Indice dei contenuti per June 2016 in Digital Camera Magazine

THERE really is nothing quite like a great big adventure to revitalise your photography. So this issue, we’ve prepared more than 40 pages of travel-related delights for you. Kicking off with the basics of travel photography on page 37, we look at everything you need to know, from planning and packing to working colour and composition. To get your creative juices going, we’ve talked to some of the world’s finest travel photographers, including Ralph Gibson, Lottie Davies and Magnum’s David Alan Harvey. We also take a look at what life as a cruise ship photographer is like. I was one myself more than 20 years ago, so it’s interesting to see how the industry has changed. It still looks like great fun, hard work and a wonderful way to see…

ABOUT CRAIG CRAIG Easton shoots landscape and people photographs for prestigious clients and personal projects worldwide. RECENT awards include the Cutty Sark Award for Worldwide Travel Photographer of the Year in 2012 and Luerzers Archive Best 200 Advertising Photographers Worldwide in 2012-3. CRAIG collaborated with writer Brigid Benson on the highly acclaimed 52 Weekends series of books. FIND OUT MORE www.craigeaston.com WHILE Craig Easton is lauded in travel photography circles, he strives to go beyond the picturesque. Craig’s work doesn’t peddle the fantasy that the modern world has yet to intrude on popular locations – he shot gas stations in Myanmar, for example, rather than the usual temples. “My work is concerned with reality, the way we live, politics, etc,” he says. “I’m a documentary photographer at heart and so…

ABOUT JOHN John Davies has been taking photographs since the age of 14. Kosen is the first book of his work. The project arose after frequent trips to Japan and John’s love of classic Japanese photography books and vintage prints. John is chairman of The Image Group, the world’s largest cruise ship photography company. TRAVEL has always held a huge appeal for John Davies. “Somehow I always had it in my blood,” he says. Although born and bred in the Vale of Evesham, John has spent much of his time in more exotic parts of the world and now lives on the Cayman Islands. Photography has also been a big part of his life, and he has combined the two in a highly successful career after starting a cruise ship…

W ILLIAM Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was one of the key figures in the invention of photography. A prominent scientist, mathematician and intellectual of the Victorian era, he was born into a wealthy family and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. His experiments with fixing images on light-sensitive paper led to the invention of the negative-positive process, which became the basis for most photography until the digital era. When did he do his first experiments? In 1833, Talbot was making drawings of landscapes in Italy using a camera obscura and wondered how he could use it to create a permanent image. (Others, including Thomas Wedgwood, had tried and failed.) He began experimenting by making images on writing paper soaked with salt and silver nitrate, which he called ‘Photogenic Drawing’.…

www.benroeu.com Benro FTA 28CV1 Travel Angel Tripod with Ballhead £349/$440 At 1.81kg, not even carbon fibre can stop this lining up alongside the FLM as the heaviest platform here, while the 47.5cm packed length also makes these the longest legs on test. But on the upside, the Travel Angel will raise your SLR higher than the competition, with the four-section legs and centre column extending to a lofty 170cm. The nine-layer carbon construction results in a 10kg payload rating, and grippy twist-lock leg clamps, a sturdy ball head and a set of spiked feet are great to have. The Travel Angel’s stand-out feature is a removable leg that screws to the centre column to form a monopod. www.flm-gmbh.de/en FLM CP26-M4S Carbon Fibre Tripod + CB-38FTR £371+£223/$595+$400 With sturdy four-section carbon…

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. SOFTWARE Photoshop CC GET IT FROM www.adobe.com GET START FILES FROM www.bit.ly/dc178files WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc178video DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc178extra STEP BY STEP KNOCK OUT A DRAB SKY IN SECONDS Replace a sky with Blend If by controlling the transparency of different pixels 1 COPY THE IMAGE OVER Open the two start images we’ve provided – waterfall and sky – into Photoshop. Grab the Move Tool and drag the sky image over to the waterfall to copy it on top. (See above.) Go to the Layers Panel (Window > Layers), then double-click the top layer to open the Layer Styles…

A large part of Lightroom’s job is keeping your images organised. This becomes a progressively greater challenge as your image library grows in size, and as the number of different ways in which you want to use your pictures increases. Lightroom uses industry-standard ‘metadata’ embedded in your images to help, consisting of keywords, captions, copyright information and more. But it also offers quick-access Flags, Ratings and Labels and an interactive Filter Bar to help you quickly find and isolate the pictures you’re looking for. 1 Folders This is where Lightroom displays the real location of your photos on your computer or your external drive. If you move photos and folders here, you move them on your computer. It’s important to realise, though, that if you move them on your computer…

THE BIG INTERVIEW NICK BRANDT We talk to Nick about his latest project, ‘Inherit the Dust’ TRAVEL INSPIRATION PRO INSIGHT Ralph Gibson, David Alan Harvey, Lottie Davies and Craig Easton WORK EXPERIENCE LIFE AT SEA Discover what life is like sailing the seas as a cruise ship photographer QUESTION MASTER ANDREW JAMES Our resident photo guru is on hand to answer all your photo querries ANALYSIS CARLA VAN DE PUTTELAAR How Carla was inspired by the Dutch masters to use natural light TRAVEL JOURNALISM JOHN DAVIES John tells us about his latest project photographing a geisha PHOTOSHOP MASTER MONTAGE James Paterson on how to make a fantasy landsc…

PANASONIC makes mirrorless cameras in two styles: its SLR lookalikes the GH4 and G7 and its rectangular, rangefinder-style GX and GX cameras. The GX80 falls into the rangefinder camp. This is where Panasonic seems to be putting most of its effort right now, and the recently-launched GX8 was the first to get the company’s new 20-megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor. The GX8 is the flagship of the Panasonic range, but it’s a pretty big camera, with a pretty big price tag. The announcement of the GX80 (the GX85 in North America) promises much of the power of the top-end camera in a smaller, more affordable body – without sacri􀂿cing the electronic viewfinder. Interestingly, Panasonic has stuck with its older 16-megapixel sensor for the GX80, though it has removed the anti-aliasing…

PART 1 Travel basics 1 BEFORE YOU GO… Essential travel items all photographers need to have with them TRAVEL TRIPOD A lightweight but still flexible and sturdy travel tripod is an essential accessory for shooting early or late when the tourists are in their hotels. See our travel tripod Mini-Test on page 122 for ideas. RESEARCH/MAPS Google is your friend. For ideas, search for images in the area you are visiting. Mark potential locations on a map of the area that you can keep in your pocket or camera bag. PLUG ADAPTORS Always carry an international plug adaptor and throw a three-socket extension plug into your hold luggage so you can charge more than one item from the same connection at the hotel. LAPTOP Carry a laptop to help store,…

ABOUT DAVID DAVID Alan Harvey is a Magnum photographer based in New York. He has published three major books: Cuba, Divided Soul and Living Proof. DAVID joined Magnum as a nominee in 1993 and became a full member in 1997. FIND OUT MORE www.davidalanharvey.com MAGNUM great David Alan Harvey has covered stories around the world, including French teenagers, the Berlin Wall, Maya culture, Vietnam, Native Americans, Mexico and Naples. His experience has taught him that whatever type of photos you take, you need to be sophisticated to achieve superior results. “You need to be visually literate,” he says, “and have some sense of the history of photography and your place in it. Then you need to be educated about the place. “Before I arrive in a place, I read as…

1 CAPACITY Aim for a drive that offers several terabytes (TB) of space. A 1TB drive is equivalent to 1,000GB – or somewhere between 31-33,000 raw files from a 22.3MP Canon EOS 5D Mark III. 2 SPEED Slow-spinning hard disk spins extend the time it takes for photos to be copied across. All things being equal, a 5,400rpm drive handles data at about 2/3 the speed of a 7,200rpm drive. 3 CONNECTIONS To improve compatibility and buy a degree of futureproofing, choose an external hard drive that offers more than one connection port, such as USB and FireWire. With portable hard drives, you may have to make do with just USB. 4 RELIABILITY More important than capacity and (arguably) cost, but hard to measure – although online computer backup company…

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.delkin.com Delkin SD 633x UHS-1 £46/$40 Delkin’s card delivers decent read and write times in the mid-range of this test. Delkin is renowned for its rigorous testing methods: as well as shock tests, this card has been tested against sea spray and ultraviolet light. It also has built-in error correction. Read: 45.15 Write: 43.58 www.samsung.com Samsung Pro+ SDHC UHS-1 £46/$60 The Pro+ card comes in at a close second, just beating the Gobe Magic on write speeds. The card provides solid performance, although it’s one of the pricier cards here. The card is protected against water, temperature (-25 to 85 degrees C), X-rays and magnets. Read: 83.96 Write: 71.09 www.mygobe.com Gobe Magic 64GB £30/$46 Gobe is relatively new to the memory card market. The performance from the Magic rivalled the…

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. SOFTWARE Photoshop CC GET IT FROM www.adobe.com GET START FILES FROM www.bit.ly/dc178files WATCH VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc178video DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/dc178extra Love landscapes, but never seem to chance upon the perfect scene? Then why not make your own fantasy location instead? With a few simple Photoshop skills, you can combine elements from a range of images into a single, perfectly composed frame – and you get to choose exactly where everything goes: a tree here, an animal there, a snowy mountain, perhaps even a few sun rays to add to the drama. If you want to piece together your own personal paradise,…

Lightroom uses the industrystandard IPTC system for tagging photos with keywords, captions, descriptions and more as ‘metadata’ – or data embedded invisibly in the image but available to programs like Lightroom and newspaper picture editors, for example. It can also display the EXIF (shooting information) data embedded by your camera in every shot it takes. 1 Keywording Keywords are at the heart of any serious image cataloguing system. They’re words or short phrases that are embedded in the photo and used later to help locate specific images. You can use this panel to type in any keyword or keywords you like with one or more images selected. Lightroom will look for similar keywords you’ve already used as you type, to help avoid duplication and save time. It will also display…

GOOGLE has made its Nik Collection plug-in suite free to download. The Google Nik Collection consists of seven plug-ins installed as a package but can be used individually. The newest, developed by Google and not Nik Software, is Analog Efex Pro, a powerful and effective retro effects generator. You also get Colour Efex Pro, which is an extensive range of photographic filters with individual adjustments and the ability to stack them together as ‘recipes’, which you can save and re-use. The Google Nik Collection also contains two enhancement tools, Dfine and Sharpener Pro, for precise noise reduction and sharpening respectively. What’s more, Google says: “If you purchased the Nik Collection in 2016, you will receive a full refund, which we’ll automatically issue to you in the coming days.” www.google.com/nikcollection LONDON…

PART 2 Travel Inspiration ABOUT LOTTIE LOTTIE Davies’ unique style has been employed in a variety of contexts, including newspapers, magazines, books and advertising. SHE has won recognition in numerous awards, including the Association of Photographers’ Awards, the International Color Awards, and the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Awards. HER work has garnered international acclaim with the image ‘Quints’, which won First Prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery in London; and with ‘Viola As Twins’, which won the Photographic Art Award, Arte Laguna Prize in Venice in 2011. FIND OUT MORE www.lottiedavies.co.uk AS WELL as being a highly creative and successful portrait and art photographer, Lottie Davies is an experienced travel photographer with lots of commercial commissions under her belt. There’s a lot of…

FOR Ralph Gibson, it’s important to look for the signs and the shapes that define a country and culture. “This is called semiology,” he explains. “If you look at my 1991 series ‘Pharonic Light’ at www.ralphgibson.com/archive, you can see how V-shapes run through the images – the tip of the felucca boat pointing to the sky, or the point of the obelisk. I was new to Egypt, so I decided to follow this pointed shape throughout the Egyptian culture.” Wherever he goes, Ralph looks at local architecture as a defining phenomenon, or at the language. “I’m going to China soon. I don’t understand the meaning of the characters, so I see them as primary shapes, as if I was looking at a painting.” Ralph loves travel as it’s such a…

THREE LUCKY WINNERS WILL RE CEIVE A BUNDLE OF STORAGE GOODIES WORTH A COMBINED £1, 013, COURTESY OF VERBATIM W ITH more pictures being taken than at any time since the dawn of photography – an estimated one trillion shots in 2015, according to InfoTrends – how we store all this material has never been more crucial. It’s an area in which Verbatim has unrivalled expertise. Since 1969, it’s played a leading role in the evolution of storage media, from floppy disks and CDs to today’s Blu-ray Discs, solidstate disks and memory cards. Courtesy of Verbatim, we’ve got three bundles worth £337.93 each to be won. Each prize bundle includes: • Verbatim Vx450 USB 3.0 External Solid State Drive 128GB (£86.99). Solid-state storage for Windows and Mac OS X computers…

ANTAGONISED BY AUTOFOCUS? UNHINGED BY UNDEREXPOSURE? Send your question to digitalcamera@futurenet.com and let us provide you with a solution Top filter Q I am thinking of investing in filters, but my budget is tight. Which one filter couldn’t you manage without? Craig Hollis A THE truth is that with all the post-shoot software options we have at our disposal, I’m not convinced there’s any filter I couldn’t live without. So while I use physical filters, such as ND grads, Big Stoppers and straight NDs, it’s not a disaster if I accidentally leave them at home. But to answer your question, I think it’s my polarising filter that I’d rather keep handy above anything else. While ND filters are great for creativity, I can still get water or cloud movement in…

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 SOFTWARE Lightroom CC/6 GET IT FROM www.adobe.com GET START FILES FROM www.bit.ly/dc178files Vignetting is a form of lens distortion that darkens the corners of the image. Normally this is something you’d want to correct to have a perfectly exposed image: if you crop an image with this problem, you can end up with one side having dark corners, and the other being well exposed. Simply apply a Lens Correction Profile in Lens Corrections to fix that. But the presence of a vignette in a photo can also be useful. The eye is naturally drawn to the brightest part of the photo, so…