If you live in or work near our capital here in Ireland, you've probably seen this already, but there's a pretty great Christmas Market in Dublin City at the moment. The market runs along the north side of Stephen's Green, and, I have to say, is very impressive. The stands run practically the full length of the green and consist of everything from food, and sweets to hand made gifts and other trinkets. 

There was an unusually foggy day here in Dublin about two weeks ago. Not just a little foggy, but pea soup kind of fog. I had been heading into the city anyway, so I brought my trusty little Fuji with me to get some pictures of the murk. 

I was coming back from a week in London on Saturday, and our flight was approaching Dublin at sunset. The view out the window of the plane was amazing with the sun just sitting above the clouds. As we began our descent it looked even more impressive, so I grabbed my iPhone and fired up the hyper lapse app, and recorded our descent through the clouds, and then down until we landed. 

I love how the light changes throughout the seasons. Every season has it's own quality of light, and it makes images taken during that time unique. It also depends on where you are in the world, as different latitudes, and even different places on the same latitude can have differing characteristics to the light. Here in Ireland, because we're fairly far north, our seasons vary dramatically throughout the year. While not as much as countries like Norway, we do get significantly different light in winter than we do in summer. 

I've had a busy month, and I haven't been able to get out shooting for one reason or another. I've been doing some animation work this last few weeks, and so I've been stuck in-front of my computer for much of the time. The few days I've had off, the weather hasn't been great. It's funny, but every time I'm away from shooting for any length of time (even more than a few days) I start to get antsy. Some would probably call this an addiction, but I prefer to think of it as knowing what your true calling is. When you can feel it in your bones, you know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. 

I've been a bit remiss with posting here lately and I have a few ongoing subjects that I know I've promised which have been getting delayed. I'm still working on a detailed report on Capture One Pro 8 for Fuji users, but I've been swamped with work so it's taking a bit longer than I had anticipated. I am writing a first impressions report thought, and I'll have that up shortly. I'm going to be doing a lot of design and animation work for the next few months, so the blog might be a bit quieter than usual for a while, but I'll do my best to keep the updates coming. In the mean time, I do have some random bits and pieces of news to report, so in no particular order...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about what the then rumoured 5K iMac would mean that for photographers, and how you would now be pixel peeping on such a display even just looking at images. It was sort of a tongue in cheek piece, but now that the Retina iMac is real, I thought it would be important to have another look at the implications of a 5k display for photographers. If you're considering one of these new iMacs (I know I am !) then there are a few things you may want to ponder first!

Lately I've been writing a lot about using Photo Ninja in conjunction with Lightroom for processing files from Fuji's X-Trans sensors. I've been promising to write about the workflow for using Photo Ninja with Lightroom for some time, so here it is, finally! 

A while ago I posted the list of photography blogs that I keep in a folder of bookmarks in my browser's favourites bar, and I check them every day. Since I posted that some have stopped updating, while I've also discovered some new sources of inspiration.

Here's a quick tip for you. One of the things that I find happens in Lightroom every now and again is that the preview in the Develop module (The navigator) gets stuck and stops responding. It can be really annoying when this happens, especially if you are trying out presets and want to see what one will look like before you apply it. 

Despite my reputation as more of a street photographer, I actually love taking pictures of nature too. I have a huge collection of Nature images in my archive, which I'm slowly getting around to organising and getting online. Even when I don't intend taking images, I usually have my camera with me and even simple little things can make nice photos. 

When I was having problems with this blog a little while ago, which caused me to move it to squarespace, it effected all my sites, including my recently launched Lightroom Diary blog. I had originally re-posted lots of content from here on the site so as to populate it but when I moved to squarespace, all the links got broken. It's been on my list to fix for a while, and it ended up taking a bit longer than I wanted, but I'm happy to say that it's finally back up and running, and there's already some new content on it. 

If there are two longly held axioms in the photography community, at least on the internet, it's that Megapixels don't matter, and Pixel Peeping is something to be frowned upon. I personally disagree with these two ideals to an extent, but in the near future, those who are absolute in their condemnation of of pixel peeping or the merits of more megapixels are going to have to re-think their objections. Soon there will be a very real reason why megapixels matter, and soon, we're all going to be pixel peeping. 

Ever since I've started releasing presets for Lightroom, I've been getting requests for Photoshop ACR versions. I've been promising people for a long time that I would release Camera Raw compatible presets, and so I'm delighted to announce that my first sets are now available! The first two sets that I've ported to ACR are my two most popular: Monolith and Steely Blue. Depending on the demand, I'll look at porting the rest of the sets in the coming weeks. 

Here's a really quick tip for fellow Fuji X-Series shooters. Changing the focus points on a fuji camera can be a bit fiddly. You have to press the AF button on the back of the camera to activate focus point selection mode, and then use the d-pad on the back to select the focus point that you want to use. The problem with this method is that you really need two hands to do it, and I often find that I have to take my eye away from the viewfinder (although, yes you can still do it with your eye up with practice). There is however, another way!