Nikon Owner Midlands Group Meeting,
Saturday evening, July 3rd, 2010

You are invited to the re-launch of the Nikon Owner Midlands Group with Nikon Owner subscribers Rachel and Phil Hibberd at 7.30 p.m., on Saturday evening, July 3rd. The venue that has been chosen for this initial meeting is the Malvern Hills Hotel, Jubilee Drive, Wynds Point, Great Malvern, WR13 6DW .

The Malvern Hills Hotel is high on the western slopes of the Malverns in the heart of an area of outstanding natural beauty and just a stone’s throw from the Iron Age hill fort, British Camp. The hotel itself is a major landmark with a breathtaking panoramic vista from 1,115 feet above sea level which still remains just as spectacular in the 21st century as when it was first constructed. Malvern has a rich cultural heritage of forts, castles and priories within a landscape of ancient woodland, rolling pastures and wild, open commons. The area is also home to a diversity of locally and nationally important wildlife.

We hope that this initial meeting will act as a spring-board for useful photographic discussion, further meetings (perhaps an itinerant schedule of venues might be workable within the broad Midlands area, to make it easier for everyone to attend), and hopefully a number of photo-outings. The meeting starts at 7.30 p.m., and you are invited to bring some samples of your photographic work if you would like to do so. Partners and family members are also welcome.

To reserve your place please email me, Gillian Greenwood, on gillian.greenwood@nikonownermagazine.com with your full name, your mobile or daytime telephone number.

A very big thank you to both Nellie and John Steadman for all their past hard work over the years organizing the Midlands Nikon Owner Group, and we would like to welcome Rachel and Phil Hibberd who will be helping to organize future events for the Midlands Group. Rachel and Phil have been Nikon users for a number of years, and work as full-time professional photographers in addition to running a company called Photography Made Simple.

If you are no longer a Nikon Owner subscriber, and would like to re-subscribe to Nikon Owner magazine and interactive website at the special price of £59, please email me at gillian.greenwood@nikonownermagazine.com with your name, daytime landline and mobile telephone number or call me on
0207 828 8971 between 2.00 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. Monday to Friday. Please note that I am working in the editorial department in the mornings but can take your call in the afternoon.

With Kind regards,
Gillian Greenwood
Features Editor/Events Coordinator
–
Nikon Owner magazine
40 Churton Street
Pimlico
London SW1V 2LP
Tel: +44 020 7828 8971
Fax: +44 020 7976 5783
Website: www.nikonownermagazine.com
If you no longer wish to receive mailings from Nikon Owner magazine, please send an email to webmaster@nikonownermagazine.com with the message subject ‘Remove’ giving your subscriber number.

We spent a lovely day yesterday in great weather at Ashton Court.  The sun and the roses were both out and Jo, Nicola, Bethan, Mandy and Ed took some great pictures:

Nice composition from Jo

Bethan's compact camera did a great job on these houses.

Bethan's DMC-TZ5 also did a nice job on shallow depth of field.

Nicola's little Samsung took great landscapes

Interesting composition from Nicola

Great shallow depth of field from Mandy's olympus

and a good job of metering on these tricky white daisies.

Ed's D70s did fine job of metering this rose.

Phil took this picture of his big camera with Nicola's little one.

Ashton Court is a great place to visit, not just for photography courses!  All the people that came were local, but had not gone to Ashton Court before.

We’re moving house shortly, and we took a load of old books to the second hand shop,  which is helpful as far as it goes, but Phil did have to buy a couple of new books while there.  Ian Jenkin’s Photography: A Concise History, was one such tome that now has to be boxed and moved with the rest of our stuff.

We’ve been reading about early photography, and the often quoted notion (from Fox Talbot) that a camera records disinterestedly. So a camera does not know which bits of a scene are important,  and a photograph can confuse it’s viewer.  A painter could choose to leave bits out, move things around re-vitalise an otherwise boring view.  Painters don’t have stray bits of tree branch pokin in from the side of the frame, they just leave it out.  Photographers get what their given and record the whole lot.

So when we teach that you need to watch the backgrounds in portraits and foregrounds in landscapes for confusing stuff, or that the edges of your frame can accidently bisect a sheep  that a painter would have left out or moved over a bit, we’re recalling Fox Talbot.  The mechanical capturing of the image needs be tempered with a bit of common sense when you take the shot.

Otherwise you have a lamp post growing disinterestedly out of someone’s head!

We realise that this is a slightly more arty/philosophical posting than usual – if you want more of this kind of stuff – let us know!  If you want less – let us know anyway!  That we can constantly improve our photography courses.

Ian Jenkin’s latest work is How to read a Photograph – see a review in the guardian.

Chris came on a course recently and emailed us with a question that we thought may be of interest to other people.  We’d waxed lyrical about one of our favourite lenses, the nikkor 28-105mm f3.5-f4.5, which can be had for £100 on ebay if you’re lucky.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day and will take the opportunity to learn more on a future course.  I have investigated lenses and seem only to find quite expensive 28-105 m ones – what is the price range I should expect for these?  Already have a 50m one on order!

Thanks again for a great day,

Chris

Hi Chris,

when you get your 50mm f1.8 (I hope not a 50m that would be some sort of interplanetary telescope – I’ve attached a picture of it) see how you get on. You will be amazed at how versatile this lens is! Plenty of people make do with just this lens, to start with anyway.

Then, when you’re finding the limitations of it you can have a think about what to do next:

We really like the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 lens – they seem to be £150 or so on ebay – we got lucky and got ours for £110. These are great for people, giving you a bit of zoomed in and zoomed out slack either side of the 50mm you have.

We also like the 18-55mm kit lens – these are under £100 and can be even cheaper without VR, which we think is pretty unnecessary on so short a lens. This will (obviously) give you roughly your 50mm plus a much wider view – good for landscapes etc. If you want even wider a really good landscape lens is the Tamron 10-24mm f3.5-4.5 but it’s £300 so make sure you really want it first!!

A lens that is popular but we don’t like much is the 18-105mm – f3.5-5.6 – in theory this gives you the best of both worlds, but in reality is quite restrictive. If you mostly take people you’ll be happier with the 28-105, and mostly landscapes the 18-55.

If you want a longer (more zoomy lens) 55-200mm’s f 4-5.6 are about £140, not a bad buy but if you’re really into wildlife you might be better off shopping around for a used 70-200mm f2.8, but these are over £1000 but worth it if you like that kind of thing!!

Since your other half has a Nikon, what you could do is borrow lenses from him and see which one you like and buy those (or keep them, but it is our company policy to discourage this kind of lens larceny).

Hope this helps,

Best wishes
Phil and Rachel

The proposed Euro50m telescope  - not yet available on ebay!

We had a couple of questions from Janet – an ex-student (we encourage this) that we thought might be useful to make available to other readers:

- taking a portrait shot for example of a bee on a flower where the flower
is quite ‘deep’ eg: foxglove / alium, how do I get the bee and flower in
focus – would I increase the F-stop so it’s not on the very lowest setting
for example?

Yes that’s right the smallest f-stop/largest aperture will tend to give the shallowest depth of field, so you will need to adjust it to a more middling aperture – say 4.5 or 5.6 or even 7 rather than 1.8 or 2.8    Also remember that aperture is not the only thing at play here – the more zoomed in you are the shallower the dof as well, so if you can physically get closer and zoom out (at the same time to give the same size bee) you may be able to have a wider aperture and still not have too shallow a depth of field.  If you’re using a fairly long lens (to prevent bee attack!!) then you may need what seems like a small aperture, which means that you need a long exposure, which probably results in a blurry bee.

- I recently took a pic of a group of friends getting ready to go diving so
in dark wetsuits.  I used a high F-stop number (small aperture) working on
the basis that I wanted to get everything in focus – so a type of
‘landscape’.  I was about three yards from them.  The pic came out fine but
seemed to lack a bit of depth and clarity and I wonder if I should have
used a mid-point F-stop so that they were in focus but the background was
less so, that being less important of course.

Again, you need an intermediate f stop.  The difference in distance from the closest to the furthest diver to you was probably not that great.  You probably weren’t (for example) photographing a load of people watching someone else far away in the water and trying to keep them all in focus.  That would require a big landscapey f stop.  It is more likely that everyone could have been kept in focus by using f5.6 or 7 or so, depending on the amount of zoom on the lens.

We teach that all pictures are portraits or landscapes (of one kind or another), but there is plenty of room for finesse.  Really shallow depth of field pictures isolate a subject, but can completely pull it out of context – even to a bee being our of the context of a flower it’s in, or even parts of the bee out of focus.  Really deep depth of field can give the viewer no idea of what they’re supposed to be looking at.  So intermediate f stops and zooms are often the way to go.

This, for example was shot with an intermediate f stop – we wanted to give plenty of context while still giving the viewer an idea of where to look.  So the people in the background’s expressions are visible, but we still know where to look.

Rachel taught a small group at Sudeley Castle – these were people who’ve either done a DSLR course previously or have quite a bit of experience.  This means they can get on with the fun stuff without having explain apertures first!

On an absolutely stunning day, Rachel set John, John and Sue the mission of making Sudeley look creepy:

What it really looks like – not creepy then!

Little bit of under exposure from John and look what happens!!

There is an exhibition of modern art at Sudeley at the moment – both John’s noticed this makes great reflections:

Sue’s amazing zooming-in-with-the-shutter-open shot:

Of course there were more conventional images to be had:

John takes the record for travelling the furthest to photograph at Sudeley Castle – but it is a lovely venue to work at, or just spend the day.  Just bring your earplugs for the peacocks!!

Following last month’s task to photograph temptation, this month’s activity was technology.  Aimee did us proud:

Ancient and Modern:  the wheelchair lift in Worcester Cathedral

The phone is mightier than the pen!

Ipod beats CD beats LP!

Once again,  inspirational and inspired images by Aimee.  Well done!!

Peter came on the DSLR course at Shugborough a couple of months ago, and decided to come along to the Landscape course at Severn Valley. Rachel and Peter took their time and used a tripod, long exposure and F32!

The results speak for themselves. Well done Peter (Nikon D60).

Last week Phil and Rachel drove to Norfolk to attend the funeral of Mike Graham-Cameron.  His funeral service packed a huge church in Sheringham with people who all agreed he was a “lovely bloke,”  all-round good chap and petrolhead.  Mike co-founded the Illustration Agents GCI (see their website).  Rachel is one of their illustrators under her maiden name Rachel Annie Bridgen (see herportfolio of illustrations).  She is currently working on a series of kids books featuring a superhero labrador.

Rachel also drew the illustrations for this website.

RIP Mike.

Phil taught six people at the “New Shoots” photography course at Stourhead, arranged by the National Trust.  A great day, beginning with a really informative talk by Anne Butler, Education Officer at Stourhead.  We often say in courses that landscape photography is like walking around with a picture frame under your arm.  It appears at Stourhead they actually did, “taking views” of the landscape using something called Claude Glasses, a portable tinted mirror that would frame your view.  Here’s some from the V&A museum:

The poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771), was so fond of the glasses he is quoted as saying the view could sell for 1000 pounds…if only one could fix the image!   What would Gray make of cameras now, where an image can be captured, sent across the world and reviewed within seconds.   Witchcraft!

Stourhead is a remarkable place to photograph (whether you’re on a course or not), because the gardens are designed as a series of vistas that are effectively copies of paintings of the time.  So the composition is largely arranged for you, with foreground interest, variations in colours and tones all thought up hundreds of years ago.  We are thrilled to be teaching photography courses for the National Trust at Stourhead.  There are more courses later this year, though sadly the children’s courses sold out within days.