Table of contents for May 2018 in Digital Camera Magazine

SIGMA LENSES WHERE THE ART IS Sigma announces prices and availability for the ‘magnificent seven’ Art prime lenses coming to the Sony E-mount system in the next few months IF YOU’RE a Sony full-frame mirrorless camera user, there’s a good chance you’ve been left frustrated by the lack of Sigma Art lens action. Up until now, if you had a camera like the Alpha 7R III, the only option if you wanted to use one of Sigma’s superb premium prime lenses was to buy the lens in Canon-fit and add the Sigma MC-11 mount converter for Sony cameras. Not any more. Sigma has confirmed it’s releasing seven Art lenses on Sony E-mount fitting this summer. Three are due to arrive in May: 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM | Art (£750); 85mm…

EVERY photographer has a go-to lens that’s a permanent fixture in their kit bag. Whether they’re shooting wildlife, sports, portraits, or any other kind of photography, the quality and reliability of the lens is paramount to success. In the field, in sometimes challenging conditions, professionals need a lens they can depend on to deliver precision autofocus, speed and weather sealing to truly make the difference between capturing an iconic image and a wasted opportunity. Professional photographers of all stripes naturally turn to Canon’s L-series lenses for their excellent quality and reliability. That won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows anything about lens manufacturing. With sci-fi style robots, fault-hearing engineers and anti-static shoes, Canon’s Utsunomiya lens factory is a hotbed of innovation and precision. Canon’s L-series lenses are known globally…

PREVISUALISE IN-CAMERA UNDERSTANDING how colours and tones will translate into your final black-and-white image can be challenging, but there are some camera settings that will help you to pre-visualise the effect before you press the shutter. The main one is the Monochrome Picture Control (or Picture Style): this gives you a black-and-white preview on your LCD screen, indicating how the final image will look. Along with this, you also need to use the right settings to get the best-quality results, and also understand how the exposure and white balance settings you use will affect the final result. IN-CAMERA PICTURE STYLES Use your camera settings to predict how your final image will look USING your camera’s Monochrome Picture Style or Picture Control is a great way to help you to pre-visualise…

WHILE there is a host of black-and-white effects available in Lightroom or Photoshop, going beyond the preset choices means you need to spend time adjusting the settings to achieve different results. However, there are other software options that offer a wider range of preset looks and effects. These can often be used as a plug-in within your existing Lightroom or Photoshop software, so you have to choose the plug-in as an effect or processing option to access them. These software tools all offer a range of preset options, ranging from toning, printing and film to camera ‘looks’ that you can simply apply by clicking on the relevant option. You can then fine-tune the effect, and even apply many different effects to a single image, although you need to use a…

CAMERA SHAKE The greater magnification offered by a telephoto means that any vibration will be equally magnified. Use a lens with image stabilisation or a tripod for sharper shots. ANGLE of view is the amount of a scene that a lens can take in, measured in degrees – usually either horizontally or diagonally Lenses with shorter focal lengths offer a wider angle of view than those with longer focal lengths – that’s why they’re called wide-angle lenses. For example, a fisheye lens with a focal length of 8mm may be able to capture a super-wide 180-degree view in a single frame. That means it can record everything in front of it – and to each side, so you need to be careful where you put your feet or tripod legs!…

SHOOTOUT! Sponsored by london camera exchange CANARY WHARF Two readers join technique editor Claire Gillo for a day of modern architecture and urban photography among the skyscrapers and waterways of the capital’s Canary Wharf district READER 1 Tom Nixon CAMERA: Nikon D810 LOCATION: Northumberland TOM is a 22-year-old graphic design student coming to the end of his degree at Teesside University. He says he is looking forward to pursuing photography further after he graduates – and he means that in quite a literal sense, as he plans on travelling around Asia with his camera once he’s saved up enough money. Eagle-eyed readers might recognise Tom from Digital Camera’s recent Young Photographer of the Year 2018 competition: he picked up a community-awarded Crowd Vote win in the ‘On the Road’ travel…

EMMA SAYS: I took this shot of pelicans on a recent trip to a lake in Greece, while lying on the beach. The birds are quite extraordinary and fascinating to photograph. This group were squabbling over fish that was being thrown to them. I didn’t want to include the fish in the shot, but I liked the idea of the interaction and the splash as their big bills hit the water. It was taken on my Nikon D500 with a 10-24mm lens at 10mm. The exposure was 1/1,250 sec at f/8 and ISO 250. ANDREW SAYS: What a great shot. I really think you’ve caught the character of these birds as they jostle to try and get the food being thrown to them. I am full of admiration for this…

MAGNUM Photos veteran David Hurn is one of the UK’s most respected and influential documentary photographers. His best-known work takes a personal and affectionate look at culture and people’s everyday life and behaviour, particularly in Wales, where he has spent most of his life. What’s his background? Hurn was born in 1934 in Surrey; his father was an officer in the Welsh Guards. Educated in Wales, he was severely dyslexic and left school without qualifications. In 1953 he began two years’ National Service in the Army and was later selected for officer training at Sandhurst. While there, he bought a camera and taught himself photography. When did he become a pro? During his time at Sandhurst, Hurn saw a copy of Picture Post with photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson of ordinary…

CSC www.sony.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Sensor 24.2MP full-frame Exmor R CMOS, 35.6 x 23.8mm Image processor Bionz X AF points 693-point phase-detection AF/425-point contrast AF ISO range 100-51,200 (expandable to 50-204,800) Max image size 6,000 x 4,000 pixels Metering zones 1,200 Video 4K UHD at 30/24fps, Full HD at up to 120fps Viewfinder XGA OLED, 2,359,296 dots Memory card 2 x MS/SD/SDHC/SDXC (1 x UHS-II) LCD 3-inch tilting touchscreen, 921,600 dots Max burst 10fps, 177 JPEGs, 89 compressed raw, 40 uncompressed raw Connectivity Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth Size 127 x 96 x 74mm Weight 650g (with battery and memory card) LET’S do a quick stock-take of Sony’s Alpha 7 mirrorless camera range. While the Alpha 7 III is the eighth A7 model to be announced, in reality there are just three A7 product…

TRIPOD kits that comprise a set of legs and a head range in price from around £10/$15 for a flimsy, often unbranded option, to about £1,250/$1,500 for a top-of-the-range option. But how much do you need to spend to get a good one? With an eye on stability, load bearing capacity, features and performance, we’ve selected eight sturdy yet sensibly priced tripods, costing around the £200/$300 mark – a little less in some cases. But while the prices are fairly close, there are some fundamental differences in design. All of the tripods in this round-up weigh between 1.4kg and 2.6kg, so they’re lightweight enough to be easily carried. Each comes with a ball head, apart from the Benro Mach3, which bucks the trend with a three-way head. They also all…

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ABOUT CHRIS RUTTER Chris has over 30 years’ experience of shooting and printing black-and-white images – first with film and traditional darkroom techniques, before moving to digital 15 years ago. www.chrisrutterphotography.com EVEN though a digital camera is capable of capturing an almost exact copy of the subject, that doesn’t mean this is the best option. Photography isn’t about simply recording the scene in front of you: it’s an act of interpretation, and that’s exactly what black-and-white still offers. It frees you from the constraints of capturing a life-like image, giving you almost unlimited creativity. At the dawn of photography, black-and-white was the only option, but now it’s a creative choice that both acknowledges the history and legacy of photography, but can also be modern and cutting-edge. Black-and-white images have a…

LIGTENING, darkening and adjusting contrast of selective areas of an image to control the final result has been a part of black-and-white photography since the start of the traditional darkroom. With your digital images, you have a number of editing options to achieve these results in Lightroom, Camera Raw or Photoshop. Starting with a raw file and using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom or Camera Raw will give you the best results when you lighten shadows or darken highlights, as there is more detail available in a raw file compared with a JPEG; but it’s often easier to fine-tune your final adjustments in Photoshop using Adjustment Layers. 1 CAMERA RAW ADJUSTMENT BRUSH Selecting the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw (or Lightroom), you can simply paint over the area that you…

THIS MONTH: FOCAL LENGTH Everything you need to know about choosing lenses – in a nutshell FOCAL length isn’t actually a measurement of how long or how short a lens is. It’s actually the distance in millimetres from the optical centre of a lens to your camera’s sensor when the lens is focused at infinity. Too much detail? Don’t worry, all you need to think about is the way in which focal length affects image size. For a camera with a full-frame sensor, the ‘standard’ focal length is about 50mm. This is the focal length that provides a similar perspective to the human eye. Lenses that have focal lengths shorter than 50mm are known as wide-angles, as they offer a wider angle of view, while lenses with focal lengths greater…

PAINTED FLOWERS NAME: Nilesh Bhange LOCATION: India KIT: Canon EOS 5D Mark II with Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM lens EXPOSURE: 1/400 sec at f/4, ISO 200 WEBSITE: www.nileshbhange.com Among the flowers Nilesh’s low-down position helped him to create this immersive shot. “The point of view was selected to highlight the backlit petals of the beautiful flower and the main subject,” he says. “I picked a flower that had plenty of empty space in its background, then got as close to it as possible for minimum distractions and maximum blur.” Dense and dreamy The dense plants didn’t leave much room for Nilesh for shooting. To overcome this, he used a 70-200mm telephoto lens instead of a macro, meaning he was able to stand slightly further away from his subject.…

JOHNNY SAYS: This small pond is in Centenary Park, a small wooded enclave in Bedfordshire. Normally it is dry through the summer months, but this photo was taken after heavy rainfall over January and February. I wanted to take a photo where water was one of the main ingredients, so after a long walk in the mud my dogs came across the pond and basically went nuts! The weather was very overcast, but this allowed the reflections to come through. It was taken on my Canon EOS 5D Mk IV and a 24-105mm lens. The exposure was 1/1,600 sec at f/5.6, ISO 6,400. ANDREW SAYS: Pets always make great subjects, Johnny. You clearly have a great love for your dogs. Compositionally I think you’ve got it about right and that…

CSC www.panasonic.co.uk SPECIFICATIONS Sensor 10.2MP MFT Live MOS, 17.3x13.0mm Image processor Venus AF points 225-point DFD contrast AF ISO range 160-51,200 (expandable to 80-204,800) Max image size 3,680 x 2,760 pixels Metering zones 1,728 Video C4K/4K UHD at up to 60/50fps, Full HD at up to 240fps Viewfinder OLED, 3,680,000 dots Memory card 2 x SD/SDHC/SDXC (both UHS-II) LCD 3.2-inch vari-angle touchscreen, 1,620,000 dots Max burst 11fps (with AF-S), 7fps (with AF-C) Connectivity Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Size 139 x 98 x 87mm Weight 660g (with battery and memory card) Panasonic’s latest highlights the different demands of pro video, but also acts as a bridge to the world of stills photography The GH5S is an unusual and highly specialised camera. Panasonic’s latest is an important crossover product that highlights the different demands…

WORTH £99 FOR PC & MAC DXO Optics Pro 11 is an image-editing application with a difference. It’s designed to extract the maximum possible image quality from your camera; it does this using DxO’s powerful raw conversion process and its vast library of lens correction profiles. DxO provides the equipment, software and testing know-how used by the Digital Camera team when testing cameras, and is a leading specialist in imaging science and optical corrections. Optics Pro 11 makes what could be a complex process remarkably simple. Our walkthrough below shows you the four basic steps needed to browse and open your images, try out the preset image effects, make manual adjustments of your own and export a finished image for printing or sharing. DxO Optics Pro 11 can also apply…

THIRD PLACE, ‘THE MOMENT’ MAXIM KOROTCHENKO, RUSSIA “This dramatic shot shows journalists desperately running away from a 10-ton MAZ truck which has lost control during the 2016 Gold of Kagan rally. The race is held every year near my home in the Astrakhan region of Russia. One of the photographers, seen top right in this shot, was hit and was seriously injured as a result of this accident.” SECOND PLACE, GENERAL BLACK & WHITE QUANHUI LIU, CHINA “An 80-year old craftsman makes baskets by hand in my home town in Jongxin County, Jiangxi Province. I lay down on the ground to get this shot. The lighting is all natural – provided by a high window to the right, and doors to either side.” FIRST PLACE, ‘THE MOMENT’ KM ASAD, BANGLADESH…

PROJECT 1 Surreal reflection Shoot a water world Travel, landscape and abstract photographer Chloe Moore reveals how she took this image TAKING a different perspective on a familiar place can help you think about it in new ways. I am lucky enough to live and work in Bath, one of the most photographed cities in the world, so it’s fun to try to find new ways of capturing its famous buildings. There are so many beautiful places in Bath that I constantly have an opportunity to look for subjects that will work for this type of image. We are also not short on rain, so I don’t normally have to wait long for puddles to form for my reflection photography. I have a whole series of photographs of familiar Bath…

SUCCESSFUL black-and-white conversions can take time and practice to perfect, but it’s worth getting to know when and how to use the range of controls available to help you get the perfect monochrome image. There are many software options available for converting your raw files from colour to black and white, from your camera manufacturer’s own software to Photoshop. Lightroom is a great choice, though: it offers all of the controls that you could ever wish for, from a wide range of global highlight and shadow adjustments to several options for adjusting selective areas of your image. Along with these precise controls, there are also a range of preset options to help speed up your workflow. As you are working on a raw file, you can also adjust all of…

FROM the earliest days of photography, black-and-white images have been toned, printed and manipulated to create an almost endless range of effects to complete the final image. Now you can recreate these effects, or come up with some of your own, without having to spend hours in a darkroom full of acrid chemicals: they are all easily attainable through some simple software tweaks. Here are five different treatments that will give your black-and-white shots extra impact or a different mood, or simply make it look more ‘analogue’ than a standard mono conversion. Many of these are available as presets through many software packages such as Lightroom, but you can adjust the different settings to suit your particular image, or even start from scratch to create your own black-and-white masterpiece. 1…

FIRST, congratulations on your 80th birthday. How do you feel about it? It’s been gratifying for me reaching 80 and not feeling what I thought 80 must feel like. I’m at that time of my life when working is fun. It always has been, but there’s something about now, at this age, that makes me feel I can do whatever I want. My sense of play and energy feels really good, and living here in Tuscany, where my wife and I have lived for four years, is rewarding and inspiring. It’s a very productive, positive time. In your youth, was art and drawing your main interest? As a little kid, I drew cartoons and airplanes and all the stuff from the comic books. My father could render and draw in…

LENSES, http://shop.lomography.com Canon EF Nikon FX Pentax K SPECIFICATIONS Full frame compatible Yes Effective focal length (APS-C) 52.5mm, 75mm, 120mm Image stabiliser No Minimum focus distance 35mm, 0.25m; 50mm, 0.4m; 80mm, 0.8m; macro adaptor included Manual focus override MF only Internal focus No Filter size 52mm Iris blades 8 Weather seals No Supplied accessories Macro adaptor, ‘bokeh’ plates Dimensions Base, 66 x 34mm; 35mm, 55 x 42mm; 50mm, 55 x 34mm; 80mm, 55x38mm Weight Base, 192g; 35mm, 157g; 50mm, 124g; 80mm, 116g Price £839/$990 LOMOGRAPHY is full of surprises. This hipster retro specialist operates a regular production line of plastic lo-fi cameras, instant cameras, and quirky films in all kinds of formats, and has helped relaunch classic lens types. The Neptune Convertible Art Lens System might seem like a random…

www.canon.co.uk Canon PowerShot D30 £239/$330 1 THE PowerShot D30 is getting on a bit, but you wouldn’t know it from its 25-metre waterproof rating, which is only beaten by the much pricier Nikon W300. A 2m drop resistance and -10°C freeze proofing are also respectable although, unlike the Olympus TG-5 or the Ricoh WG-50, there’s no crushproof rating. Extra features include Full HD video and GPS for image location tagging. The D30’s exterior manages to be sleek while including rubberised panels on the front and rear for improved grip. Combine these with the oversized, logical controls, and this is the easiest camera of the bunch to operate, especially underwater or if you’re wearing gloves. The 3in LCD monitor is also one of the brightest on test. Image quality is a…