Innehållsförteckning för No. 562 från 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 brilliant 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. JOIN THE PHOTOGRAPHY WEEK COMMUNITY AND START SHARING! FACEBOOK http://bit.ly/39py9lg TWITTER http://bit.ly/2vGadLP FLICKR http://bit.ly/2VIgsJO We’re more than just a magazine – read…

Macro is a specialised field of photography that draws on a whole assortment of specialised kit to help you take better close-up pictures, from LED lighting to illuminate your tiny subjects, to focusing rails that allow you to incrementally adjust your focus to achieve total precision and create focus stacked images. Here, we’ve laid out some of the most useful equipment for macro work, but you don’t require all of these items to get started, so you can get the essentials and then add to your kit bag as you go; once you’ve started shooting, you’ll learn where additional gear will help, and can set your sights on a piece of kit that will make your macro shoots easier. If you’re on a super-tight budget, lots of the items listed…

While dedicated macro lenses are ideal, and essential if you want to shoot macro professionally, you can still achieve fantastic results with other lenses, such as a Lensbaby or a standard telephoto that can focus at a reasonably close distance. Here are some examples of alternative optics. 1 USE A CREATIVE LENS Portrait or street photographers may own an experimental lens in the form of a Lensbaby Spark 2.0, a Lomography Petzval or similar. These aren’t macro lenses, but if the focal length is long enough you’ll be able to get tightly cropped images of your subjects that will look totally different to images taken with a typical macro lens, helping to create shots that really stand out. 2 USE A TELEPHOTO TO CAPTURE GREAT MACRO DOF EFFECTS As it’s…

1 USE A FOCUS SLIDER RAIL Set up your camera on a sturdy tripod with a focusing slider rail attached to the tripod head. Now, frame up on your subject at your desired magnification and focus so that the closest part of your subject is sharp. Go into Manual mode to lock the settings and use an aperture of f/11 for better sharpness in each individual image. Take the first shot, move the slider forward a tiny amount, then repeat the process, slowly moving the slider forward until you’ve captured every part of your subject in sharp focus. 2 OPEN YOUR SET OF IMAGES Open Adobe Bridge and navigate to the batch of images in your stack. If you’ve shot raw files, you’ll need to open them all in Photoshop’s…

The CEWE Photo Award is the world’s largest photo competition of its kind based on the number of entries, and we’ve been given a sneak preview of some of the more than half a million images that have been submitted to the 2023 contest, ahead of the announcement of the winners on July 12. The competition is free to enter, and photographers can submit up to 100 images, hence the vast number of entries. There are 10 categories, including People, Animals, Sports, Landscapes, and Travel and Culture. For every entry, CEWE donates 10 euro cents to the charity SOS Children’s Villages, with donations from previous competitions totalling more than two million euros. The prize fund is in excess of 250,000 euros, and includes a bespoke trip of a lifetime for…

www.dxo.com £115/$129 (£69/$79 upgrade) While many swear by Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, in terms of raw processing they aren’t actually the best tools around. Adobe’s raw engine does a good job with colour profiles, AI masking, tonal adjustments and basic lens corrections, but it isn’t the best software for noise reduction. And while Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop may be among the best photo-editing software applications you can get, but they aren’t perfect, especially for editing raw files. Raw editing is PureRAW 3’s speciality. Its lens correction profiles tackle global lens sharpness issues but also edge softness, all through DxO’s correction profiles, which have been developed in-house for tens of thousands of camera-and-lens combinations. It also uses DeepPRIME XD AI-powered noise reduction and detail enhancement to produce spectacular results…

Nikon has announced two new Z-series telephoto zooms, the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR super-telephoto and the Z 70-180mm f/2.8, a fast all-purpose telephoto zoom. Starting with the Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR, this lens had actually been listed as a 200-600mm lens on the Z-series lens roadmap – so the official announcement offers a bonus 20mm reach at the wide end. Nikon sees this lens as the Z-mount successor to its popular AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR F-mount super-telephoto for DSLRs. It’s aimed at, and priced for, enthusiast wildlife, aviation and motorsports photographers. It offers Vibration Reduction rated at 5.5 stops to keep shots pin-sharp even when shooting handheld, and a Sport mode stabilizes the viewfinder image, making it easier for you to capture unpredictable or fast-moving subjects. The lens is…

MATIN WRAP-AROUND LENS REFLECTOR FROM £10 /$10 These nifty reflectors have a hole in the middle that’s large enough for you to poke a lens through while bouncing light back onto your subject. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC FROM £9.98/$9.99 MO Editing software such as Photoshop CC is ideal for enhancing your macro images with exposure and colour tweaks, and also for techniques such as focus stacking – you can use Photoshop’s Photomerge command to blend together several images set to different focus distances. RING LIGHT FROM £25 /$30 Ring lights emit an even amount of light directly from around the lens for softer shadows. You can usually get a budget-friendly LED ring light for macro use, rather than the expensive flash units required for portraiture, which need to be more powerful.…

Focusing is very tricky when shooting macro and close up to your subject, as the depth of field becomes very shallow, giving you just a thin slither of sharp focus, even with high aperture values like f/22. One recent innovation that many cameras offer is focus peaking: when using Live View on the rear LCD or electronic viewfinder, this places a vibrant outline around any sharp areas within your scene that are in focus. Focus peaking makes it much easier to assess which parts of the scene are sharp, as you can then manually twist the focusing ring until you see the focus peaking outline appear over your subject exactly where you want the focus to be.…

Achieving a totally sharp shot can be much more difficult when shooting macro photography because your depth of field becomes more shallow as your subject gets closer to the front of your lens. This means that even a relatively narrow aperture of f/16 or f/22, which would usually deliver good sharpness throughout a scene, will only provide a shallow band of sharpness when shooting close-ups. The solution is to create a focus stack. This is where you capture a series of images, focusing on a different part of your subject in each frame, then merge the sharpest pieces of each shot to produce an image with a much greater depth of field. A slider rail is handy for this, as you can keep the focus set and rack the whole…

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Festivals offer lots of great opportunities to cut your teeth as a music photographer. Big-name headline acts share the stage with lesser-known groups and singers, and as well as the performers there are all manner of sights that are worth capturing with your camera. There are a few things you’ll want to consider, however. You really don’t want to be carrying a bagful of lenses around with you all day, let alone having to change them in the chaos of the mosh pit. And security-wise, you don’t want to leave your valuable kit unattended in your tent. So if you want to shoot a festival, a compact camera with a single lens is the way to go. A standard zoom lens, like a 24-70mm, enables you to take everything from…

N-PHOTO N-Photo is a monthly magazine for Nikon photographers, and is packed with technique and Photoshop video lessons every month. http://bit.ly/3atHLfO https://apple.co/2TNE26T PHOTOPLUS PhotoPlus is a monthly magazine for Canon photographers that features expert advice, tips and video tutorials on all things Canon. http://bit.ly/30FoOlQ https://apple.co/2vaIdzw DIGITAL CAMERA WORLD A monthly magazine that aims to improve your photography with an inspirational mix of amazing images and how-to articles. http://bit.ly/2RER7g6 https://apple.co/2RBrZqG  DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHER The monthly kitbag essential for enthusiast and pro photographers, packed with tutorials, exclusive interviews and the latest reviews. https://bit.ly/3lH4ucX https://apple.co/2SJf6ff…

There’s a whole new world just waiting to be discovered with your camera – all it requires is a macro lens, or even budget-friendly macro accessories. This will help you get closer to everyday items, and transform them into extraordinary photographs packed with detail. The great thing about macro is that it covers a broad range of subjects, from amazing close-ups of insects and flowers that you can easily find in your garden, local park or nature reserve, to still lifes of inanimate objects such as coins, watches, or food. In this feature, we’ll show you how to achieve fantastic macro shots with minimal kit and even the most limited of budgets, and also with more advanced gear that you’ll want to master if you want to venture further down…

USE A REVERSING RING Give a standard lens macro abilities by using this economical add-on Shoot through a lens backwards using a reversing ring to increase your miniumum focus distance 1 GET YOUR REVERSING RING Reversing rings are widely available online, and won’t break the bank. Make sure you get one that fits your camera mount, such as Canon EF or Nikon F, and that it has the correct filter thread for your lens. 2 ATTACH YOUR LENS An film-era 35mm or 50mm prime lens will work well, as they often have a physical aperture ring that enables you to change the aperture when the lens is mounted in reverse. 3 RACK THE FOCUS Using the rear LCD screen or looking through the viewfinder, move your camera back and forth…

1 FOCUS BRACKETING Some cameras, like Canon’s EOS R5 and R6, have a focus bracketing mode that rapidly fires off a sequence of shots, changing the focus distance by a small amount in between frames. Focus bracketing will increase the chance of getting a shot in which the focus is exactly where you want it to be, and also gives you a batch of images, the sharpest areas of which you can blend together for a pin-sharp shot. If your camera has this feature then it’s certainly worth experimenting with. 2 FOCUS DISTANCE WINDOW This is a window on your lens that tells you exactly where the focus distance is set. This is handy for quickly setting the lens to its highest level of magnification, such as 1:1 to produce…

As the name suggests, a focus limiter is a useful feature included on many macro lenses. It allows you to lock the focus distance to a range of preset distances, which comes in handy if you know you’re going to be shooting a subject just a few centimetres away, as you can enable the closest range in your limiter to stop the lens hunting all the way to infinity. Alternatively, if you’re shooting a portrait several metres away, you could switch the limiter to the 0.5m to infinity setting.…

GOAT RODRIGO GODINEZ “This is one of my nephews’ pets. The photo was taken in Crosby, Texas.” https://bit.ly/3CziEHM BEAUTIFUL JUNK THOMAS POHLIG “This image is from a series called ‘Beautiful Junk’. I have a love for all things old and rusted; I am drawn to the unique textures. All the images in the series were taken at a place called Woods Hole Farm in Southern New Jersey, USA. I used a Nikon Z6 II with a 50mm lens set to f/8 at 1/60 of a second.” https://bit.ly/3NyMouz VERTIGO GEORGE KURZIK “This is an intentional camera movement image created in the Pep Ventossa style using eight separate images combined. It was taken in the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Clock Tower in Baltimore, Maryland.” https://bit.ly/2QrRzC5 SUNSET COLORS… JIM STRIPE “This was taken while I…

There are lots of tools that can help your images to pop out of the screen or from a printed page, but few have as instant an effect as Clarity. Available in Camera Raw and Lightroom, Clarity works by increasing the contrast in midtones, the range of tones that sit either side of the middle grey point in an image. When you increase midtone contrast the brighter tones in the midtone range become brighter, and darker tones get darker. As you’ll discover in this video tutorial, all you need to do is open an image and experiment with the Clarity slider to get a feel for the effect it has on details. In the photo above, for instance, a bold increase in Clarity boosts contrast around the dog’s hairs, making…