Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i PhotoPlus : The Canon Magazine

HOT IN THE CITY TONIGHT Discover creative new ways to take better travel photos with our lucky Apprentice who shot picturesque Amsterdam. Page 8 The UK is perfectly positioned for a quick hop to Europe’s best destinations, and from any number of airports you have access to some of the most photogenic and historical cities in the world. This month, along with our game Apprentice and seasoned travel pro Matt Parry, we headed to Amsterdam for a quick city break in search of stunning shots. We certainly weren’t disappointed, as it’s overflowing with beautiful Baroque buildings, medieval architecture, picturesque canals, and among the coolest people on the planet (note: it’s easy to avoid the seedy side of the red light district and overindulging tourists). See page 8 onwards. Also inside…

CANON PRO NAME: MATT PARRY CAMERA: CANON EOS 5D MARK III MATT is an award-winning travel photographer whose images have been published in leading travel and photography publications. Now 38 and based in Middlewich, Cheshire, he’s visited over 50 countries across six continents, and his passion for photography evolved from a way to showcase his trips to become the driving force behind where and why he travels. You can see more of his images at www.mattparryphotography.com APPRENTICE NAME: PAUL MARTIN CAMERA: CANON EOS 6D FROM Nottingham, 34-year old Paul works for a major credit card systems company. He’s only been into photography for three years but has progressed from a point-andshoot compact to bridge cameras, and now has upgraded to a full-frame Canon EOS 6D DSLR. He asked for our…

The term ‘selfie’ has been bandied about for a few years now and, with the popularity of these digital self-portraits growing fast, you don’t need to look far to find a smiling shot of your nearest and dearest gazing into the camera of their smartphone. And with selfies all the rage on social media, even celebrities are posting poses for all to see. Although we typically think of selfies as taken on a smartphone with a one-click garish filter applied, there’s no reason why you can’t construct your own self-portrait with your DSLR. In this project we’re going to show you how to shoot a selfportrait with a difference by taking two shots – a self-portrait and a portrait of your beloved pet – and merging them together to give…

The biggest problem with portrait photography, whether taken in a studio or at home, can be finding a great background. Without this key element, your people pictures can look somewhat sterile, or worse, suffer from distractions behind your subjects. What is needed is a realistic-looking background to provide interest – yet one that isn’t obtrusive, thus ensuring that your subject stands out in the shot – such as a Lastolite by Manfrotto Urban Collapsible pop-up backdrop. As demonstrated in issue 117 (see Project 5) these backdrops are supersimple to set up and can instantly improve your portraiture. You can use them in the studio or on location to spice up shots, and give indoor portraits that contemporary urban outdoor feel. Using a Lastolite stand and the handy Lastolite Magnetic Background…

Guided mode is one of the strongest features in Photoshop Elements because it guides you, step by step, through some of the tools you’ll need to master in order to progress from a beginner to an image-editing expert. It fills the gap between novice and expert, and as you learn to create the different Guided image projects, you’ll pick up key image-editing skills in a friendly, painless environment. For Elements 14, Adobe has redesigned the Guided mode interface. Although it looks very different at first, as soon as you’ve selected the Guided process you want to use it reverts to the ‘old’ layout, with your image displayed in the main window and a set of simple step-by-step processes displayed and explained in a panel on the right. First, though, that…

Steve Bloom is a pro wildlife photographer who shoots images that have a powerful and emotional impact. His work often highlights the link between animals and people; anyone who looks at his images of primates would be moved by the close similarity between their behaviour and ours. He’s just as likely to photograph a hippo beset by a pack of hungry lions as appealing penguins leaping off an iceberg. While much of his work has focused on wildlife, he started out documenting everyday life in his native South Africa and returned to the subject for his landmark book Living Africa in 2008. Bloom will be speaking at Wilkinson Cameras’ Digital Splash 16 (details on page 71), but we met up with him before, and in this look back on his…

Photo essays from PhotoPlus readers and professional photographers alike PROJECT INFO NAME: Hien Nguyen LOCATION: Cambridge and London, UK MISSION: To produce painterly pictures in the style of British artist J.M.W. Turner using the camera drag technique KIT: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM www.hien-photography.com I’m a great admirer of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, so when happy accidents happen and one of my photographs turned out to emulate Turner’s trademark textures and colour palette, I didn’t complain. J.M.W. Turner, ‘the painter of light’, was an English romanticist landscape artist, regarded as one of the most controversial figures in his day. He used oils and watercolour to achieve an almost transparent effect, and depicted pure evanescent light by his use of shimmering colour. His objects are often barely recognizable,…

Photocrowd All the images in this gallery were entrants to the PhotoPlus ‘Travel’ competition hosted on Photocrowd – a website where a public vote on the best-liked images is pitted against expert opinion. To enter our current contest, and vote on your favourite photos, simply visit www.photocrowd.com Photocrowd All the images in this gallery were entrants to the PhotoPlus ‘Travel’ competition hosted on Photocrowd – a website where a public vote on the best-liked images is pitted against expert opinion. To enter our current contest, and vote on your favourite photos, simply visit www.photocrowd.com Each issue, our favourite image wins a Manfrotto Pro Light RedBee-210 backpack (worth £140) and a selection from our top ten choices will be printed in these gallery pages. www.manfrotto.co.uk…

Most lenses are built at great effort to correct barrel distortion, so that straight lines in a scene will be captured straight in the image. Fisheye lenses, however, forego this rectilinear approach and instead cram as many degrees of view as possible into the frame. The result is extreme distortion, with curvature that gets more pronounced the further things are from the centre of the frame. The widest fisheyes can capture an amazing 180 degrees of view, but these are the kind that produce a circular image surrounded by black. Alternatively there are those that are less wide but produce a more practical rectangular image, like the Canon 8-15mm lens used here. On a crop sensor DSLR, it offers a whopping 180 degrees angle of view across the diagonals of…

Have you sometimes come across a camera technique that requires you to change how you shoot? One of these is back-button focusing, where instead of pressing the shutter button half way to focus; you use the AF-ON or AE-lock button on the back of your camera, depending on which model you have. Not convinced this will make much of a difference? Let’s take a closer look. When photographing a moving subject, the split second between half and full presses of the shutter button can be enough for you to miss the moment. With back-button focusing, you’re engaging the autofocus with your thumb, leaving index finger free to fire the shutter button. Plus pre-focusing is easier – for instance you can focus on a branch where a bird will land. It…

Back in the days of film a double exposure could be created by exposing the same frame of film twice, without winding it on. The result would be an abstract mixture of two images. It was an unpredictable and rather charming effect, and in the days before Photoshop, one of the very few ways in which photographers could blend two images into one. The popularity of the effect remains to this day, especially in TV and film (notably in Adele’s trippy Send My Love music video and the excellent opening credits to the TV series True Detective). In fact, in an era of digital perfection, the old-school charm of double exposures seems to grow stronger and stronger. These days, we can use Photoshop to create almost the exact same result…

“In 2006 I was finishing my book Elephant! and wanted to shoot something that was iconic and different to everything else in the book,” says Bloom. “I had heard about elephants that had been used for logging in the Andaman Islands off the coast of India, and that they used to swim from island to island. I found one that had been retired to an island with his mahout. “When I got there I had no experience of diving, so arranged for some divers to help me navigate. They were basically my lifeline. Then the elephant would go in the water and I’d have to swim beside it. I used a fisheye lens because an elephant is a pretty big creature, and in order to get all the elephant in…

Bahrain International Circuit is an ultramodern motorsports facility that is located in the heart of the Sakhir desert in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The 2016 Bahrain Grand Prix was held there on 3 April 2016. This was the second round of the 2016 season and marked the 12th time that the Bahrain Grand Prix had been run as a round of the Formula One World Championship. To cover a distance of just over 308km on the race track, the F1 cars have to cover 57 laps. “The fact that the cars are moving so fast means there’s difficulty in focusing and keeping them in the frame” PROJECT INFO NAME: Premjith Narayanan LOCATION: Kingdom of Bahrain MISSION: To capture speeding F1 cars in the night race at the Bahrain International Circuit…

You don’t have to jack in the day job to earn money from your camera equipment and photography skills. There are plenty of ways that you can make a bit extra on the side as a semi-professional photographer, whether you’re shooting a wedding at the weekend or throwing your hat into the stock photography ring. In this feature, we’re going to look at ways that you can help to fund your photography habit, whatever the level of your ambition. For some photographers, shooting a wedding is the pinnacle, as you’ll be able to see first-hand the pleasure your pictures can bring. It’s also one of the more lucrative things you can do on the side, enabling you to earn several hundreds of pounds for a couple of days’ graft. Wedding…

Your Canon’s metering system plays a vital role in picture-taking. It works out how much light should enter the camera to make a correct exposure. It’s very clever, but it’s not completely foolproof. The problem with metering is that it takes an average reading – either of the entire frame or part of it, depending on which metering mode you’re in – and this reading is assumed to be a midtone, or in other words, halfway between white and black. More often than not this assumption comes out right, but a metering system can struggle when a frame is dominated by areas of extreme brightness or darkness. For example, imagine a person standing in the snow wearing a white coat. The frame will be dominated by whites, but your metering…

great photograph can do more to sell a product than any amount of sales spiel. Whether you’re shooting products to sell on a website, in a brochure or listing a second-hand item on eBay, capturing quality shots is vital if you want to get your product noticed. You’ll be pleased to hear that it is actually quite simple to capture a clean-looking shot of a product set against a white background. Better still, you don’t need an expensive or fancy studio setup to take them. In this project we’re going to show you how to create a DIY table-top studio using little more than an A3 sheet of white paper and some tin foil. The key to successful and clean product photography is having a seamless white backdrop with no…

Tackling over- and underexposed areas in photos is relatively straightforward with Lightroom – you can use the Develop module’s Basic panel to adjust the shadows and the highlights to reveal detail where it’s needed. How, though, do you improve an image that’s mostly midtones? The starting image on this page has some bright areas in the background windows, but the majority of the image consists of dull shadows and murky midtones. The very flat-lit printing press has lots of interesting textures and details, but in the unprocessed picture these areas of interest are lost in a muddy wash of dull browns. To reveal more detail in this scene we could have captured a series of bracketed exposures and combined them, but Lightroom lacks Photoshop CC’s ability to merge multiple photos…

Bloom was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1953. While working in the graphic arts, he began documenting life in the apartheid era in his spare time. He emigrated to England in 1977 and set up a state-of-the-art photo retouching business. In 1993 he began a new career as a photographer specializing in wildlife and set up his own photo library. Since then, he has extensively photographed the wildlife and people of Africa and animals around the world. His books include Spirit of the Wild (2006), Elephant! (2006) and Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009). A major exhibition of his South Africa images is being planned for to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the end of apartheid in 2019. Next issue: Pro landscape photographer and Norway Northern Lights specialist…

Professional photographers reveal their top six tools of the trade they couldn’t shoot without “Airline baggage limitations mean we pare back our kit to what we can carry on” As pro wildlife photographers, we turn our hands to everything from insects to elephants, so need a large collection of kit. But much of our work is in Africa, and the strict airline baggage limitations mean we have to pare back our kit to what we can carry on, travelling with two photo backpacks, weighing around 12kg each. Into these we’ll squeeze three camera bodies (Canon EOS-1D X, 5D Mk III and 5D Mk II), a 500mm lens, two 100-400mm lenses, a 24-105mm and a 17-40mm, a couple of 1.4x Extenders, two flashes, a laptop, iPad, backup external drive, digital audio…

With a whole host of new improvements and refinements, and the potentially gamechanging Dual Pixel Raw imaging technology, the new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV looks set to be one of the most complete full-frame Canon DSLRs we’ve ever used. Just be prepared to pay for it. Canon’s EOS 5D series of cameras has a rich heritage – the original 5D bought full-frame photography to the masses, the Mk II unleashed Full HD video capture for the first time on a DSLR, while the Mk III had landmark innovations with its improved AF system, faster frame rate and high ISO performance, which made it one of the most complete DSLRs of recent times, loved by enthusiasts and pros alike. Despite the 5D range deviating a little since, with the arrival…

Whether you’re photographing a bug’s life or your collection of rare postage stamps, a macro lens can resolve incredible levels of minute detail. Unlike some ‘macro’ lenses, all of the ones we’ve selected for this group test are capable of reproducing small objects at full life size on the image sensor. Bearing in mind that the sensor is the electronic equivalent of a frame of film, this enables eye-popping enlargement when viewing the resulting images on screen or in print. Indeed, it can reveal levels of detail that are all but invisible to the naked eye. Most macro prime lenses are full-frame compatible and can therefore be used on both APS-C format and full-frame cameras. Two exceptions in our test group are the Canon and Tamron 60mm lenses, which are…

Whatever the weather On my cycle rides, I often look for suitable photographic subjects and I was delighted to discover a new spot to capture the steam trains on the East Lancashire Railway. After consulting the railway’s timetable, I returned with my trusty 70D. I could hardly have chosen a worse day, the wind had got up to a near-gale and the dark clouds descended and the showers kept blowing in. I got out of the car five minutes before the train was due, and realized I had forgotten my coat. I nearly gave it up as a bad job, but shivering and wet, I waited for the train, which was ten minutes late. The light was so poor, I had to set ISO500. Even then I could only manage…