Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Opinion
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Adobe’s “generative fill” for photoshop. The feature, which uses Adobe’s firefly AI engine to add AI-generated imagery to your photos or artwork directly in photoshop. Now that it is no longer test software, I wanted to share my experience, and address a couple of big issues with generative fill.
Last week I started having some weird things happen to one of my Instagram accounts. Instagram suddenly started sending me emails for my “Streets of Dublin” Instagram account in Russian. At first, I thought it musty be a hack or someone had breached my account, but there is a whole thread on Reddit about it from people having the same problem.
I like coffee. A lot. It’s probably one of my biggest obsessions after photography. I have about 10 different methods of making coffee, including three different coffee machines. I like all different kinds of coffee, and I’ll make a different type depending on the time of day and my mood. At this point, you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with photography, but bear with me. It’s a bit of a journey, but we’ll get there.
If you’re into photography at all, unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock (or stayed off the internet) you can’t help but have read about the recent “price hike” on Adobe’s Photography plan. Site after site reported that Adobe had “doubled” the price of its photography plan, which lead to cries and consternation from all corners of the internet. I was really in two minds as to whether to write about this or not, because I know this will be unpopular, and I will get lots of hate mail because of this. I was really angry and annoyed about this news. Not because of what Adobe did, but because of the way it was reported and the crazy carry on afterwards.
I love reading about the photography industry, whether it’s about the market, new gear or so on, it’s as much an interest for me as taking photos itself. In the industry, there is a lot of well-known pundits, whether they are from magazines, blogs or YouTube. As with everything, there are those I like and respect, and those that I don’t have much time for. But even taking that into account, over the past few months especially, I’ve noticed some real credibility issues for industry observers. Why? Let me explain...
“Image Quality”. It’s a term that is used all the time, yet the definition of it can be somewhat nebulous. Whether you’re talking about a camera’s sensor, or evaluating a specific photograph, the term “image quality” often can mean a wide range of things, and different people use the term in different ways.
So what is “image quality?” What does it actually mean? How do you define it?
So today, Nikon finally announced the company’s new Mirrorless cameras, the Z7 and Z6. I say finally because the leaks and rumours seem to have been going on for months, not to mention Nikon’s own teasing of the new system. So now that they’re official, what do I think?
An age-old measure of the performance of many types of recording is “signal to noise ratio”. In essence, it looks at how much noise there is compared to useful signal in any given medium, whether it’s an analogue transmission or even a digital recording. There’s one thing that I’ve noticed a lot recently, and that is when people compare cameras they often look at 1:1 crops to compare the results. In particular, they use this to compare noise performance between cameras. However, when comparing cameras of different resolutions, this may not actually give you an accurate comparison. The reason for this is that when doing this you’re only looking at one part of the equation, the noise, without considering the other part: the signal.
While we see a renaissance of sorts when it comes to photo editing software, in my opinion, the management side has taken a back seat. If you look at many of the recent developments across newer and updated applications, most of the development has been on the image editing side. Lightroom, for example, has seen only minor changes to the database side of the application in years. There are lots of new technologies out there that would be really useful to photographers if they were all together in one application, and yet, in my opinion, there’s nothing that does everything. At least not yet.
A couple of sites have been reporting over the last few days about the upcoming 7.2 release of Lightroom. Adobe have decided to focus on performance for this next release, and as a testament as to how important they feel this is, they’ve sent beta copies to various photography websites and news organisations ahead of time to show how serious they are about it.
There has been a lot of talk lately about Lightroom alternatives. Much of this has been amplified by disquiet over the recent decision of Adobe to go subscription only, although there have been grumblings about this for a while. A lot of people are looking for alternatives because of this, and many people are making claims that x software will replace Lightroom and so on. Unfortunately because of the internet echo chamber, many of these claims are either untrue, out only true for specific purposes.
A little while ago I put up a poll on the site here, asking if people were planning on using Lightroom CC or not. It was in part, to answer my own curiosity as to whether or not people were going to use it, but also to gauge interest for supporting it in the future. Now that it’s been up for a while, I thought I would share the results.
If you follow photography news at all, you’ve probably read about this new site called pixelpeeper.io (not to be confused with Pixelpeeper.com). It’s a web application that lets you see what Lightroom edits were done to an image, just by uploading a Jpeg to it. Now, on top of that they’ve added the ability to see what Lightroom preset was used on an image (if it was something like one of the VSCO presets), again just from uploading a Jpeg. I have mixed feelings on whether or not this is a good idea, and I’ve gone back and forth in my mind as to whether I agree with what they’re doing or not
This may seem like a relatively obtuse question at first but bear with me. I found myself wondering if people actually consider this when reading some online commentary. Who is your audience? Obviously, if you’re a professional, then you are shooting for you clients. But for amateurs and enthusiasts: do you take photos for family or friends? Do you take them for yourself? Do you take pictures for the general public or certain interest groups?
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.
When I was writing my epic three part Sony A6000 review, for whatever reason I left out any mention of the two best lenses that I have for the system. They are the Sigma 30mm and 19mm e-mount lenses. I’m not really sure how I managed to forget about these when I was writing the piece, but anyway, I’m making up for it now by writing this mini-review of the two lenses.
One of the interesting things that I've noticed after years of Photography, is that certain types of light act as a sense memory to me. In much the same way that a smell can trigger a memory for many people, I find that seeing a certain quality of light often triggers memories and feelings of nostalgia.
As much as I love mirrorless cameras, there's one thing about the current designs that unfortunately is a bit of a problem for me. The issue is the viewfinder. My problem is not the electronic display itself, but rather the physical design of the viewfinder. Most of the mirrorless cameras that I've used are a real pain to use in bright light if you're a glasses wearer.
