Innehållsförteckning för No. 609 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…

EXPOSURE SETTINGS Halo says… I tend to keep my shutter speed between 1/80 and 1/200 sec to either extend or freeze the water droplets, while keeping the model sharp. I shoot wide open to add depth to the rain via a mix of sharp and blurry droplets, adjusting the ISO or the intensity of the lights to compensate. FOCUS MODES Halo says… You can use Face/Eye Detection with some success, but I prefer to use single-point AF (AF-C), because the rain can cause the system to ‘hunt’ for focus. I’ll often target areas on a similar focal plane to the model’s eyes, like a shoulder, especially if it’s shiny and wet, which helps the camera to lock on. SPEED TRAP Halo says… I try to avoid using the very fastest…

DÜSSELDORFER SCHAUSPIELHAUS MARK GREENFIELD “This is Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, a theatre building designed by the German architect Bernhard Pfau. It was built between 1965 and 1969, and opened in 1970.” https://bit.ly/3v1BExW HEAVENLY HAZEL AND HAIRY HEIRESS TERRY DONOVAN “Taken inside the alpaca shed at Silk Fields Farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, where I work part-time. I used my Nikon Z 9 with a Nikkor Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S lens and Godox flash.” https://bit.ly/3PA93HA EARLY MORNING, DOWN IN THE PARK NICK STRONG “I shot this image in West End Park in Alloa, a town in Scotland’s Central Lowlands.” https://bit.ly/3tXh6GI BARBADOS BULLFINCH IAN SILVESTER “Taken on the beach of our hotel, the Colony Club in Barbados. The background is the palm trees in which these birds hide.” https://bit.ly/3StOQTI FACEBOOK http://bit.ly/39py9lg FLICKR http://bit.ly/2VIgsJO…

Local adjustments have long been one of the best features in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, and things moved up a gear with the introduction of Select Sky and Select Subject, two hugely helpful masking tools that sit alongside the existing Adjustment Brush and Radial and Graduated Filters. These tools let you automatically target areas with a single click, so you can add drama to a blown-out sky, lift the tones in your subject, and make powerful local enhancements. These tools are complemented by the Masking Panel, which makes it easy to organise and modify local adjustments that you’ve made. The dedicated panel makes a group from each mask, and this allows you to add or subtract from the initial mask using any of the other local tools. Then there…

To test real-world performance, we use lenses in all sorts of lighting conditions, for indoor and outdoor shooting scenarios. We check for good build quality and handling, smooth and precise operation of all controls, and we test the speed and accuracy of autofocus. We typically test full-frame compatible EF lenses on a range of full-frame and APS-C format bodies, whereas EF-S lenses that are designed specifically for APS-C format bodies are tested just on cameras like the EOS 90D and 7D Mark II. EF-M, RF and RF-S lenses are tested on respective EOS M and EOS R system bodies. In-camera corrections for chromatic aberrations, distortion and peripheral illumination are disabled throughout lab-testing to better reveal the true optical performance of each lens. In our lab, we test lenses under controlled…

£1,389/$1,299 Launched at the same time as the EF-S 10-18mm lens for APS-C format cameras (also on test), this was Canon’s first ultra-wide zoom for full-frame DSLRs to feature optical image stabilisation. The newly designed stabiliser gives a 4-stop benefit in beating camera shake. Having an f/4 aperture rating, the lens is considerably smaller and lighter than Canon’s 16-35mm f/2.8 zoom. That’s a big plus point for landscape and cityscape shooting, when you want to keep carrying weight to a minimum, and the optical stabilisation can save taking a tripod as well. The lens has premium optics with GMo (Glass Moulded) aspherical elements, including a large-diameter one at the front, plus two UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) elements. Super Spectra Coating is applied, as well as fluorine coatings on the front and…

The EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM III is a world-class ‘trinity’ telephoto zoom, and we’re also big fans of the smaller EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM II. Both of these constant-aperture telephoto lenses have a fixed physical length, so there’s no inner barrel that extends at longer zoom settings. The f/2.8 lens is quite big and weighty, at 89 x 199mm and 1,480g. The RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM lens is smaller and lighter, at just 146mm long and 1,070g in weight. However, it extends at longer zoom settings to 204mm. The same goes for the super compact and lightweight RF 70-200mm F4L IS USM lens, which measures 83 x 120mm and weighs 695g. This one stretches to 174mm at maximum extension. A major downside is that these RF 70-200mm…

£1,389/$1,299 Various EOS R System full-frame cameras are available as a complete kit with this lens. Typically, it takes full advantage of the revised RF mount, compared with EF lenses for DSLRs. It’s little shorter and lighter than the EF 24-105mm f/4L, at 84 x 107mm and 700g, making it an ideal match for slim line mirrorless bodies. Typical of L-series lenses, it has excellent build quality, including extensive weather seals and with a hood. Optical highlights include aspherical and UD elements, a 9-blade diaphragm and fluorine coatings. Compared with its older EF counterpart, there’s a more effective 5-stop rather than 4-stop image stabiliser, and it gets a boost to eight stops with in-body stabilisation, where featured in EOS R System cameras. Nano USM autofocus is very fast for stills,…

For sports, wildlife and other shooting scenarios where you need plenty of reach, the undisputed king of Canon’s EF lineup of zoom lenses is the EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Extender 1.4x. The built-in 1.4x ‘extender’ gives it a maximum coverage of 560mm, with a drop in aperture rating to f/5.6. You’ll need deep pockets though, as it retails for around £12,069/$11,997, and it’s been discontinued, so stocks are dwindling. In the RF camp, there’s the new RF 200-800mm F6.3-9 IS USM, which gives even greater and truly impressive zoom range, albeit with a relatively sluggish f/9 aperture at the long end. Even so, it’s much more manageable and affordable, at the relatively bargain price of £2,299/$1,899.…

The RF lens mount of EOS R System cameras offers some crucial advantages compared with the older EF mount for DSLRs. The key benefits are a wider flange and a much closer proximity to the camera’s image sensor, and the difference these make in terms of image quality is better sharpness and clarity, especially out towards the edges and corners of the image frame, while the much higher data transfer speed between RF lenses and EOS R mirrorless cameras gives a boost in autofocus and image stabilisation performance. Our pick of the crop we tested is the RF 14-35mm F4L IS USM for its outstanding performance and versatility, while the RF-S 10-18mm F4.5-5.6 IS STM is incredibly compact and lightweight, and great value for APS-C mirrorless cameras. However, it’s the…

Newcomer lens manufacturer Thypoch has announced that its first two lenses will now be available in Canon RF, Nikon Z, Fujifilm X and Sony E mounts. Thypoch’s Simera 28mm f/1.4 ASPH and Simera 35mm f/1.4 ASPH are the company’s first-ever products, but they were only available in Leica M mount when they initially went on sale last year. The appeal of these manual-focus primes is in their retro styling, which will doubtless make them particularly popular with users of traditionally styled mirrorless models such as the Nikon Zf and the Fujifilm X-T5. Both lenses are available in a silver or black finish for Nikon, Canon, and Fujifilm users (but only in black for Sony), giving you even more choice as to how retro you want your optics to look. The…

1 THE RAIN ROOM Halo says… TankSpace is home to one of the largest dedicated rain-machine studios in the UK. The space measures 7 x 7m and is covered in a thick, non-slip surface. Suspended above the studio is a custom-built rig, which houses a grid system of nozzles fed by one of three treated and heated water tanks. There’s enough water reserve for the studio to be in use all day long. 2 ANOVA PRO Halo says… We were fortunate enough to have a Rotolight Anova PRO 3 test unit in the studio. This powerful continuous/flash unit can produce millions of colours at the tap of a button. It features Rotolight’s SmartSoft Box tech, which digitally diffuses the lighting without the need for a modifier. Best of all, the…

The Comedy Pet Photo Awards has announced the finalists for its 2024 contest, and the shortlist features the usual rib-tickling selection of images of cats, dogs and other animals captured in humourous poses and situations. There are five categories: Dog: Our Best Friend, Cat: Our Fabulous Feline Friends, The Mighty Horse, All Other Creatures Great and Small, and Pets Who Look Like Their Owners. There’s also a Junior category for young photographers and a Video category, plus the People’s Choice Award. As well as celebrating the comical exploits of our closest companions the contest has a serious side, as it supports a number of animal welfare charities. Click the link to see more images from this year’s and previous contests at the awards website. You can also vote for the…

There has been so much hype over mirrorless cameras over the past few years, it’s easy to lose sight of just how great Canon DSLR and their companion EF and EF-S lenses have been for the past couple of decades. In short, Canon’s conventional EOS kit has been setting the standard for many years. But then everything went mirrorless. If you’ve got a perfectly good EOS DLSR and collection of lenses, you need a very good reason to trade it all in for R System replacements. We tend to think that camera bodies come and go, while quality lenses potentially last a lifetime. Changing lenses is even more of a tricky decision, as EF-mount lenses work perfectly well on EOS R System bodies via an EF-EOS R mount adaptor. So…

£379/$329 You might well think that the EF-S version of this lens is small and light, and you’d be right. But the newer RF-S lens is unfeasibly tiny for a wide-angle zoom, even considering that it’s for APS-C format rather than full-frame cameras. Unlike with EF-S lenses on DSLRs, you can use the RF-S lens on full-frame EOS R System mirrorless cameras in APS-C crop mode. Unlike the EF-S lens, it has a retractable design, shrinking the dimensions to just 69 x 45mm compared with 75 x 72mm. It also has a smaller filter attachment thread of just 49mm. The RF-S lens has two fewer optical elements, at 12, and again has a plastic mounting plate, the overall weight being a mere 150g compared with 240g for the EF-S lens.…

The Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens has been a favourite of professional and enthusiast photographers since it was launched in 2012, 10 years after the original edition of the lens. There’s no denying that it’s a great lens, but the newer RF 24-70mm f/2.8L IS USM is better in every way. It’s sharper, delivers less wide-angle barrel distortion, and keeps a tighter rein on colour fringing. Crucially for handheld shooting, it also adds the bonus of optical image stabilisation with 5-stop performance. The RF lineup also gives you more choice when it comes to fast standard zooms. As well as the RF 24-70mm F2.8, there’s the RF 24-105mm F2.8L IS USM Z, which is equally adept for video and stills, and the even faster RF 28-70mm F2L USM.…

£1,389/$1,299 Launched back in 2005, the original version of this lens was available as part of a kit with the first three editions of the EOS 5D, as well as the 6D. However, it wasn’t sharp enough to make it onto the approved list of lenses for use with the high-resolution 5DS and 5DS R, and this revamped Mark II edition of the lens was launched in 2016. Top of the agenda for the Mark II was a redesigned optical path, which also gains high-tech ‘Air Sphere Coating’ for keeping ghosting and flare to a minimum. Keep-clean fluorine coatings are added to the front and rear elements, and the build-quality has been enhanced for greater resistance to vibration and shock. The image stabiliser is also improved, rising from 2.5-stop to…

Canon’s big-money super-telephoto primes are some of the most impressive and imposing lenses in the RF lineup. They include the RF 400mm F2.8L IS USM at £13k/$12k, the RF 600mm F4L IS USM at £14k/$13k and the RF 800mm F5.6L IS USM at £19k/$17k. They’re incredibly sophisticated, top-performance lenses designed to cater to the needs of the most demanding action, sport, press and wildlife photographers. But haven’t we seen these lenses before? As it turns out, all three of these new RF lenses are virtually identical to the previous EF versions. The only real differences are that an EF to RF mount converter is built into the back of each of these lenses, and they’re rewired to take full advantage of the EOS R-system’s faster data transfer rate.…

£2,939/$2,599 There’s a wealth of super-tele zooms that you can fit to an EOS R System camera via an EF-EOS R mount adapter but, as an RF lens, the 100-500mm is naturally a perfect fit. It takes cues from the well-established EF 100-400mm also on test, and is physically slightly longer but a little lighter. It adds an extra 100mm of telephoto reach, albeit with a slowing in aperture by two-thirds of an f/stop, to f/7.1. The autofocus system, based on dual Nano USM motors, is blazing fast and well able to track moving subjects. The optical path incorporates no fewer than six UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) elements and one Super UD element, while the image stabiliser is rated at an impressive five f/stops, the effectiveness of which is further boosted…

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THE PRO HALO HAYNES CAMERA: NIKON Z 6II Nobody is more qualified to teach TankSpace’s unique brand of water-based portrait photography than Halo (@earlgreyhot.images). She works as the Ollerton-based outfit’s studio manager, as well as photographer, but started her creative journey as a model. The camera was too hard to resist, so she picked up her first camera and quickly built up a formidable portfolio. To sign up for a TankSpace Experience Day or hire a studio visit: www.tankspace.co.uk THE APPRENTICE HELEN EVERATT CAMERA: NIKON Z 7II Manchester-based Helen might be about to get wet behind the ears, but she’s certainly not a photography newcomer. She’s currently studying for a diploma at the Institute of Photography (IOP) and has built up a formidable portfolio of images. One thing she lacks,…

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Despite the increasingly early starts, spring is the favourite time of year for many landscape photographers. It’s warm, the weather is – in theory – more settled, and the landscape is starting to come back to life with fresh, green leaves on the trees and beautiful wildflowers in the countryside. One of the most enchanting sights of the season has to be a thick carpet of bluebells covering a woodland floor, with a vibrant canopy above. Bluebell woods are not just a stunning sight; with their intoxicating aroma and the sounds of nearby wildlife, they can be a complete sensory experience. While you can’t photograph the scent or sounds of a bluebell wood, with the right techniques and a bit of creativity you’ll be able to capture some springtime magic.…

£249/$299 Carrying around additional lenses is no fun when they’re big, heavy and cumbersome. This offering from Canon for APS-C cameras is refreshingly small for a wide-angle zoom and tips the scales at less than half the weight of many competing lenses. Its 67mm filter thread is also a lot smaller than usual, so filters are relatively inexpensive to buy. One weight-saving feature of the lens is that it has a plastic mounting plate, but build quality feels reasonably robust. Typical of many recent Canon lenses, it features an STM (Stepping Motor) autofocus system which is fast for stills, smooth for video capture and virtually silent. The electronically-coupled focus ring enables manual override of autofocus but there’s no focus distance scale. Less than half the price of Canon’s ancient EF-S…

Historically, lenses designed for film cameras and DSLRs were engineered to keep levels of distortion to a minimum. More recently, lenses for mirrorless cameras from all manufacturers, including Canon, tend to rely much more heavily on automatic in-camera corrections, which can’t be disabled in the menu systems of host cameras. It makes sense, because the lenses can be designed to be more compact and lightweight, in keeping with downsized mirrorless camera bodies. Even so, as you’ll see from our lab test results, some RF lenses actually produce less distortion than their older EF counterparts.…

£1,599/$1,299 This RF lens gives a noticeably wider maximum field of view than the EF 16-35mm, equating to 114 degrees compared with 108 degrees. The difference of 2mm at the short end of the zoom range might not sound much, but it makes a big difference. Weighing 540g, it’s 75g lighter than the EF lens, and easily manageable for handheld shooting. There’s some seriously upmarket glass shoehorned into this small lens. The total count of 16 elements includes three GMo (Glass Moulded) aspherical elements, two UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) elements and one UD aspherical element. Fluorine coatings are applied to the front and rear elements to repel moisture and grease. As you’d expect from a current Canon L-series lens, it features extensive weather seals and comes complete with a hood. Autofocus…

Colour fringing is generally most visible as lateral chromatic aberration, and most noticeable around high-contrast areas in scenes towards the edges and corners of the image frame. For example, you may spot coloured fringes around the likes of dark tree branches or the edges of buildings against a bright sky. The RF-S 10-18mm does better to minimise colour fringing than its EF-S counterpart but, in other cases, EF and RF lenses give fairly similar results.…

£2,599/$2,399 Canon’s original 100-400mm IS USM lens was launched all the way back in 1998, with film cameras firmly in mind. It continued to be highly desirable with the advent of digital SLRs, both for full-frame and APS-C format bodies, having an effective zoom range of 160-640mm on the latter. Less popular was its trombone-style, push-pull zoom mechanism. That’s been changed to a more regular twist-action zoom ring in this second edition, which replaced the original in late 2014. The optical path includes top-grade fluorite and Super UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) glass, and is more sophisticated than in the original lens, with four additional elements. As with some of Canon’s more recent top-flight lenses, high-tech ASC (Air Sphere Coating) is featured, plus fluorine coatings on the front and rear elements. Another…

The EOS R System is still very young, with the first camera and lenses being launched in late 2018. Even so, we’ve seen a wealth of full-frame compatible RF mount lenses being released over the past five years. More recently, there’s been a scattering of APS-C format RF-S zoom lenses but, as yet, no primes. Naturally, you can use any full-frame RF lens on an APS-C format body like the EOS R100, R50, R7 and R10, with no restrictions. For full-frame, most of the initial gaps have been filled, and we’ve seen some groundbreaking new lenses like the RF 5.2mm f2.8L Dual Fisheye for virtual reality capture, and the budget-friendly, fixed-aperture RF 600mm and 800mm F11 IS STM super-telephoto primes. In some cases, you’d still need to use an EF…