERA CANON EOS R5 PETER HAS a passion for nature stemming from an active outdoor lifestyle and was a firefighter for 25 years. In 2014, a mountain bike accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. Ever since, he’s been determined to prove that photography is a hobby everyone can enjoy. He uses an electric Triride to go into environments you wouldn’t think would be possible on a wheelchair. Peter is also a wildlife support officer with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and works with Accessible Nature UK to improve access to outdoor places. www.accessiblenatureuk.com 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…

01 Shoot a destination you enjoy MY FIRST tip is to simply capture a location you enjoy. The world is full of awe-inspiring destinations from Machu Picchu in Peru to the Taj Mahal in India, the Mayan temples in Mexico and the Grand Canyon in the USA. I encourage you to visit that place or site you have always wanted to go to. The excitement of visiting and shooting the location you have been longing to visit will inspire you to capture and bring home some images you can be proud of. After all, you only live once. 02 People pictures WHEREVER we go, there are many subjects we can photograph on our travels. People are often one of the most difficult subjects to capture, but one of the most…

16 Neutral Density filters BY USING an ND filter over the lens, you can reduce the amount of light entering the Canon camera’s sensor. This is a good way to slow down the shutter speed to create movement in an image. For this shot of Mont Saint-Michel in France (above), the shallow sea is beautifully blurred, while keeping everything else sharp. By shooting in low light, the ND filter enabled an even longer exposure of 30 secs. 17 Exposure compensation SOMETIMES the contrast can be difficult to manage in a single exposure, especially when framing travel shots into the sun. By applying negative exposure compensation, you can reduce the amount of light hitting the sensor and effectively capture more detail in the highlights. This can be used to creative effect…

01 FIND THE MAIN POI It can be tricky to determine what to include and leave out. Take a moment to identify the key points of interest (POI). It might be a sweeping staircase or an ornate piece of furniture. Here it’s the fireplace with the painting above. To make it more inviting we put logs in the fireplace and added flames in Photoshop. 02 DON’T GO TOO WIDE There’s a temptation to use your widest focal length and try to fit everything in, but it can lead to distortion. You’re often better off zooming slightly and picking out key features of the room. You don’t need to show everything. It is fine to crop into objects – a corner of a bed, or the edge of a table, is…

Until recently, a super telephoto 800mm lens fixed at f/11 wouldn’t have been possible. This is because Canon EOS DSLRs simply won’t work with a lens at a minimum f/11 aperture as it can’t let enough light into the AF sensor for the AF to function properly. But thanks to the more advanced AF in the latest EOS R mirrorless cameras, and their EVF (Electronic Viewfinder which brightens your view of scenes you’re shooting) an f/11 fixed aperture lens is possible. So Canon created the unique RF 600mm and 800mm F11 IS STM super telephoto prime lenses! It’s this narrow f/11 aperture that’s enabled Canon to make these lenses much smaller, lighter and cheaper, and the RF 800mm is impressively light and easy to shoot handheld, without any worries about arm…

WHEN using Canon’s RF 600mm/800mm lenses, only a central boxed area of the screen is usable for AF, so you have to make sure your subject is central in the frame. With high-pixel images from the R6 or similar, you can always crop your images later to position subjects to one side of the frame for a better composition. An 800mm prime might seem unwieldy, at double the focal length most of us have ever used, but you soon get used to what distance to set up to frame up your chosen subject, even if the closest focusing distance is six metres! While the RF 800mm enabled us to get a tight composition of this squirrel, at f/11, it could only manage a slow shutter speed of 1/40 sec at ISO3200…

Lightroom Classic’s masking has become one of the most useful features from the big changes in version 11. With those came the opportunity to mix and match different masks. The big features are Select Sky and Select Subject, but you could miss how useful the ability to invert these becomes. But what is masking? It is a way of telling Lightroom Classic where you want your settings to apply. With Select Subject and Select Sky, it’s obvious, but Color Range and Luminance Range are not. Essentially, these let you target a specific colour or brightness. In this case, we’ll look at targeting specific colours in a background. At the same time, you’re preventing them from interfering with skin tones or clothing tones in your subject. The result looks complex, but a…

01 NEURAL FILTERS The Colorize command is part of Photoshop’s new range of Neural Filters. These employ machine learning to analyse objects and people in photos. Colorize not only recognizes and isolates faces, but also determines the ethnicity and colour of a person’s skin. It does this by analysing millions of photos, building up a database of common features, then recognizing particular features. 02 PREPARE YOUR PRINT Old photos can be very low resolution, so try the Super Resolution command to upscale them. To use Super Resolution, right-click the image in Adobe Bridge and select Open In Camera Raw, then rightclick and select Enhance. Hit OK, then Done. To fix washed-out tones, open the image in Photoshop and try Image>Auto-Color. Go to Image>Mode to ensure the image is in RGB.…

01 SUNSET AT THE BEACH Alex spent a relaxing evening by the coast in south-west England, photographing Penny the Dalmatian playing in the sea during a beautifully colourful sunset Lens Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM Exposure 1/2500 sec, f/3.2, ISO160 HELLO ALEXANDRA. Tell us about your journey. How did you get into pet photography? In my mid-teens, I would often take pictures of my own pets and those of my family and friends. I’ve always loved and been fascinated by pets and wildlife. However, it wasn’t until my last year of university that I discovered my true passion for pet photography. For my final project, I decided to combine my love for animals and photography by capturing dogs in beautiful landscapes, and spending hours planning and creating each shoot. After…

THE ELECTRONIC viewfinder of an EOS R or EOS M mirrorless camera is a significant advantage for shooting on sunny days, as it’s possible to monitor the Live View feed, play back images and make menu adjustments without having to deal with distracting screen glare on the rear screen. If you are using the rear screen of an EOS DSLR to take photos, activate Highlight Alert (via the blue Playback menu) as well as the Live Histogram, as that will make it much easier to judge the exposure in bright light. Your camera may be able to automatically adjust the brightness of the LCD, but switching to manual and increasing the brightness to its maximum setting will ensure that you always have the best possible view in bright sun light.…

"I want to buy an EOS R6 Mark II, but what are the limitations if I keep my large collection of EF lenses? "Andy Fisher, Knighton BRIAN SAYS… Use the EF-EOS R Mount Adapter and your EF lenses can be used perfectly well with any EOS R-series camera. The EF-EOS R Control Ring Mount Adapter adds the EOS R additional control ring in a consistent location for all EF lenses. Some older EF lenses reduce the maximum continuous drive speeds. There are only four EF lenses compatible with the camera’s panning scene mode and focus bracketing has a limited range of usable EF lenses, mostly macro lenses. EF 70-200mm lenses can be used with extenders, which is not possible with the RF versions. For general photography, EF lenses are more…

The Canon EOS R100 could well be the affordable, easy-to-use entry-level camera you’ve been waiting for. Something simple enough for you to capture your treasured family memories, as easily as you would on a smartphone, yet advanced enough to help you grow as a photography student or amateur. Indeed, the Canon EOS R100 is a camera easy enough for first-timers to take great images in auto, but reveals its real strengths when you take it into semi-automatic and manual modes to start getting creative in ways that just aren’t possible on a smartphone. The R100 replaces the bestselling Canon EOS 250D (Rebel SL3) budget DSLR as well as the Canon EOS 2000D (Rebel T7) and stands as the cheapest entry point into the company’s EOS R mirrorless camera system. Priced…

Canon’s original 100-400mm IS USM lens was launched all the way back in 1998, with film cameras firmly in mind. It continued to be highly desirable with the advent of digital SLRs, both for fullframe and APS-C format bodies, having an effective zoom range of 160-640mm on the latter. It now has a twist-action zoom ring in this second edition. Weather-seals were also added. The optical path includes top-grade fluorite and Super UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) glass, and is more sophisticated than in the original lens, with four additional elements. As with some of Canon’s more recent top-flight lenses, high-tech ASC (Air Sphere Coating) is featured, plus fluorine coatings on both the front and rear elements. Another neat feature is the triple-mode image stabilizer. As well as the more usual switchable…

Unlike many wide-angle and even standard zoom lenses, super-telephoto lenses. For the zoom lenses on test, the Canon EF 100-400mm gives the worst barrel distortion at the short end but it’s still pretty minimal, and they all have slight pincushion towards the long end. The Sigma 150-600mm Sports has particularly negligible pincushion throughout its entire zoom range, and the Sigma 500mm prime is virtually distortion-free. The Canon RF lenses rely much less heavily on auto correction than some others in the range.…

This is an astonishingly compact and lightweight lens for a 600mm prime, partly due to a retractable design that shrinks the physical length down from 270mm in its operational configuration to just 200mm for stowage. At 930g, it’s also easily manageable for even long periods of handheld shooting and, indeed, it lacks a tripod mounting ring. Other major factors enabling the downsized design include the use of diffractive optics and a relatively narrow aperture rating of f/11. Given that you’re unlikely to want to shoot at a narrower aperture than this, Canon has saved further weight, complexity and expense by not including an aperture diaphragm. Controls are basic, with just an AF/MF switch linked to the STM (Stepping Motor) autofocus system, a Stabilizer on/off switch and an autofocus range limiter…

This Sigma lens measures 86x182mm and weighs 1,160g, making it noticeably shorter but heavier than its direct competitor from Tamron. Handling is very refined but, unlike with the Tamron counterpart, Sigma doesn’t offer a tripod mounting ring. The build feels robust and has a weather-sealed mounting plate. The optical path includes four SLD (Special Low Dispersion) elements, autofocus is of the fast yet whisper-quiet ring-type ultrasonic variety, and the 4-stop image stabilizer has a switchable panning mode, for panning in any orientation. Image quality is very sharp in the 100-300mm section of its zoom range, and doesn’t drop off much at 400mm. The wealth of switchable modes and customisable options boosts real-world handling and performance, making the lens a great buy at the price.…

Tamron’s first 150-600mm lens was a pretty good buy at the price but the G2 (Generation 2) edition is better in every way. The optical path has been redesigned and now features three LD (Low Dispersion) elements whereas the older lens only had one. A new mix of coatings features both regular and nano-structure varieties, and a fluorine coating is added to the front element. The G2 also features more extensive weather-seals and better build quality. The autofocus system is uprated for greater speed and accuracy. Autofocus proved rather better at tracking moving objects, more in line with the competing Canon and Sigma lenses. There’s another headline upgrade for the Vibration Compensation system. Not only does it deliver superior 4.5-stop effectiveness, but it gains three switchable modes. These now include…

Smaller and barely more than half the weight of the Tamron’s 150-600mm lens on test, this lens goes toe-to-toe with Sigma’s 100-400mm zoom. It’s almost identical in terms of zoom and aperture ratings, although the Tamron can focus marginally closer at 1.5m instead of 1.6m, with a larger 0.28x maximum magnification ratio. Both lenses have ring-type ultrasonic autofocus systems and 4-stop stabilizers, with switchable panning modes. Whereas the Sigma has a three-position autofocus limiter switch for locking out the short or long end of the range, the Tamron has a single ‘Limit’ position on the AF/MF focus mode selection switch. This limits the autofocus range on one side of the current focus distance position or the other. Image quality and all-round performance are impressive but edges-harpness is lacklustre at the…

PRICES QUOTED ARE BODY-ONLY UNLESS STATED APS-C EOS M CANON EOS M200 CANON’S EOS M200 is aimed at attracting Instagramers and smartphone upgraders to Canon’s mirrorless M range, and has an appealing spec list including its 24MP sensor and plenty of easy-to-use features for beginners. It shoots 4K video to seal the deal. TESTED IN ISSUE 194 PRICE with 15-45mm kit lens: £570/$549 Sensor 24.1MP APS-C CMOS Viewfinder No ISO 100-25,600 (51,200 exp) AF 143-point AF LCD 3-inch tilting touchscreen 1040K dots Max burst (buffer) 6.1fps Memory card SD/SDHC/SDXC and UHS-1 CANON EOS M50 MARK II IF YOU’RE coming to the EOS M system afresh, the EOS M50 Mark II is a compact and capable camera, taking great stills and 1080p video, ideal for travel, everyday imaging, plus vlogging and content…