Innehållsförteckning för No. 261 från Digital Photographer

What a year it’s been! In the photography journalism business, we often say that camera and kit releases come along like buses – nothing materialises for ages and then suddenly you have to choose between four or five press conferences to attend. This issue, we had the pleasure of putting together our annual Gear of the Year awards, where we take look back at all of the kit that passed through our office doors and impressed us the most this year. You can begin reading it on p24 of the magazine. Winter is a time of short days and long nights, and if you can’t swim against the proverbial tide, go with it, we say. To that end, we’ve got 13 pages of advice on shooting long exposures, turning a…

INTERNATIONAL LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR 2022 Chilean photographer Benjamin Briones Grandi wins grand prize of $5,000 The International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022 (ILPOTY) award has been won by Chilean photographer Benjamin Briones Grandi for his series of painterly images. Now in its ninth year, the ILPOTY received a staggering 3,813 entries and the top 101 will be included in the 2022 ILPOTY book. Briones Grandi takes home the top prize of $5,000 in cash, a NiSi 100m V7 professional 100mm filter kit, worth US$1,199, plus a copy of the ILPOTY 2022 awards book. His series of four images selected from the portfolio category includes landscapes that truly look out of this world, from monochromatic, white deserts to mountains doused in magical light. While his photos are of…

Not every year is the same in terms of camera launches. Some years, there is a flurry of industry news, causing photography journalists around the world to suffer from repetitive strain injury as their typing fingers struggle to keep up with the number of reviews. In other years, new releases trickle into the headlines at a more leisurely pace. Arguably, the first half of 2022 looked as though it might fall into the latter category. This was due in part to the ongoing component supply problems that have plagued the manufacturers and caused significant delays to new products, even before they are officially launched. However, the second half of the year still had a few surprises in store, as the pace of reveals accelerated from the springtime onwards. At this…

Working with natural light has one great advantage: it gives photography a unique and natural atmosphere that is difficult to recreate in the studio. But daylight is anything but uncontrollable and, used correctly, it can have a great influence on the overall look and visual language of your image. To control the light and shadows, it is necessary to remember that the quality of light changes throughout the day. If you photograph under an overcast sky, in the morning or in the afternoon, the light creates soft shadows and reflections, whereas the midday sun tends to create more extreme effects. The harsh incidence of light emphasises the shadows and produces graphic and unnatural results. Food photography offers the opportunity to learn and understand how to use light in a natural…

Photographer: Ruth Kordtomeikel-Hiller Title: ‘Rübchen’ in the morning sun Location: Rietberg, Germany @ruthsgartenfreunde About the shot: “My garden friends regularly come over for breakfast and they are the perfect models to capture,” says Ruth. “The feeders are located on the trees in my garden so that they can quickly escape from enemies. I also provide fresh water next to the tree every day. Since word of the delicacies has spread among the nimble animals, there are often peak times at the buffet. If one of the squirrels gets too excited, it hops straight to the kitchen door hoping for a ‘nut to go’. It works every time.” Tag us @dphotographermag for a chance to feature here Every issue, we’ll be sharing the best images from our Instagram community. Tag us…

Despite the frenzy around the latest mirrorless cameras, there’s plenty of life left in DSLRs. Here are the best buys that will give you maximum performance for minimum outlay... Let’s get something straight right from the start – there’s nothing wrong with DSLRs. Sure, all the fuss and frenzy has been about mirrorless cameras of late but let’s not forget, many of the most iconic images from the last 20 years have been shot on DSLRs. And it’s not just an amateur thing. The world’s most demanding professional photographers have been trusting their livelihoods to reflex cameras, and continue to do so. Of course, as the latest in photographic technology, mirrorless cameras currently enjoy many advantages, not least of which is that almost all of the R&D budget of the…

Photography is more than just a means of documenting reality – with its technical possibilities, it can encourage creativity and inspire people to explore new paths. This is where longexposure photography comes in. With this method, movement is captured stylishly, offering an expanded view of the ordinary and showing something that cannot be viewed with the naked eye. However, even the most advanced camera technology cannot produce these images alone, and the photographer must have the right knowledge, equipment and, hopefully, a trick or two up their sleeves. With these things, you will be able to get the most out of the camera’s long shutter speeds and create magical images. However, you can see any number of long exposure shots of familiar subjects on social media networks and it can…

Best textured backgrounds I would like to invest in some textured backdrops for my still life and food photography. Do you have any recommendations for a photographer on a tight budget? Jason Dixon There are many different textured backdrops out there that range in price. We suggest you start with Black Velvet Styling (blackvelvetstyling. com) as the company has a large range of products that aren’t too pricey. For example, an A1-sized vinyl photography backdrop costs £32.50, but it’s also worth having an explore around the sale section of the website, as you can find some products there for half price. Club Backdrops (clubbackdrops.com) is a similar company to Black Velvet. A 60cm by 90cm vinyl backdrop can be purchased for around £22 from this online retailer. However, if money…

For our latest competition in association with Photocrowd, we challenged you to submit your best Indoor Portrait shots and, after working through all the entries, the winners have now been selected. Both crowd-voted and expert winners will win a licence to Affinity Photo professional editing software. Congratulations to all of the winners – as usual, the standard of submitted images was extremely high and it was a difficult task to select the best ones. 1ST PLACE WINNER The innkeeper Photographer: Annafranca Our comment: We love the lighting in this shot! It demonstrates masterful control of the spread of light and so it’s unclear whether the source is natural or artificial – the aim of any professional lighting technician. The composition, colour and sharpness all create wonderful depth. A lovely indoor…

Price: £1,199/$1,199 The OM System OM-5 may be the first ‘Olympus camera’ not to bear the iconic brand name, but the familiar logo is the only thing that’s missing here – this is a camera that lives up to the Olympus legacy and expands on it in several worthwhile ways. If you hadn’t yet joined the dots, the OM System OM-5 is the successor to the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III and thankfully does away with the alphabet soup nomenclature. This means it is the manufacturer’s ‘middle camera’, sitting between the flagship OM System OM-1 and the entry-level Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV, which will be renamed as the OM-10 when the next model is due out. Where the OM-1 is the top-tier system for professionals and photography experts, the…

Fujinon XF18-120mm F4 LM PZ WR Lauren Scott reviews this versatile long-zoom optic for the X-System DOWNLOAD TEST SHOTS https://bit.ly/3UhH0Ms PRICE: £899/$899 FOCUS DISTANCE: 0.46m WEIGHT: 460g Build and handling Fujifilm extended its X-mount roadmap last year with four new optics, however, the Fujinon XF 18-120mm F4 LM PZ WR lens wasn’t truly announced until the May 2022 X-Summit event. Because it zooms internally rather than extending, the lens barrel has an uncluttered yet rather suave exterior, keeping everything important tucked away inside. The zoom and focus control ring feels superbly smooth to rotate but, if we were being picky, it could be described as a little too slow. That said, the zoom speed is proportional to the speed at which you rotate the ring, giving the user a great…

Karyn Louise The founder of RUBY LDN, Karyn Louise is a London-based multigenre photographer, covering still life, portraiture, events, live performances (music and theatre), headshots, fashion and documentary. She has had work featured in various publications, including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Grazia, Yahoo, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Business Insider and more. She was also a photography consultant for Channel 4. To see more of Karyn’s work, visit: rubyldn.uk @rubyldn.uk They say the pen is mightier than the sword and yet, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This apparent contradiction can make working on a photography magazine a challenge – a constant balancing act between visual and literary communication. If the rule of storytelling is to show, not tell, the audience something, then our remit…

BEFORE Breaking some of the unspoken conventions of landscape photography can often allow you to capture more unique viewpoints that completely change the balance of the scene. Landscapes are often shot with the tripod set to a height between 50-150cm, and for most situations, this provides the perfect viewpoint to show off the surroundings at their best. However, positioning the camera just above the ground level creates surprisingly interesting results with the right scenes; typically featuring rugged foreground interest and lots of texture. “Positioning the camera just above ground level creates interesting results” Along with a wide-angle lens to capture the widest field of view possible to include the foreground, focus stacking is an essential element of this technique. This is simply because, with the camera low to the ground,…

Lens Correction presets are a quick and easy way to remove lens deficiencies including distortion and vignetting, but they don’t exist for all lenses. Most modern lenses are covered by Lightroom’s software, but if you are using an unsupported lens, an old manual lens or would simply like to create your own manual profile, that’s exactly what we’ll cover here. We’ll also cover saving it as a User Preset. What you’ll be using ● Remove Chromatic Aberration ● Manual Lens Corrections Basic adjustments ● User Presets ● Transform 1 Process your image In some images, it is easy to see distortion, however, this shot needed to be processed before it was visible. If a lens profile is unavailable, then apply adjustments in the Basic tab to get the image as…

To be a financially successful photographer these days, you need to earn money from a variety of different sources. One of the best avenues for this is through paid affiliate links, where you can potentially earn thousands by promoting products and services to your audience on behalf of companies. Here are some of the do’s and don’ts when working with affiliate partners. DOs Make sure you have an audience Affiliate marketing isn’t something that you can suddenly start from scratch and immediately expect to be earning an income from. As with any business, the first things you need are potential customers and an audience that is already engaged with your photography work, your blog or even yourself. Before you can even think about earning money from affiliate links, you need…

GuruShots is billed as the world’s leading photography game. It’s an online platform that gives global exposure to people who love taking photos. GuruShots members start as Newbies and compete with other photographers to win challenges, increase their ranking on the site and eventually progress to ‘Guru’ status. Challenges are voted on by Gurus and the wider GuruShots community, and there’s a fresh competition brief, such as the Amazing Architecture challenge, every day. All the winners receive prizes from GuruShots’ sponsors, including Lowepro, Kodak and Lensbaby. For more information, visit www.gurushots.com…

96 Top value DSLRs While all the buzz in the industry is around mirrorless cameras, DSLRs still offer plenty of lens options and great value for money. In this test, we review four of the finest DSLRs – two apiece from Canon and Nikon. 104 OM System OM-5 The Olympus branding may have disappeared, but, as James Artuis discovers, the OM-5 retains everything that was great about its predecessors and improves a few aspects too 108 GoPro Hero11 Black The Hero11 Black has the biggest sensor we’ve seen in one of GoPro’s action cameras. Angela Nicholson takes it out and about in her review 110 Lenses Every month, we take two professional optics out into the field to test their performance. This issue, we have the Fujifilm Fujinon XF18-120mm F4…

FUJIFILM INSTAX SQUARE LINK Website: www.instax.co.uk Price: £130/$140 The Instax Square Link is a smartphone printer that produces, you guessed it, square prints. Download the Square Link app to your smartphone to enable images to be personalised with drawings, filters and stickers. You can add a QR code to your prints to trigger animations or add text or doodles when the images are scanned by a phone. BENRO POLARIS ASTRO 3-AXIS HEAD Website: www.uk.benroeu.com Price: £1,100/$1,149 This electronic tripod head features an integrated camera controller and as well as allowing you to set the composition, it can be programmed to track stars while the camera takes a series of images, shoots long exposures or captures motion time-lapses. A dedicated app also allows the Polaris to be controlled remotely using a…