Camera Reviews
The reviews below are available as PDFs to download and are 4-8 Mb in size.
19th February 2008
Your chance to enter the UK's most prestigious competition for amateur photographers.
The overall winner will receive a £3,000 Virgin holiday voucher from Samsung
and there are monthly prizes of Samsung's top-end DSLRs, the GX-10 and GX-20, top digital compacts, lenses and more
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19th February 2008
Round 1 Face of the Earth
This round is not just for landscape enthusiasts but for all those who are interested in the world around them. Whether natural or urban, aerial or from a bug's-eye view, the Earth has many faces. Maybe you want to capture the mark left by humanity, or perhaps you want to highlight those places that remain untouched. Or maybe you want to take your camera underwater to see how the other half live. The world outside your door is filled with stunning colours, shapes and patterns.
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30th April 2008
Round 4 Humanity
Humans leave their mark in many ways, and in our fourth round, 'Humanity', we want you to explore this idea. You may be driven to find a willing subject and a comfortable stool, and tackle the time-honoured genre of portraiture. Albert Watson, the legendary portrait photographer, provides an excellent example of how it can be done on page 47 of this week's issue. But his is not the only way. From studios to outdoors and simple to elaborate backgrounds, everyone has their own style. What is yours?
Alternatively, you might want to eschew portraiture and explore the
ways in which humanity interacts. Maybe it's a street scene full of commuters. Or perhaps it's a well-observed tender moment between two people, such as in Robert Doisneau's famous image 'Kiss by the Hotel de Ville'. Humanity has many faces. It's up to you to show us how you see it.
The closing date for APOY Round 4 entries is 30 May. See AP 3 May for an entry form.
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4th April 2008
Round 3 Intimate Detail
'Intimate detail' can have multiple meanings. You may have your camera with you on a walk into town and notice an intricate carving in the façade of your local church, or on the way back you are struck by small patterns in the fabric of the seats on your bus. Then again, maybe you want to take a traditional macro shot of the detail on the coin you found beneath the seat.
Or perhaps the words 'intimate detail', to you, suggest emotion. You may want to photograph your cat grooming her newborn kittens or, if she'll let you, your spouse after the two of you have had an argument – though we wouldn't recommend this! As always, how you fulfil the theme of this round largely depends on what it means to you. We are looking for images that are both creative and technically superb.
It's up to you to bring it to us and to your fellow AP readers. This is your chance to show us how you see the world. The closing date for APOY Round 3 entries is 25 April. See AP 5 April for an entry form.
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6th March 2008
Round 2 Arranged by...
Still life is the theme of our 'Arranged by…' round, and it is very much open to your interpretation. Perhaps you have a box of old relics in your attic you want to position in your kitchen when the afternoon light is just right. It could be that you found an appealing natural formation of rocks at the beach. Maybe your son's bedroom, littered and strewn like the aftermath of a seafood platter, screams photographic potential. Or maybe you like that metaphor so much you want to shoot the seafood platter itself. In this round we are looking for an object or collection of objects from which you can experiment in composition, lighting, colour arrangements, texture reproduction and more. There are many forms of still life, and many more ways in which to interpret a scene, but be careful when composing that your image does not stray into the genre of landscapes or something else.
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6th March 2008
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 with its 18x zoom lens has one of the widest focal-length ranges we have seen on a bridge camera. But can the 1/2.5in sensor that makes the huge
focal-length range possible cope with more than eight million pixels?
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6th February 2008
The Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III should appeal to photographers who need the ultimate in image quality: it has an incredible 21 million pixels, and a redesigned body and menu system. Does it deliver the goods? Barney Britton finds out
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13th December 2007
At last the waiting is over and the new professional-level Olympus camera has arrived, but is it the answer to the prayers of Four Thirds users?
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7th December 2007
We've got one of only 1,000 Oskar Barnack 125-year celebration kits to give away to mark the 125-year anniversary of Leica inventor Oskar Barnack
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7th December 2007
With its high-resolution, full-frame capture and a maximum frame rate of 9fps, Nikon's D3, the company's new flagship DSLR, is a jack-of-all-trades, but can it really keep everyone happy?
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