Tabla de contenidos para Issue 6 2023 en Digital Camera User

“ So you have a new camera, or you are itching to get one and get out there and start snapping away, filling memory card after memory card, right?” For many people, new to the world of photography, one of the easiest and most accessible areas first explored with a new camera is the great outdoors, and why not? You don’t need a studio or masses of expensive equipment. There is plenty of available light, unless you’re feeling adventurous and want to try night photography, and beautiful seaside or countryside scenes are usually not too far away by car or a brisk walk. Photographing outdoors is an amazing and rewarding experience for the novice and seasoned professional. Whether it’s just a record of a day trip you’ve made to a…

Cameras come in so many shapes and sizes, packed with gadgets and technology that can be confusing to the average enthusiast. Add to that the fact that there are many types of camera system too, and you would be forgiven for wondering if it’s easier to take up fishing instead. Don’t worry, if you just want to snap pictures of your friends on holiday or shoot with the latest medium format camera in the wilds of Borneo, we’ve got a list of camera types that help sort it out for you. 1. Standard compact Most compact cameras fall into this category. They tend to be fairly small and light, measuring about 100 x 50 x 25mm and weighing around 120-130g. Modern standard compacts are normally fully automatic, although some may…

There can be no worse feeling, for a photographer of any skill level, than finding yourself in a location where the combination of setting sun, clouds, land and water conspires to create the perfect landscape image and what you actually capture is blurry due to too slow a shutter speed and the fact you shot it hand held. In situations like this, the tripod becomes your saviour. All the best cameras and lenses in the world cannot save you from the need to shoot long exposures in low light conditions. Even the most modern DSLRs with very high ISO capability will still produce a noisy image if you bump the sensitivity too high. If you want the sharpest, highest quality images for shooting in low light situations outdoors, then you…

“ Photography is a rewarding and potentially profitable hobby, and the more you learn about it the more you’ll get out of it.” Modern digital cameras are marvels of miniaturised technology, with many automatic functions to help you take good photos in a wide range of different situations. However by learning more about how your camera works and how to use its many features you can expand the scope of your photography and get good results every time, even in difficult conditions. For owners of more advanced cameras there are options such as aperture and shutter speed control, sensitivity and white balance, as well as creative light metering modes and manual focusing, all of which can be used creatively to make your photos really stand out. It’s just a case…

When shooting hand-held and wishing to avoid camera shake, as a rule of thumb you can safely use a shutter speed roughly equivalent to the reciprocal of the focal length you are using. For example if you’re using a 100mm focal length then you can take a sharp hand-held shot at a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second or faster. If you’re using a 35mm focal length then 1/35th of a second is safe, and so on. Here’s an example shot taken hand-held at a focal length of 100mm and a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. As you can see it’s sharp and shake free. Here’s the same hand-held shot but this time with a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second. At this speed and focal…

Freezing the action with a fast shutter speed produces a nice sharp image, but sometimes you might want to allow a controlled amount of movement blur to show that the subject was in motion. There are a number of ways to accomplish this. In this first example, the camera was fixed on a tripod, with a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second, while the subjects cycled past in front of the lens. The tripod ensures that the background is sharp and the fast shutter speed has frozen the movement. The result is sharp but looks slightly unnatural, as though they were somehow balancing there without moving. With the camera still mounted on the tripod, the shutter speed was set to 1/10th of a second, and another subject came past.…

The most obvious effect of altering focal length is the change in magnification. Anyone who has ever used a zoom lens will be familiar with this effect. If you want to take a photo of something a long way away, you zoom in and the subject appears closer. This series of photos shows the effect of a wide-angle zoom equivalent to 25mm, medium zoom of 80mm and a telephoto of 400mm, all taken from the same position. What is happening here is not the subject being brought closer, but the angle of view being reduced so that a smaller proportion of the scene fills the frame of the sensor. If we look at a cropped-down section of the centre of the wide-angle 25mm view we can see that it looks…

The focal length of your lens, in other words how much you zoom in on your subject, also has a large effect on depth of field. Short focal lengths have much greater depth of field than longer focal lengths. This is one reason why, when taking a portrait shot, it’s a good idea to step back a bit and zoom in rather than using a wide angle lens up close. In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance, so…

If you look at a white snow-covered scene, your brain takes over and manipulates what you see, so that it matches your expectation of what white should look like. So, what you see, even under differing lighting conditions, is white. If you put a camera in the same scene, it does not make any such adjustments and adapt to a certain expectation. The camera will simply record the colours that are present in the scene. ‘White’ light visible to humans can actually vary in colour from reddish orange to greenish-blue. This variation is usually described as a temperature range, with warm being the red end and cold at the blue end, and is usually measured in degrees Kelvin using a colour meter. Confusingly, the higher the colour temperature, the cooler…

Your typical landscape image is normally recognisable for what it is. There are an infinite number of beautiful images to be captured out in the world, and that is absolutely fine by all landscape photographers. Now and again though, it is refreshing to see beyond the grand vista, to capture something more than what mother nature has placed in front of us. There is much debate as to whether a photograph can be classed as art. Digital photography does at least enable us to express ourselves and set our imagination free. With that in mind, let’s put the landscape photography rulebook away for a spell and uncover some interesting techniques to elevate your landscape photos to a whole new level of artistry. Why not try the long exposure panning technique…

1 Choose the right camera When you’re looking to buy a new camera for outdoor photography, make a list of your requirements and set yourself a budget. Don’t forget to allow for accessories such as lenses, a tripod and cleaning kit if you need them. Don’t fall in to the trap of thinking that a more expensive camera will make you a better photographer. You’re much more likely to improve your technique by overcoming the limitations of cheaper kit than by spending more money than you need to. 2 Choose the right lens If you’re buying a compact system camera or DSLR, it will probably come with a standard telephoto lens that is ideal for general photography and snapshots but there is a wide variety of special lenses available for…

If you are just a holiday shooter or an enthusiast landscape photographer, then your choice of camera can be fairly specific. Obviously, when looking at a new camera, budget will have a major part to play. It is always recommended that you try to get the best camera you can afford without breaking the bank. Just be aware that it is a good idea to get something that you can grow into as you develop as a photographer. You may find that if you get a basic model with limited manual controls, you will quickly outgrow it and go looking for a new camera anyway, so it is something to keep in mind. You may not need all the fancy technology and gadgets that are on offer with certain cameras…

If you’ve ever edited a photograph on your computer using Photoshop, Gimp, or any of the main image editing programs, you may have noticed a disparity between the size of the image as displayed in your computer’s file manager, and the size of the image once opened for editing. That image of the Lake District you took was about 4MB according to your file manager, but Photoshop is telling you it’s actually 35MB. Well, thanks to some clever maths and algorithms, image compression is at work here. We’ll start with the one you’ve all probably heard of which is the JPEG. The JPEG standard also happens to be an ideal format for storing pictures on a digital camera, because it uses something called file compression. This is a technique that…

Any movement in the frame during the exposure will be captured in the picture, resulting in motion blur. Anti-shake systems can do nothing to correct this; the only solution is to use a shutter speed fast enough to effectively freeze the action and eliminate any sense of motion. With a fast enough shutter speed you can freeze even very fast-moving objects, as this next sequence of photos will show. They were taken at shutter speeds ranging from a fairly slow 1/25th of a second up to 1/4000th of a second. As you can see, at 1/4000th of a second the blades of a desk fan can almost be frozen in place. “ The solution for motion blur is to use a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the action.”…

DEPTH OF FIELD The perspective-flattening of long lenses can also be used in other circumstances, such as drastically reducing depth of field. You can use this to isolate a subject by blurring out the background, as in the shot above (left). Compare this with the same shot on the right, but taken with a wide angle lens from a much closer range. The relative size of Bailey the dog is the same in both shots, but due to the increased depth of field in the wide angle shot, the background, although apparently more distant, looks sharper. TELEPHOTO LENS Careful focusing with a long telephoto lens can pick out individual subjects despite busy surroundings, such as focusing on Bailey the dog at the park with lots of visual distractions behind him.…

Light, and how it affects your scene is the basis of photography. Controlling how your camera handles exposure is a key technical skill that is one of the major methods you can employ to improve your photography. Leaving your camera in auto exposure mode when shooting selfies at a party is one thing, but trying to capture the best sunrise possible is going to require finesse. Relying on your camera to correctly, and automatically, meter a scene with difficult lighting conditions, is going to give you results you may not have been expecting. Most modern cameras, even relatively cheap compacts, have sophisticated built-in TTL multi-zone evaluative exposure meters that measure light levels at dozens, in some cases hundreds, of points within the frame, instantly comparing the results with a built-in…

Landscape photography is one of those genres where sharpness is everything. Wide angle shots of amazing vistas usually require front to back sharpness in your scene to maintain all the detail that was present. The viewer of the final photograph will appreciate the image more if their eye is able to take in all that detail. It will make the photograph ‘live’ for them. Nothing ruins a shot more than the image being fuzzy and blurry when you need it to be tack sharp. The problem however, is that in many cases in landscape photography you have a foreground element as well as a distant object that you want to be in as sharp focus as possible at the same time. Shooting with a wide angle lens and setting a…

“ The process is pretty straightforward and just requires a little bit of thought regarding the approach to the sequence.” There will come a time when your widest lens just won’t be wide enough to capture the scale and grandeur of a particular landscape. This is where the ability to capture a panoramic sequence of shots and combine them into a much wider or higher resolution image comes in very handy. The process is pretty straightforward and just requires a little bit of thought regarding the approach to the sequence you are about to capture. Essentially you are going to take a number of stills. Rotating the camera a few degrees left to right with each shot taken, while allowing enough overlap from image to image so that they can…

“ Good advice is essential and that’s why we’re here to help.” In this first section, we want to outline some of the essentials you’ll need to consider if you are looking to purchase your first camera, or upgrade what you currently have. Shooting outdoors, particularly if you are wanting to shoot landscapes, can be done with the cheapest of compact cameras, all shot hand held. That is absolutely fine up to a point. Beyond that, to take your outdoors photography up a notch, getting informed about lens types and investing in a good tripod, are key things to bear in mind. Over the next few pages we’ll look at a few of the many different types of camera that are available. We show you a few good tripod choices,…

A camera can stand or fall depending on how a good a lens you have attached to it, and also if it is right for the job in hand. Imagine setting up by a beautiful lake that stretches off as far as the eye can see in each direction. You would need a wide angle lens with a very short focal length that is capable of capturing all that grandeur and spectacle, but all you have is a telephoto lens. That is going to limit the kind of shot you could take there. You could also find yourself in a field of bluebells, wanting to get an extreme close-up of the dew on those gorgeous flowers. All you have in your bag is a standard lens with a minimum focusing…

As camera technology develops and the megapixel count increases with every new camera that is released, the file sizes that these cameras create when shooting in Raw format can be substantial. As an example, if you were to shoot a highly detailed landscape image with lots of tree, grass, clouds and mountains, an uncompressed 12-bit Raw file from something like a Nikon D810 could be as much as 55MB. Now imagine shooting an action scene of ponies running across the moorlands in burst mode and capturing twenty shots in just one sequence, you can imagine how quickly you would start filling up any digital storage. There’s more to it than just the amount of storage you have. A memory card of 64GB will let you store a lot of images,…

Even shooting at your camera’s lowest quality setting will still produce acceptable results under most circumstances. These three photos were taken using a Canon DSLR using the Maximum, Medium and Minimum quality settings. As you can see the differences are very hard to spot. The next picture is the same Minimum quality shot as above, but resaved as a JPEG using Adobe Photoshop using the Medium compression setting. While the quality is a little lower, the image is far from useless. For comparison, this next image takes the Minimum quality original and is then resaved in Photoshop using the Minimum quality compression settings. Now more compression artefacts are visible in the image.…

Whether it’s the smallest flower filling the frame of your viewfinder, or the sweeping vistas of the high moors and dales, these images would not be possible to capture without the aid of different focal lengths, giving you very narrow or very wide angles of view. A zoom lens allows you to choose a wide angle of view, or zoom in and use a narrower angle of view, magnifying the image. Focal length is one of your primary tools for adjusting composition. Selecting the right focal length for the scene allows the photographer to control perspective, angle of view and magnification, and can radically alter the mood and style of the photo. Some focal lengths are more suited to particular types of photo, and the properties of wide-angle and telephoto…

Apart from the role that aperture plays in controlling the exposure in your image, it is also the key ingredient in defining how much of your image is sharp and how much is out of focus. If you want your landscape shots to be as sharp as possible from front to back, or you want a close-up of a butterfly to be the only thing that is sharp in the scene, then it’s aperture that will do that for you. The aperture is literally a hole through which light passes after it enters the lens. The diameter of this hole can be altered, allowing a greater or smaller amount of light to pass through on its way to the sensor. In the early days of photography, aperture was adjusted by…

The difference between a good shot of your favourite view becoming a truly awesome landscape is simply down to how you compose the shot and the elements within it. A tree here, a lake there, it all adds up to elevate a photo to a piece of photographic art. There is a certain balance to a photo that is achieved by following some basic rules that will help you take better pictures. As in all things, it comes down to practice, but here is a quick introduction to the most useful rule of them all. The first and most important thing to remember is to take your time. Look at the scene in the viewfinder or on your monitor and try to see it not as simply a view but…

Selling pictures to photo libraries is a good way to make some money from your hobby. If you’ve got some decent quality camera gear, the technical know-how to use it properly, and you have a good eye for a picture, you can make yourself some useful extra cash by selling your photos to one of the many online picture libraries, such as Alamy, iStockphoto or Shutterstock. If you’re sufficiently dedicated you could even make a decent living from it. Almost any type of picture can sell, it just depends what picture editors are looking for that week. Even casual shots, like this moorland image, can find a sale in a book about photography, which means a sale for the library and a payment for the photographer. “ If you’ve got…