Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
I’ve long complained about the lack of certain metadata functionality in Lightroom. I don’t particularly like the interface for entering metadata as it is, but the software lacks certain key features that I have long missed since moving from Aperture..... Recently I set about trying to find a solution, and it came in the form of a plug-in from John Beardsworth called “Search Replace Transfer”
With Photokina just around the corner, and with most of the major manufacturers probably going to announce new cameras, I’ve been thinking about what my ideal camera would be. Without getting into brand wars and camera maker loyalty, I am particularly keen to see what Nikon will announce. They’ve been on a roll lately with the D500 and the D5 and considering that the D810 and D750 starting to look a little old, an announcement might be on the cards.
Over the last little while I’ve been trying to sort out some of the ever sprawling mess that is my photo library. While sorting through a drive falloff images, I found a lot that I had either forgotten about or wasn’t happy with the way that I had originally processed them. One particular set was from a trip I trip I took to Washington DC a few years ago, and in particular to the beautiful suburb of Georgetown.
Before I started this blog, I used to write about Apple and technology on various blogs. It was in a typical old fashioned blog style, where it was a mix of links to news articles that I found interesting, with some commentary added by me on things that I found to be comment worthy. I stopped doing it a long time ago, but I’ve missed the experience. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about doing something in this kind of format about photography.
Adobe has released an update for Lightroom which provides support fort the Fuji X-T2 as well as some bug fixes. Hopefully it fixes the memory leak that I reported on last week (it is listed as one of the fixes).
I’m delighted to announce, that after much delay, my latest set of Lightroom Presets, FilmLUX is now available. I came up with the idea for FilmLUX a little while ago when I was in the midst of scanning lots of old slide and transparency film. I noticed that the results I was getting had a really nice quality to them, and they weren’t quite like what I was getting from other presets. With this in mind I set about trying to create my own, paying close attention to the results I was getting from my own film scans.
It’s been a while since I last released a set of Lightroom presets, despite my plan to release one set a month this year. I’ve actually been working on a new set for a while now though, and I’m excited about the results. Called “Film Lux” it’s a continuation of my “Lux” series,and this time it’s about some more realistic film styles.
I’ve been plagued by a nasty bug in the latest version of Lightroom on the Mac. It’s affected me several times now, and the same action triggers it, so it’s not a a random one off. On top of that I’ve read similar stories online from people with similar issues. Basically, every so often, when you open the import window, the memory usage of Lightroom goes through the roof and the application becomes frozen. If you don’t force quit the application quickly after this happens, the entire system hangs.
As I only have a limited set of lenses for my X-Pro 2 at the moment, so I have been keen to try some of my other glass on the camera via adaptors. The X-Pro 2 has some nice focusing aids, and I have some interesting lenses, so I wanted to see what kind of results I could get. Lens adaptors can actually be quite expensive, depending on the brand, but there are cheaper options available. As this was more of an experiment than anything, I went with some of the cheaper adaptors that available.
In one of my earlier X-Pro 2 diary entries I pointed out an issue that I was having with the X-Pro 2 and using auto focus on small objects in a scene or objects close to the camera. The camera’s autofocus would refuse to lock on to smaller objects such as flowers and so on, and instead it would focus on the background. At the time, I wrote that it was probably something that I was doing wrong. Well, I’ve been trying a lot of things and I finally found the solution
Yesterday Adobe released a big update to Lightroom Mobile for iOS which adds a number of features including local adjustment tools, and more importantly RAW importing and editing.
There are times that it feels like I’m playing a constant battle with hard drive space. I’m sure that many photographers feel like this at one time or another (or all the time). My Lightroom Library is a giant mess. I’m the first to admit that, and it’s not particularly well organised. I have images littered across multiple drives and I’ve lots of older projects which I don’t really need access to the raw files, but are still online. So, once again, I’ve started trying to tame the beast, and I’ve a few new strategies for dealing with it that I thought you might find interesting.
If you are an X-Pro 2 shooter and you’re using planing on using Capture One, then there are some important things to know. First of all, at the moment, Capture One only supports the X-Pro 2 in a preliminary fashion. There are a number of important features lacking in support at the time of writing this. In particular Capture One does not yet support X-Pro 2 compressed RAW files and it does not support any kind of lens correction on X-Pro 2 images.
Fuji today announced the new X-T2, the successor to the popular X-T1. Like the X-Pro 2 it features a 24mp sensor, but unlike the X-Pro 2 it has 4k video. There’s not really much I can add to the already wide ranging coverage of the release. if you’re looking to find out more, I suggest you head over to Fuji Rumors which, as always has covered the launch in quite extensive detail.
There have been a couple of software updates recently that I haven’t covered because I was busy with other things. Capture One received a semi major update, and Apple updated its Raw software for MacOS. Both of these are of interest to Fuji X-Pro 2 shooters, not so much because of what’s in them, but because of what’s missing.
As I mentioned on my main blog recently, I've been scanning in lots of my old negatives and slide film recently. One of the patterns that's emerged from looking at my old shots is that I had an interest in Street Photography even from the early days of my photographic interests. Of course I didn't know it was a genre called "Street Photograhy" at the time. I just like taking pictures around the city. Most of these were taken between 15-20 years ago, on my trusty Canon Eos 5.
Last week I posted some black and white photos from my time in the little town of Heppenheim in the German countryside. I had taken a lot more photographs while I was there and I’ve finally had the time to go through them to my satisfaction. The residents of this sleepy little town clearly lit as you can see a real sense of pride in the way the buildings are adorned with flowers and decorations. Photos were taken with a Fuji X-Pro 2 and Nikon D700
One of the things that people love about their Fuji X-Series cameras is the film simulation modes and the rich colour that they give out of the camera. Many of these film simulation modes are based on actual films that Fuji makes, or used to make. Provia, Velvia and Astia are slide films, while the new (in the X-Pro 2) Acros is based on the Neopan Acros film. Lately I’ve been scanning some of my old film in and I realised that I have photos taken with some of these films, so I thought I’d share what the real thing looks like.
