Advanced Photographer 41

16-PAGE FULL-FRAME ULTIMATE GROUP TEST THE MAGAZINE THAT TAKES YOUR IMAGES SERIOUSLY

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FULL TEST

SONY A7R How does this pixel-packed pocket wonder rate?

TECHNIQUE

NIGHT GLOW Essential techniques and inspiration to fire up your night shots

GO COASTAL! Head to the coast this weekend and capture stunning seascapes LIGHTING ACADEMY USING GRIDS FOR PUNCHY PORTRAITS

TOP SPOT FOR SPURN POINT AINSPIRING IMAGES

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Welcome

WILL CHEUNG FRPS, EDITOR

Will has worked in photo mags for over 25 years and been taking pictures for even longer. His photographic interests are very broad, from nature to portraits.

Welcome to the issue. It’s action packed, as always, with advice and ideas to get your creative juices running. However, it’s worth saying, that some of the techniques must be carried out with an eye on safety.

If you have a go, please don’t be silly and take any risks.

Barry van Elder’s images show what can be done with a creative mind. His images are amazing and very imaginative. If his firewall technique is not for you, we have plenty more night photography techniques for you to enjoy.

Our second portfolio features Scott Wilson’s seascapes. Again, if you are inspired to go to the coast please check the weather forecast and heed any warnings from the Met Office and emergency services.

Photo Kit is dominated by a major full-frame DSLR comparison test.

We’ve had no fewer than seven full-frame DSLRs in the office to see how they fare. If you are thinking of changing format or just updating your existing 35mm format camera, this test is simply unmissable.

Anyway, we hope you’ll enjoy this issue and until the next time, happy shooting.

Will Cheung FRPS, Editor

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Contents

44

CAPTURE: Light painting

10

INSPIRE: On the coast

The cover story...

“One of those moments when things come together,” says Scott Wilson of his image of Anglesey’s Penmon Lighthouse. “In the wonderful blue dusk light, the tide was spot on and a full moon was rising behind me. The movement of the water over the rocks and the moonlight glistening on the seaweed really caught my eye. Shooting this was more precarious than it looks and involved wading out to this slimy, seaweed covered vantage point with little in the way of footholds and a race against the incoming tide.”

Nikon D700, 14-24mm f/2.8 at 16mm , 30secs at f/22, ISO 200

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SEE PAGE 62 FOR DETAILS

Inspiration, technique, opinion 6 UPFRONT There’s more

than a kitbag’s worth of new launches and announcements from Nikon, Fujifilm, Samsung and Sigma. Better start saving up now!

10 COAST TO COAST: INSPIRE Rather than

52

LIGHTING ACADEMY: Grids & gels

coasting along with his photography, Scott Wilson likes a challenge, whether it’s wading into the sea or entering exhibitions.

18 BESIDE THE SEASIDE: CAPTURE

Light, location and lenses – just three of the things to consider when planning your next day trip to the coast.

24 TOP SPOT: SPURN POINT Make a point of

heading to this photogenic spot on the Humber Estuary.

Whatever the weather, it’ll be worth the journey.

4 ADVANCED PHOTOGRAPHER ISSUE 41

29 EXPOSED As camera

makers vie for our pennies, they pack more features into their kit. But which ones do we actually want and need?

30 TRAINING DAY It’s never too late to learn, but what are the best places to do so? We have the answers.

This issue we join an Olympus Experience Day for a spot of light painting.

36 OPEN FIRE: INSPIRE When you’re a pyromaniac with a passion for cars and photography, the resulting images are sure to be epic.

44 THE LIGHT TOUCH: CAPTURE We’re not suggesting you start playing with fire, but fairy lights, torches and wire wool are all fun, and safeish, introductions to light painting.

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Contents

30

TRAINING DAY: An Olympus Experience

24

TOP SPOT: Spurn Point

64 MEGA TEST: Full-frame DSLRs

82 FULL TEST: Sony A7R Photo Kit: the latest gear tested

52 LIGHTING ACADEMY

Armed with a grid and some coloured gels, expert John Denton works hard to control light spread and create dynamic portraits.

58 RAW MASTERCLASS Nellie the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to colour – well, actually editor Cheung turned her black & white in Lightroom.

62 SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS Make sure you get

your copy every issue – and you don’t even have to go to the shops with a subscription.

114 NEXT ISSUE Take a walk on the wild side of the streets with us or a trip to the university city of Cambridge.

Then again you could go on a nature trail, or simply read about gear, glorious gear.

82 SONY A7R Our resident techie Dr Fyfe wonders if small really is beautiful… even when you factor in a high pixel count, a big price tag and slow focusing/shooting speeds.

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64 FULL-FRAME TEST

We pit seven magnificent full-frame bodies against each other to find out if one is the most magnificent.

92 AUTOPANO GIGA 3 A stitch in time saves nine goes the proverb, but will this software save you time when you’re putting your panoramas together?

87 PROFOTO B1

Will you be saying goodbye to your existing flash heads once you’ve met this unit with the convenience and flexibility of TTL plus the power of studio lights?

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INSPIRATION

Coast

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INSPIRATION

Coast

An award-winning seascaper, long-exposure enthusiast and general photo wizard, Scott Wilson wasn’t born with a camera in hand WORDS CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS PICTURES SCOTT WILSON

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INSPIRATION

Light fantastic

With rivers of fire, walls of flame and retina-searingly perfect cars, Barry Van Elder’s automotive shots are images of truly epic beauty WORDS CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS PICTURES BARRY VAN ELDER

36 ADVANCED PHOTOGRAPHER ISSUE 41

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INSPIRATION

Light fantastic

AUDI TT “This Audi TT was the centre of attention while I showcased the firewall holding device, a tool which allows the Kevlar rope to be attached to either end. This allows you to manoeuvre the rope around, keeping a consistent line and ultimately allowing for far more creative ideas.”

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LIGHTING 41 A Part C A D E M Y

Last month we looked at hard light and how we can utilise it to make great images. This time we’ll look at using another form of hard light and how important it is for giving depth and a little drama WORDS & PICTURES JOHN DENTON

I am often asked what are the best modifiers to purchase to improve your lighting. To start with, a nice soft light modifier such as a softbox or brolly is the best place to start to give an even light over your subject.

But while an even light is fine as your key light, you will often want to pick out small areas of the scene with your light – it might be the subject’s hair or the background. This is where a grid is essential to really channel your light down and allow you to place it with great accuracy.

What is a grid? It’s simply a collection of holes that fits over your light source and channels it down – minimising light scatter. A grid is like a honeycomb and they are available in different sizes. The current trend is for cloth grids to come supplied with softboxes, while metal grids for standard metal light reflectors are often sold separately.

Whilst buying the grids, indulge in a pack of coloured gels too and you have a killer combination for some beautiful images.

Many a dedicated strobist has spent hours cutting black drinking straws to length and wrapping them in card to make their own home-made versions – the DIY approach is fine for flashguns but obviously not recommended for mains flash. Personally I use the Interfit Strobies versions on my speedlights and the Elinchrom products on my Quadra Rangers.

Grids come in a variety of sizes measured in degrees. My Elinchrom kit has a 30, 20 and 12° grid. The smaller the number the

tighter the spread of light. That’s important to know when buying your kit but also to think of when selecting the one to use on a shoot as spread of light is also affected by the distance the light travels to the subject.

If you’re working in a confined area and need a wide spread of light then the 30° grid will be your best friend. If you have to place your light a long distance from the subject but still want a tight spread then the smallest degree grid in your collection will be your tool of choice.

Typically I use grids to control light spread when using as a hair light or as a background light. In both cases the light is being used to separate the subject from the backdrop and give depth to the image.

1 In the first image a speedlight was placed behind Jade. She was sitting in an open doorway MAIN IMAGE Nikon D300, 85mm f/1.4 lens, 1/200sec at f/1.8 and ISO 200.

1

TOP TIP If using a grid on a flashgun or a light without the modelling lamp on, how do you know if it’s pointed directly at your subject?

Simply ask your subject to look at it. If they can see the bulb or tube of your flash then it’s pointing at them. If they’re slightly off centre then they won’t be able to see through the honeycombs of the grid and so the light won’t be hitting them directly.

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Grids and honeycombs are available from the flash makers as well as third party suppliers, and you can get them for mains flash as well as speedlights, so check out Honl, Interfit, Lastolite and Rogue.

Some strobists make their own from corrugated cardboard or bunches of drinking straws bound together and held in front of the flash with gaffer type.

LIGHTING A C A D E M Y

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Photo Kit

FULL-FRAME GROUP TEST

FULL-FRAME There are more full-frame DSLRs on the market than ever before, and they’re cheaper than ever. But which is best? We get seven side by side to find out WORDS & PICTURES IAN FYFE

64 ADVANCED PHOTOGRAPHER ISSUE 41

Choosing to go full-frame means choosing to invest a significant amount of money in your photography, so deciding on the system to commit to takes some thought.

And in the last two years, the choice of full-frame cameras has expanded dramatically. Not only this, but the price gap between full-frame and smaller format cameras has been bridged by more consumer-friendly and affordable models.

So the benefits of the 35mm format, 24x36mm sensor is now within reach of more enthusiasts.

It’s not just the prices that have shrunk either – gone are the days when full-frame was a pseudonym for bulky and cumbersome. Eighteen months ago, Nikon and Canon launched compact fullframe bodies similar in size to APS-C format DSLRs, the Nikon D600 and the Canon EOS 6D. By the way, next month begins a three-part huge APS-C DSLR comparison review.

At the end of 2013, Nikon replaced the D600 with the D610 and added its retrostyled Df, while Sony stirred things up with the introduction of the A7 and the A7R, the first ever mirrorless full-frame cameras. These added to the Nikon D800 and Canon EOS 5D Mark III, existing ‘prosumer’ models, means that anyone looking for a full-frame camera has more choice than ever before.

That’s a good thing, but it can also make buying decisions more difficult.

What you really need is to get all the options in your hands and compare them side by side. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Over these 16 pages, we’ll tell you all you need to know about seven 35mm format cameras and see how they perform in side-by-side tests of resolution, metering and low-light performance. But first, let’s look more closely at why you’d want to go full-frame in the first place.

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Photo Kit

FULL-FRAME GROUP TEST

MEGA TEST The best in image quality In a nutshell, bigger is better. In the same way that a medium-format sensor will deliver better quality than a fullframe sensor, so a 24x36mm sensor will outperform an APS-C sensor. This is down to the bigger surface area, which allows for either more pixels or bigger pixels. The benefits of having more pixels are obvious – higher resolution means more detail and bigger prints without software help.

The advantage of bigger pixels is twofold. Firstly, bigger pixels can each collect more light, which means there’s a bigger difference between the darkest and lightest tones it can record – the sensor has a larger dynamic range. The other benefit comes in low light, because bigger pixels create less digital noise relative to the amount of light they collect. This makes for less noise and a superior high ISO performance.

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Lens matters If you have an APS-C system and are considering going to full-frame, there are a few things to say about lenses.

Firstly, not all lenses can be used with full-frame cameras. Some can only be used with APS-C format cameras because they don’t create an image circle large enough to cover a 35mm sensor, hence the crop factor. Crop factors vary according to the sensor size – on Canon it’s 1.6x and Nikon 1.5x. This means if you fit a 50mm lens on an APS-C Canon, it gives the same field of view as if an 80mm lens was used on a full-frame camera. It gives an apparent increase in focal length.

You might be able to use your existing lenses and just crop images (either manually or automatically in-camera), but this approach does limit you at the extreme wide-angle end until you invest in a new lens.

Secondly, there is a benefit in the crop factor, specifically at the telephoto end. If all you shoot is sport and nature you might be better off sticking with the APS-C format. The smaller format’s apparent gain in focal length means if you fit a 300mm lens on an APS-C Canon you have the focal length equivalent of a 480mm in the 35mm format. The cost of buying an equivalent lens for full-frame could be prohibitive and it’ll be bigger.

Thirdly, speaking of size, full-frame lenses tend to be bigger and heavier than APS-C-only equivalents. The Sony A7/7R might have a potential advantage here as smaller lenses to suit the smaller bodies might be a real boon.

Finally, pictorially the larger fullframe format means shallow depthof-field effects are generally easier to achieve. Typically, use f/4 on a fullframe DSLR and you would need f/2.8 on APS-C for the same look.

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Photo Kit SONY A7R

Sony A7R

Big on resolution, small on size, the Sony A7R seems to offer the best of all worlds. Ian Fyfe takes a closer look at what it really has to offer

WORDS & PICTURES IAN FYFE

KEY FEATURES £1689 BODY ONLY 36.4-MEGAPIXEL SENSOR BIONZ X PROCESSOR ISO 50-25,600 465G WWW.SONY.CO.UK

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You could say the Sony A7R is a camera of extremes. It’s the lightest full-frame camera with interchangeable lenses, yet equals the record for highest pixel count on a 35mm sensor, matching the Nikon D800. The A7R, at £1689 body only, could be the answer to your photographic prayers.

The A7R is the big brother of the 24-megapixel A7 – the first two to combine the convenience of size you get from a mirrorless design with a fullframe sensor. We reviewed the A7 in the last issue of Advanced Photographer, and there are a lot of similarities and just a few differences.

The body of the A7R is less plastic and more magnesium, which makes the camera slightly lighter – by a miniscule 9g though, and the extra magnesium doesn’t elevate the A7R to a new level of build quality, so in practice it’s insignificant.

What’s great is that the A7R has the same amount of customisation options for the controls – while real estate for buttons is more limited than on a DSLR simply because of size, having ten reprogrammable buttons, each with 46 possible controls, makes the best use of the space available.

Although similar to Sony’s NEX cameras in terms of design and lens mount, the A7R menu is more similar to that of Alpha DSLTs, although this has been refined to make navigation through the options easier. Rather than one level of tabs, there’s a second level of sub-tabs, and you can navigate sideways. This saves time searching, although these aren’t always under the tabs you might expect, so be prepared for some menu hunting.

As with the A7, I found the A7R a little slow to respond in some ways, particularly in its two-

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Photo Kit SONY A7R

second power-up time and slight lag in the display when changing settings with the dials. Despite the difference in file size – Raw files from the A7R are over 37MB each compared to 25MB in the A7 – I didn’t notice any extra delays in file processing or writing to the memory card.

What the file size does affect is the continuous shooting speed. The A7R has a maximum rate of 4fps, but that’s only in Speed Priority mode where there’s no focusing between shots. To allow for focusing, the speed drops to 1.5fps – hardly worth using continuous shooting mode at all. The A7 can manage 5fps in Speed Priority mode and 2.5fps with focusing.

Another slight difference from the A7 is in the shutter mechanism. Both the first and second curtain in the A7R are physical, as in a DSLR, whereas you can elect for an electronic first shutter curtain in the A7.

Press the shutter button of the A7R then, and you’re met with two loud clunks. If you were thinking the A7R was the ideal camera for remaining inconspicuous during some high-resolution street photography, then the noise of the shutter might make you think again. One other consequence is that the minimum flash sync speed is 1/160sec rather than 1/250sec in the A7.

We’re getting used to mirrorless cameras having on-sensor phase detection for faster focusing performance, and the A7 features this in its Fast Hybrid AF system.

The A7R, however, doesn’t have this, and instead relies solely on contrast detection autofocus in its Fast Intelligent system. On paper then, the more expensive model has a less advanced AF system. And in reality, there’s a slight but definite difference in performance – with the A7, lens movement is generally direct, while there’s more movement back and forth before the A7R locks on. This is to be expected because contrast detection requires hunting to work, and if you take this into account it’s still pretty quick, but just a fraction slower than the A7.

If the light’s low, focusing slows down considerably, and whether or not it locks on at all becomes much less reliable. In these conditions though, the A7 also suffers in the same way, and in fact the A7R’s slight disadvantage of having no phase detection becomes insignificant.

If you’re focusing manually with the A7R, you’ll need to get it spot on because the high resolution exaggerates any slight error, and luckily the manual focusing aids on the A7R are a great help. Focus peaking highlights sharp edges in a choice of colours and sensitivities – if you’re using this with the whole frame in the viewfinder, it’s difficult to judge accurately, but you can also magnify a defined area on-screen, making extremely fine adjustments and precision focusing easy.

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ANATOMY OF...

Sony A7R FROM THE TOP Everything on the top plate is on the right shoulder, with nothing to the left except for the stereo microphone 1 . The mode dial 2 is tucked in to the right of the EVF unit – on a camera of this level, you might expect it to lock, but it doesn’t. The exposure compensation dial 3 can be used in A or S modes, but does nothing in manual mode.

In front of this is a programmable custom button 4 , one of ten buttons in total that can be assigned as you wish. The on/off switch 5 is around the shutter button, so it’s easy to flick the camera on and off when in use, although it takes a couple of seconds for the camera to power up.

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FROM THE FRONT The handgrip 1 is very comfortable, and even has indentations on the inside edge for your fingers to nestle into. At the top of this grip is the front command dial 2 , positioned very naturally for your shutter finger to drop down and use. There’s also an AF assist lamp at the top of the front plate 3 , which can be turned off if you prefer, but it does help focusing in low light. With 36.4 megapixels, the sensor 4 is rumoured to be the same Sony-made chip as is found in the Nikon D800. Unlike the A7, there are no phase detection pixels on this sensor, and instead it relies on sensor-based contrast detection for focusing and this can be less decisive.

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FROM THE BACK All the buttons on the back except for the menu button 1 are on the right and within reach of your thumb. These include a dual function button 2 that can be switched from AF/MF selection to AEL with the lever that surrounds it. The Fn button 3 opens the customisable quick menu, and the multi-selector 4 is both a keypad for function selection and a wheel for navigation. Along the top, there’s a custom button 5 and the back command dial 6 .

For composing shots, you have the option of the OLED electronic viewfinder with 0.71x magnification 7 , or the LCD screen 8 , which tilts up and down.

AT-A-GLANCE SPECS PRICE £1689 body only CONTACT www.sony.co.uk SENSOR 36.4 megapixels with BIONZ X processor IMAGE DIMENSIONS 7360x4912 pixels ISO RANGE ISO 100-25,600 AUTOFOCUS MODES Single-shot, continuous, direct manual, manual EXPOSURE COMPENSATION +/-5EV in 1/3, 1/2EV steps, AEB 5 frames at +/-1EV or 3

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frames at +/-3EV in 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 1, 2 or 3EV steps SHUTTER 30secs-1/8000sec METERING PATTERNS Multi segment, centerweighted, spot SHOOTING SPEEDS Single, continuous 1.5fps, speed-priority continuous, self-timer ten or 2secs, self-timer continuous LCD SCREEN 3in tilting with 921k dots STORAGE MEDIA SD, SDHC, SDXC, Memory Stick Pro Duo, Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo, Memory Stick XC-HG Duo

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