Table of contents for Spring 2016 in Digital Camera Magazine

THIS month we’ve gone landscape crazy! It’s a bonanza issue jam-packed with over 40 pages of landscape-related delights. Whether you’re just getting into landscape photography and want a few practical tips or you’re bored with shooting clichés and want to take your photography to creative new heights, there’s something for you. With insight, inspiration and killer tips from some of the world’s greatest photographers, this is an essential read. I was lucky enough to indulge in some landscape antics too, joining readers Paul and Dave in the Lake District for this month’s Shootout. We had a great time and the guys managed to capture some stunning images: see how they did on page 70. If you’d like to take part in a Shootout or have suggestions of what you’d like…

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has agreed with the Science Museum Group to create the world’s foremost collection covering the art of photography. 400,000 objects from the SMG’s 3-million-strong photo collection will move to the V&A, joining an existing collection of 500,000 images. Among the images are works by British pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot, Hill & Adamson, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron. The shots were once all part of a single collection in the 19th century. www.vam.ac.uk/photography…

ABOUT PAUL BORN in 1941, Paul Hill became a freelance photographer in 1965 and went on to work for the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times and the BBC. PAUL became a photography lecturer in 1974 and later set up The Photographers’ Place, the first residential photo workshop in the UK. HE has exhibited regularly worldwide. His books include Approaching Photography and White Peak Dark Peak. www.hillonphotography.co.uk Do you ever consider what motivates your choice of location when setting out to do landscape photography? Why did you go there? What are you looking at? Is it what confronts you, or are you trying to find the type of photograph you admire and replicate it? In other words, would you like to be original, or just a copyist? Consider where you…

FASHION photographer Lara Jade grew up in Staffordshire in the UK, where she discovered her interest in self-portrait and conceptual photography at 14 years old. At 19, she moved to London to pursue fashion photography full-time before making New York her home in 2011. Influenced by playful narratives, colour and elegance, Lara enjoys creating stories with a cinematic approach. As well as working on her personal projects, Lara also tutors fashion photography workshops and seminars worldwide. Lara has been fortunate enough to receive a number of sponsorships and accolades, most recently Broncolor, working on the NextGEN project. Lara was also winner of the Public Choice Award at the 2009 AOP Open Awards and has appeared as a guest photographer on both Poland’s Next Top Model and DigitalRev TV. Here, she…

THERE’S been a lot of buzz around fullframe cameras lately, but APS-C still has plenty to offer. Ideal for action, the crop factor of an APS-C sensor gives you great telephoto reach without the need for monster lenses, and there’s a wealth of high-quality supporting optics from Canon and Nikon, as well as from independents like Sigma and Tamron. We haven’t seen any fully professionalgrade APS-C format Canon or Nikon cameras for a while, although the Canon 7D Mk II comes very close, and Nikon has recently announced the D500. Both our test models are highly sophisticated bodies with customisable, advanced functions that enable them to be tailored to the shooting styles of demanding enthusiast photographers. Announced in March 2015, the Nikon is about 20 months newer than the Canon…

www.thedigitalroom.co.uk 1 The Digital Room £175 (24 x 16 inches) DESPITE being the second most expensive option on test, this is a fairly lightweight affair. It’s based on a single sheet of 5mm acrylic, with the print bonded to the rear. A weightier option using a 10mm acrylic sheet is available for £6 more, and is better value. The hanging system uses a second large sheet of material at the rear that incorporates a hook and four stick-on feet. One of the feet became detached from our review sample in transit, and required gluing back on. Worse still, print quality was poor, with too much contrast and saturation. www.loxleycolour.com 2 Loxley Colour £132 (24 x 16 inches) LOXLEY Colour is renowned for its high quality and reasonable prices, and offers…

SEAN McCORMACK Photographer and writer Sean McCormack is an experienced photographer and writer based in Galway. He is the author of The Indispensable Guide to Lightroom CC. seanmcfoto.com Lightroom SOFTWARE Lightroom CC/6 GET IT FROM www.adobe.com get Start files from www.bit.ly/dc176files There’s no such thing as a perfect lens. While lens technology has come on in leaps and bounds, lenses can still suffer from barrel or pincushion distortion. Barrel distortion bends everything outwards, like it’s all being blown up like a drawing on a balloon. Pincushion looks like you’re pushing the image inwards, exactly like a pin in a cushion. Moustache distortion is much more complex, and considerably harder to fix. Adobe’s solution to this has been to create maps of the distortion on a lens-by-lens basis. These maps are called…

JAMES PATERSON Editor, Practical Photoshop With a decade as a working writer and photographer behind him, James knows which Photoshop and Lightroom tools and techniques matter the most to you. Photoshop SOFTWARE Photoshop CC GET IT FROM www.adobe.com GET START FILES FROM www.bit.ly/dc176files WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc176video The power of the S-curve Black-and-white conversions will almost always benefit from a contrast boost. One of the most powerful tools for the job is Curves The curve line starts off as a straight diagonal line that represents the tonal range of the image, from the shadows on the left side to the highlights on the right. Any point along the line that is moved above the starting diagonal lightens that part of the tonal range, and any parts moved below will darken the range.…

Our foray into the traditional darkroom begins with the most popular digital effect of them all – the black-and-white conversion. Of course, mono photography was the only option for most photographers for over 100 years. But even now, when sensors can capture millions of colours, we continually choose to reduce our images down to simple shades of grey. There are many reasons for the enduring appeal of monochrome, but perhaps the strongest is a desire for simplicity. Colour can sometimes be a distraction, so stripping an image of it will draw attention to shape, form and composition. So for images like this fineart nude, there really is only one option: a beautiful black-and-white treatment. Read on to find out how it’s done… The HSL/Grayscale tab For many photographers, Camera Raw…

THE BIG INTERVIEW MARTIN MIDDLEBROOK The acclaimed photojournalist on his journeys through Afghanistan WORK EXPERIENCE LARA JADE The in-demand fashion photographer reveals the secrets of her success QUESTION MASTER ANDREW JAMES Fixing your photographic problems and camera conundrums COVER STORY PAUL HILL You’ll never view landscapes the same way again after Paul’s essay PHOTO ANALYSIS SIMON BUTTERWORTH Find out out Simon captured a widescreen vista of Hong Kong PHOTOSHOP EXPERT JAMES PATERSON James shows how Camera Raw can remove noise from low-light shots…

SIGMA has entered the compact system camera market by unveiling the sd Quattro and the sd Quattro H. The sd Quattro features an APS-C size sensor offering 39 megapixels, Sigma says, while the sd Quattro H offers an APS-H size 51MP sensor measuring 26.6 x 17.9mm. Also on board is a Dual True III processor to enable bursts of 14 raw files at 3.6 frames per second on the sd Quattro, or 3.8fps on the sd Quattro H. A new Super-Fine Detail exposure mode blends images at seven exposures to produce one shot with an high dynamic range. Pricing wasn’t confirmed as we went to press. www.sigma-global.com…

PENTAX has made no secret of its full-frame SLR plans, announcing the development of its new high-end camera last year. But it’s done a good job of keeping the specs secret, which makes the official announcement all the more dramatic – not just in the headline specs, but in the details of what promises to be an innovative camera. First, the price, because this puts everything else in context. The Pentax K-1 will go on sale in mid-April at £1,600 body only in the UK. This puts it straight up against budget full-frame SLRs from Canon and Nikon, yet the K-1’s specs put it in a higher league than these cameras. It comes equipped with a 36.4MP sensor, with 50% more resolution than the Nikon D610 and D750 – and…

1 GETTING PREPARED Shooting great landscapes starts before you even leave your house MAP Whether it’s a paper version or an electronic one on your phone, a map is essential for finding potential locations before a shoot, and for navigating during a shoot. CLOTHING Layering is the key to outdoor clothing, so you can add layers to keep warm and dry while you are fairly still during a shoot, and remove them while you are walking. TRIPOD A sturdy tripod will help you use slow shutter speeds and still achieve pin-sharp results, but it also needs to be light and compact enough to carry with you to every location. LENSES Along with a standard zoom, a wide-angle lens is essential for capturing wide vistas and emphasising foreground objects. A telephoto…

To create an exposure, the shutter speed and aperture need to balanced. A large aperture lets more light into the camera, so the exposure time required to record an image needs to be relatively short. Smaller apertures reduce the intensity of light, so the exposure time needs to be longer to ensure that the sensor receives the same level of exposure. The decision over whether you use a large aperture and fast shutter speed or a small aperture and slow shutter speed is down to the effect you want to achieve. If you want to blur the background when you’re shooting a portrait, for example, you might opt for a large aperture and benefit from the associated faster shutter speed. If you want to intentionally blur motion, you’d select a…

LIKE many of today’s best photographers, Stavros Charisopoulos leads a double life. With a background in jewellery design and gemmology, he currently earns a crust from running his own jewellery shop. But photography has always been Stavros’s passion – and as his landscape and architectural photography has evolved to a more professional level, it has become his second career. Although Stavros has travelled to some of Europe’s most iconic destinations, including Venice, London and Madrid, it’s the unique terrain of Iceland that remains the big draw for him. “Although it has certainly been over-photographed in the past few years, it still remains my favourite location. It offers vast photographic opportunities in areas that have not been explored yet,” he explains. “The surreal landscape, the variety of subjects, the absence of…

CITIES and towns offer rich pickings for the tuned-in photographer. For this challenge, we want to see how you can create tightly composed pictures from the constructed environment. We’ll be looking for clever use of the building blocks of composition – line, shape, texture and form – and how you’ve used lighting and lenses to make the most of them. How can you deploy colour, scale and the blank canvas of the sky to enhance your frame? You can choose to shoot an abstract or a wider scene, go for a straight documentary approach or apply a range of creative treatments; it’s the strength of the composition that we will be focusing on when it comes to selecting a winning image. ENTER TODAY! www.photocrowd.com/a/current Closing date: Friday 22nd April How…

Saul Leiter is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of colour photography. For most of Leiter’s professional life, he worked as a fashion photographer for magazines including Elle, British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire. But it’s his personal work, which didn’t become widely known until he was in his 80s, that has belatedly brought Saul Leiter global recognition. What did he do in his early life? He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923. His father was a Jewish scholar and rabbi who expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Saul, however, had other ideas. At the age of 26, he abandoned theology school and went to live in New York, with the aim of becoming an artist. How did he get started in photography? While in New York,…

www.canon.co.uk Canon Remote Switch RS-80N3 £39/$42 Canon’s remote feels much like cheaper rivals, but its shutter lock mechanism is marginally more precise. An 80cm cable length is nothing special, suggesting the extra cash is going on the branding. http://uk.hama.com Hama DCC Base Cable Remote Release £15 This remote is almost identical to Hähnel’s offering, but the cord is tiny and doesn’t plug into your camera. Instead you choose an additional cable to suit your camera model, adding versatility, but also £10 to the price. www.fujifilm.eu/uk Fuji Remote Release RR-90 £36/$40 Apart from cost, all our remotes are closely matched, although Fujifilm’s version has an especially accurate – if loud – shutter button. It lines up with the Canon as average yet overpriced. www.nikon.co.uk Nikon MC-DC2 Remote Control £25/$27 This is…

JAMES PATERSON Editor, Practical Photoshop With a decade as a working writer and photographer behind him, James knows exactly which Photoshop and Lightroom tools and techniques matter the most to you. Photoshop Software Photoshop CC Get it from www.adobe.com Get Start files from www.bit.ly/dc176files STEP BY STEP APPLY NOISE REDUCTION Get sharper, cleaner, noise-free images with Camera Raw’s Detail Panel 1 GET THE IMAGE READY Open the image into Camera Raw. Use the Basic Panel sliders to fine-tune the tones and colours. (To see how the noise looks, try temporarily increasing exposure.) Head to the Detail Panel. Double-click the Zoom Tool to jump to 100% magnification. 2 FIX THE NOISE Increase Luminance Amount until the grainy noise is subdued, but be careful not to push it too far. Use the…

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The ability to lighten and darken specific areas of a print has always been important to photographers. Whether they’ve been shot on film or in raw, techniques such as adding vignettes, boosting eyes or darkening skies can help an image come alive. Anyone familiar with traditional darkroom tools will have noticed a similarity with some of the tool icons and naming conventions in Photoshop. The most obvious examples of this are the Dodge and Burn Tools. Traditionally, darkroom users would have made a circular shape with their hands held under the enlarger to create a kind of adjustable spotlight that could be moved around to target and ‘burn in’ certain areas of the print. This allowed extra light to reach these areas and resulted in darker tones. Hence Photoshop’s Burn…

WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc176video WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc176video When you see either of these logos, there’s a related video online FREE! 9 landscape tips cards! Our series of tips cards offer pocketfriendly advice for photographers on the go. This month, our cards join in our festival of landscape photography with recommended camera settings for classic landscape locations, from lakes and lone trees to village views. There’s also a handy composition reference to help you find the perfect framing for your shot, and advice on what kit you should have with you. Look for them after the magazine. SHOOT BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES DARKROOM EFFECTS This month’s Photoshop Guide ebook shows you how to recreate some of the classic looks that photographers discovered by experimenting in the darkroom. You’ll find expert tips and techniques for…

MENU INTERFACE The menu follows the familiar Canon approach, but the look has been cleaned up and the font made more legible than on the 70D’s screen. CARD PORT The 80D has a single card port that accepts SD, SDHC and SDXC media and is compatible with the high-speed UHS-1 standard. LIVE VIEW AND VIDEO CONTROL The Live View and Video control has changed slightly from the 70D, but it operates in the same way, with the control button starting recording. VARI-ANGLE This vari-angle hinge makes the rear screen easy to view from a range of angles – always useful if you’re taking a shot from an awkward position.…

Ikigai Rival backpack The Rival gives you two bags in one, with a backpack that houses a removable storage cell. This module will house a large SLR and a hefty attached lens, plus six lenses. From £230/$300; uk.ikigaibags.com Western Digital My Passport Ultra This generation of WD’s portable hard drive range comes capacities from 500GB to 3TB and comes in four colour options. USB 3.0 ensures speed doesn’t lag behind storage. From £45/$80; www.wdc.com Manfrotto Befree One Manfrotto’s updated Befree tripod follows the original’s light and compact design ethos. Weight is down fractionally to 1.3kg, while the new model’s shorter closed length is reduced from 40cm to 32cm. £125/$189; www.manfrotto.co.uk…

FLEXTILT The FlexTilt screen mechanism, which pivots sideways as well as up and down, is strong enough to bear the camera’s weight. WEATHERPROOF Like Pentax’s other (non-full-frame) SLRs, the K-1 is dust-and weatherproof. There’s an optional protected remote control too. CARDS There’s a dual card port to accept SD, SDHC and SDXC media. Both slots support the high-speed UHS-1 standard to get more from your cards. SMART FUNCTION It looks like a mode dial at first glance, but the new Smart Function dial provides an easy route to some of the K-1’s key features and settings.…

The shutter in a digital SLR features two curtains that open and close in order to begin and end an exposure. Here you can see an illustration of how the shutter works during a fairly slow exposure, with the imaging sensor being fully exposed to light once the curtains move out of the way. We’ve indicated the first curtain in blue and the second curtain in green. At fast shutter speeds, this sequence happens so quickly that the second curtain begins closing to end the exposure before the first curtain has finished opening. This means that the full area of the sensor is never exposed in one go, but rather through a rapidly moving slit.…

Baffled by bokeh? Discombobulated by depth of field? Send your question to digitalcamera@futurenet.com and let us provide you with a solution ANDREW JAMES Our expert photo advisor is here to help New view Q I know my technical stuff, but my images don’t seem to improve. What can I do to make a difference in my shots? Greg Rubin A I hear this sort of question a lot. There isn’t one simple answer to it, but I’ll try! For starters, it’s great that you feel you’ve grasped the technical aspects of photography – but don’t assume you know everything yet. I continually learn or relearn techniques, even after all these years. When people make this sort of comment to me on the courses I give, I ask them to go…

Reviews you can trust Digital Camera is brought to you by the UK’s most experienced team of photography journalists, which means you can trust everything you read, and compare kit with confidence. We believe the best way to test a product is to use it as it was intended. Our real-world testing involves taking equipment on a proper shoot – whether outdoors or in the studio – and using it exactly as you would, to let you know if it’s fit for purpose. Scientific data won’t tell you everything, but it’s a great way to make comparisons and sense-check our real-world conclusions. We have a series of controlled tests for cameras and lenses that deliver objective benchmarks. You can download the high-resolution test images and resolution charts we shoot from…

www.mindshiftgear.com 1 MindShift Gear UltraLight 20 £32/$35 THIS is actually a type of small, light bag that keeps your camera dry between shots, but you need to take out the camera for use. It’s essentially a lightly padded fabric cube where the top flap folds over your camera and fastens around the lens with a drawstring. This mid-sized version will wrap around a full-frame SLR with a modest zoom lens, and features an integrated waist belt that allows the cover to be worn like a holster bag. Unlike a traditional holster design, this cover can be collapsed and scrunched into its own compact pouch for ultimate portability. This means it’s just the ticket for stashing in your main camera bag, ready for a day when you want to travel light…

GLYN DEWIS Photographer and author Glyn is a commercial photographer and retoucher, and is also an Adobe Community Professional trainer. He is the author of The Photoshop Workbook. www.glyndewis.com Photoshop SOFTWARE Photoshop CC GET IT FROM www.adobe.com GET START FILES FROM www.bit.ly/dc176files WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc176video YOU can turn a daytime scene into a realisticlooking night-time scene, with street lighting. You’ll use Smart Objects and the Camera Raw Filter. There is a workaround for older versions of Photoshop, which involves opening two versions of the street scene picture in Camera Raw, making the adjustments and then opening both into one document within Photoshop. Working with Smart Objects means you are working non-destructively, so you can make changes to any of the settings at a later stage without having to redo lots of…