Indholdsfortegnelse for No. 278 i Photography Week

Welcome to the world’s No.1 weekly digital photography magazine. If you’re already a reader, thanks for your continued support and involvement; if you’re new to Photography Week, you’ve come to the right place! In addition to expert advice, brilliant tips and step-by-step tutorials, every issue features interactive galleries of the best new photos, how-to videos on essential shooting and editing techniques, and in-depth reviews of the latest camera kit. But that’s not the whole story. Photography Week is more than a magazine – it’s a community of like-minded people who are passionate about photography. To get involved, just follow any of the links below and share your shots and comments – your photo might even appear on our cover! JOIN THE PHOTOGRAPHY WEEK COMMUNITY AND START SHARING! FACEBOOK http://tiny.cc/7s2zgy TWITTER…

Have you ever wondered why some pictures just look ‘right’, while others don’t? The answer almost always lies in the composition, which relates to the positioning and relationships between areas and focal points in the subject you’re shooting. Understanding how composition works is the single most important thing you need to know to improve your images. Composition is a combination of art, a little bit of science, and a significant sprinkling of ‘gut feeling’. Here you’ll discover all the rules and techniques that you need to know to improve your composition skills, and learn how to use them and how they affect your images. While we can’t teach you the ‘gut feeling’ bit, simply getting out there and using these composition techniques will help you discover which ones work for…

While the basic positioning and placement of the elements within a picture is vital to the composition, this is only one part of improving your images. Even when you’ve positioned your subjects beautifully you can end up with very flat-looking images, so you need to use some other techniques to add a sense of depth and distance to shots. There are two main techniques that can help emulate a three-dimensional scene within the constraints of a two-dimensional photograph: leading lines and aerial perspective. The first relies on using shapes, lines or curves in the subject to draw the viewer into the picture. This technique can be enhanced by using geometrical rules such as vanishing points and objects getting smaller as they get further away from you, giving a sense of…

WHERE WORLDS DIVIDE MIKE VER SPRILL “This was taken at Thingvellir National Park in Iceland. At this location the North American tectonic plate meets the Eurasian plate, and they are slowly separating from each other.” http://tiny.cc/87m2py MARINA BAY SANDS ANNA MAY MANRIQUE “A blue hour shot of the very picturesque Marina Bay, from a vantage point featuring one of the famous landmarks of Singapore, the Marina Bay Sands resort.” http://tiny.cc/vithny DROPS IN PINK FLOWER TARJA PORKKALA “After a sudden shower, sunlight entered our garden and illuminated the water drops on this pink flower.” http://tiny.cc/h1i8ny THROUGH THE CROWD JONNY HENCHMAN “Red Bull protégé and GP2 frontrunner Pierre Gasly, photographed between the crowds attending the British Grand Prix.” http://tiny.cc/swjvoy FEELING BLUE BASIA PAWLIK “A classical beauty shot that I like to take…

Bitplay standard lenses From £22/$20 www.bitplayinc.com Bitplay’s range of standard lenses may be compact and cheap, but optical quality pays the price. Sharpness from the 3x telephoto optic falls off fast from the centre, and there’s distortion. At the other extreme is the circular fisheye+5x macro optic. In fisheye mode you get a true 180-degree field of view, but sharpness is low and fringing atrocious. Unscrew the front of the lens and you reveal a tiny macro optic. If you can ignore the huge sharpness fall-off and pincushion distortion, centre-frame detail is impressive and highly magnified. The 0.3x full-frame fisheye tightens the FOV: fringing is less severe, but centre-frame detail is only marginally improved. It’s a similar story with the 0.68x wide angle+1.5x macro lens, where barrel distortion and blur…

Panasonic has announced its latest video-focused mirrorless camera, the Lumix GH5S. Designed primarily for professional filmmakers, Panasonic believes that the GH5S will deliver the highest-ever video image quality seen in a Lumix camera. Panasonic has ditched the 20.3MP Micro Four Thirds Live MOS sensor found in the GH5 and replaced it with an all-new 10.2MP sensor. This has allowed Panasonic to improve on the maximum ISO of 25,600 on the GH5, with an ISO ceiling of 51,200 in the GH5S. To reduce the risk of background image noise in low-light conditions, Panasonic has also included its Dual Native ISO Technology. The Lumix GH5S also gives those shooting stills the option to shoot 14-bit raw files, while the newly developed multi-aspect sensor provides sufficient margin to get the same angle of…

Identifying and positioning the main subject, and other focal points, in your image is at the heart of good composition. Get this wrong, and you’ll simply end up with an unbalanced, awkward and unfulfilling image that will never look quite ‘right’. So here we’ll start with the building blocks of where to place subjects and focal points to help you get better balance, shape and distribution of form in your photos. No single one of these rules and techniques is the ‘golden bullet’ for getting the right balance every time you take a shot, but if you’re struggling to find a framing and composition that works, implementing one or two of these rules is likely to help you get a shot that looks great, instead of one that’s only destined…

You don’t always have to fill the frame with the main subject or include loads of different elements in a scene to produce striking compositions. In fact, it’s often better to isolate a single focal point or leave space around the subject to give it room to ‘breathe’. This approach to composition will help you produce more relaxed, contemplative images, because the extra space helps to give the viewer more time to ‘find’ the subject in the image without the competition of other elements or focal points in the scene. Finding this perfect simplicity isn’t always easy though. You’ll need to identify the dominant subject and then isolate it from any distractions around it to produce a really striking composition. To help you isolate a subject you can use a…

Back in October we brought you the winners of the annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, chosen by a distinguished panel of judges including leading photographers and naturalists. But if you fancy yourself as a good judge of what makes a great wildlife image then here’s your chance, as alongside the main WPY contest the UK’s Natural History Museum also holds its People’s Choice awards, and voting for the latest competition, which features 24 images chosen from the main contest shortlist, is now open to the public. You can see four of the shortlisted images above; click the link to see all the images and cast your vote. Voting closes on February 5, and the winner will be announced on February 13. SEE MORE IMAGES http://tiny.cc/0rx3py…

The basic rules governing the positioning of objects and focal points are great for many shooting situations, but they can only give a bare structure to images. Thinking about how the different areas, objects and subjects in the picture interact with each other and add to the story will enable you to go beyond simply where to position them in the frame. These connections are sometimes obvious and literal, such as a line or an object linking two areas of the frame, but can also be more ephemeral, such as using similar shapes or subjects to add to the story. It can also involve using two strikingly different subjects or colours to create a contrast to add impact or even conflict to the narrative of the image. When you’re thinking…

From the wide view of a short focal length to the high magnification of a telephoto, the type of lens you use has an impact on the composition of your images. But it’s actually your viewpoint that’s the real weapon in your composition armoury, as your perspective is governed simply by the relative distances between your viewpoint and the different subjects in a scene. So, when you’re out shooting, don’t simply stand in one spot and rely on zooming in or out (or changing lenses) to include more or less of the scene; you’ll need to move to really transform your composition. Also consider high or low viewpoints, to give your images and composition a distinctive twist. PICK THE CORRECT LENS The lens you use simply determines how much of…

10 MINS Your camera’s metering system plays a vital role in picture-taking, by working out how much light should enter the camera to make a correct exposure. Be warned, though: while it’s very clever, 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, halfway between white and black. More often than not this assumption comes out about right, but the 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…

Capturing motion blur is a great way to add drama and dynamism to shots of cars and other objects, but it’s not always easy to get the effect right in-camera – and what if your subject isn’t actually moving? The solution is to add the blur in Photoshop, and in this video tutorial we’ll show you how to use the Path Blur and Spin Blur filters to add realistic motion blur to our image of a stationary car. As is often the case, the key to this effect is in making a precise selection, and we’ll show you how to do that too. DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES http://tiny.cc/3mezpy ON A PC OR MAC WATCH THE VIDEO http://tiny.cc/mgt9ky WANT MORE PHOTOSHOP TUTORIALS? CHECK OUT PRACTICAL PHOTOSHOP For more Photoshop tutorials, tips…