Yesterday Sony announced the latest camera in its A6K line, and for the first time, Sony has embraced the Vlogging market somewhat seriously. The new camera, the Sony A6400 is a mid-range entry in Sony’s APS-C lineup, which borrows some features from higher end Sony cameras as well as adding some new features of its own, all for a relatively affordable price.

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?

Today, I’m happy to announce the launch of my latest set of Lightroom Presets: StreetLUX. I got the idea for StreetLUX when I was processing my most recent set of photos from my Street Photo Diary series, and I was originally using my Monolith Presets. I wanted a high contrast look, but I wanted to create something a little more “film like” so I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new set. But I didn’t stop there and I also created a set of colour presets too, which were inspired by the “chrome” style of films from the past.

I’ve come across a few interesting tidbits-bits of information over the past week that I wanted to share, but none of it was long enough to put into individual blog posts, so I thought I’d compile it all into a singe compilation. This is pretty random, but anyway.

With my Patreon channel operating for more than six months now, I’ve recently made a few changes to how I run it, and to the rewards schemes. After struggling for a while, it became obvious to me that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew with it, and I had also made it a bit too complicated. So, I’ve simplified it considerably, and I’m trying to get back to what I had originally intended to do with it, which was for it to be like a “directors commentary” on my main blog and various other photography activities.

Last week I was approached for an interview about one of my photography projects by a fairly prominent online newspaper here in Ireland. The piece they were interested in was a project I did charting the progress of the cross-city tram construction that took place in Dublin over the past few years. The request came out of the blue and took me a little by surprises, but they did a good article following the interview.

I have had to temporarily disable sales on my online store as a technical problem has occurred that is affecting payment processing. I am working with the server administrators in my hosting company to resolve the issue, but in order to prevent any problems with customer purchases I am disabling sales until I can find a solution. I am also putting backup plan into place should this take too long to resolve.

Yesterday Phase One released the newest version of Capture One, Capture One 11. This new update features several major new features as well as some changes under the hood. The biggest difference in the upgrade is the new layers system, but there are also a lot of little features too.

Today, Skylum, the company formerly known as MacPhun, announced the next version of its flagship application Luminar. Luminar 2018, which is now available for pre-order, is a significant upgrade over the current version, and I have been lucky enough to get to use a beta version over the last little while. To me, this isn’t an incremental update, but a dramatic upgrade, and it almost feels like an entirely new application.

Today Ireland is bracing for the impact of one of the worst storms ever to hit the country. As I sit here typing this, there’s a weird eery calm outside. While Ireland has its fair share of bad weather, we have a generally calm climate compared to other parts of the world, and extreme weather events are quite rare. The weather forecasters are saying that this storm, ex-hurricane Ophelia, will be the worst in 50 years. They are also saying that it is in many ways unprecedented and that the country hasn’t experienced anything like this before.

You may have read this already, but if you’re a mac user considering upgrading to High Sierra, and you use a Wacom Tablet, then don’t. The company has announced that the system will require a new driver and that won’t be ready until the end of October.

Pixelmator, which was one of the first new generation Photoshop competitors to come to the mac a few years ago (before Affinity Photo) have just announced a new version called “Pixelmator Pro” which is coming sometime this Autumn (Fall). The new version is a completely new application and it looks really interesting, for a number of reasons

When Nikon pre-announced the D850 a little while ago, I was filled with a mix of excitement and a sense of trying not to get my hopes up. I have long been an owner of the Nikon D700, which was Nikon’s first model in this style of full frame smaller body cameras. I love the D700 and I still use it all the time, but it’s starting to show its age. I really want a high resolution camera for landscape and nature work, but I also want one that does video. I had hoped when the rumours started of the D850, that Nikon would come out with something similar to the Sony A7RII. I was not disappointed.

Luminar, which I’ve reported on and talked about a good bit on this site, is now available as a beta for Windows. The public beta is open to everyone and all you have to do is sign up to try it out.

It’s been over a week since I stared offering a membership option on Patreon, and I want to thank those who’ve already joined up. I also realised that I didn’t explain it very well the last time I posted about it, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

Macphun have just released a new and updated version of Luminar. The update features some big new features, as well as a lot of little improvements. I’ve had a chance to use the beta version for a few days, and there are some interesting new features in the application.

Based on popular request, I’ve created a bundle of all four of my current Fuji X-Trans post processing guides. The guides cover Capture One, Lightroom, Iridient Developer and Iridient X-Transformer. This bundle contains all 4 of these guides and is a little cheaper than buying them separately

I’ve been a bit out of the loop the last few days, as I’ve been dealing with a nasty bronchitis bug that has decided to pick the worst possible time to take me out of action. I was supposed to be travelling, but Instead I’m feeling sorry for myself and enjoying a tasty diet of antibiotics and lemsip. I was trying to keep my blog updated, and store ticking over, so if I’m slow in responding to comments please forgive me! I have managed to do a few things though, and so, here are a few updates: