Amateur Photographer - UK (2021-11-27)

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Celebrating

Enjoy the winning images from our

major competition with cottages.com to

capture the best of Britain

E

arlier this year we ran a competition with cottages.com,

the UK’s leading provider of self-catering holiday

properties and luxury homes, to win one of five fantastic

UK breaks up to the value of £2,500 and a GoPro bundle.

The competition, called Viewfinder, featured five categories –

Classic Countryside, City Break Sights, Capturing the Coast,

Sunscape Scenes and Wild Walks – which gave fans of landscape and

scenic photography a lot of creative scope.

The judging panel comprised AP editor Nigel Atherton, well-

known travel writer and broadcaster Simon Calder, and Paul Evans

from cottages.com. The results are now in – see below for full details

of the category winners.

Classic Countryside

Nikon Z 50 with 16 - 50 mm lens

Andrew Kennedy from Northampton wins this category,

with an image of the Milky Way over Stevington Windmill,

located outside Bedford. ‘We never get to see the Milky Way in

this part of the UK, but with the right settings on the camera,

you can just make it out,’ he explains. ‘I used the Photo Pills

app to locate the Milky Way, but it was going to be hours

before it was positioned where I wanted it to be for my

image. I used the time by taking some light paintings of the

windmill, then the Milky Way was showing just where I wanted

it. I tried a number of shutter speeds and ISO settings to see

which setting brought out the Milky Way best.’

Editing the image

The editing process consisted of using 20 images of the

Milky Way and three light-painted images of the windmill.

‘I loaded the 20 images into Sequator, which helps to align

the stars and stacks them. Once it had rendered the final

shot, I opened the image in Photoshop before making the

final touches in Lightroom.’

at its best

theUK