Apple posted a gallery of images taken with an iPhone 6 from around the world on its website over the weekend. The selection of pictures is amazing. Even if you don’t care about the iPhone or even that these were taken on a smartphone at all, the images are fantastic and a great source of inspiration.

Recently I had an opportunity to try out a friends Nikon D800 and I’ve been wanting to write about the experience ever since. I realise that the D800 is a few years old now and has been superseded by the D810, but as the camera is selling for quite a reasonable rate second hand now, I thought some people may still be interested. This isn’t going to be a review as such, but rather a personal take on what it was like to use it. 

It seems like it has been an exceptionally long winter this year. Even though we haven’t had any really harsh weather, the long dark evenings and pervasive damp and cold conditions have seemed to be going on for so long. There are finally signs of spring coming through though.

Over the past few years I've accumulated quite a few different blogs and websites. As with many people in the same situation, I've had the best of intentions with these, promising myself to create my own little blogging empire, but usually they've been neglected after a while, as I've realised that my workflow was to great. Anyway, I've a few that had been going well, but I've neglected lately, and I've begun consolidating them.

Until this January, if you wanted to sell digital image downloads from your own photography website, and you were based in the EU, it was a relatively simple process. You could host your images on one of the services which offer simple ways to sell downloads to your clients, such as Photoshelter, SmugMug or Zenfolio. However, since the new EU Vat rules came in to effect in January, if you use any of these services to sell images to a customer in the EU, you may be breaking the law. The simple reason is that none of these services support the necessary vat rules.

I know I’m kind of late with this, as it’s news that was doing the rounds last week, but it looks like Lightroom 6 will be shipping soon. The rumour is based on a premature posting on the french Store Fnac's website. (it’s since been removed) According to the listing Lightroom 6 will ship on March 9th ( Just a few weeks from now)

Yesterday on February 19th, Adobe Photoshop celebrated its 25th birthday. It’s hard to believe that 25 years ago the first version of the venerable photo manipulation software was launched. 

While it probably doesn't get the attention that other important innovations of the late 20th century get, such as the personal computer, Photoshop is still one of the most influential inventions of the time. When you think about how much of the visual world we live in today has been influenced by computer graphics in one way or another, from advertising to movies, and much of that can be traced back to Photoshop. 

I want to take a little break from the normal photographic topics for today and relay a personal story. This only has a tenuous link to photography, so please excuse the indulgence, but it's worth a read in my opinion. Last week my wife and I had to move from our home of many years.

I'm not a huge black and white shooter. Don't get me wrong, I like black and white, but I rarely set out with the notion of shooting exclusively in the format. I used to in the past, but I haven't done it in ages, so when I was in the city centre here in Dublin the other day, I decided to try shooting some black and white images with my new(ish) Sony A6000. 

On Friday Canon announced the company’s newest DSLR offerings, the much rumoured Eos 5DS and 5DS R cameras. The new versions of Canon’s long running 5D line have been making waves in the photography community for their headline feature, their new 50mp sensor. I won’t go into all the specifications and technical details on the cameras, as that’s been covered in great detail by photography news sites...

I’ve written a lot on this blog about using different RAW converters (other than Lightroom) to get the best from Fuji X-Trans files. In the past I’ve discussed using Photo Ninja, Iridient Developer, and Aperture but there is one big piece of software that I haven’t really covered in depth and that’s Capture One. The main reason was that I didn’t really have the time to properly use the software to judge it fairly. The few times I had tried it, I wasn’t satisfied with the results, but I’ve gotten comments from many readers who swear by it so, over the past few months I’ve been spending time with the software whenever I had a chance to see how I could get the best results from it.

I've been shooting some more street photography recently, partly as part of my review of the A6000, which was a good excuse to get out there, despite the really cold weather we've been having lately. I've written my first impressions of the little Sony camera already, and I'll be doing a full, comprehensive review once I've been using it for a few weeks. 

A couple of months ago my Sony NEX-7 stopped working. I was out shooting and the controls just stopped responding. I tried all sorts of things to get it back but to no avail. The camera was out of warranty and it was going to cost me €100 just to have it even looked at. I still haven't done anything with it yet, and I do intend to leave it in to be assessed at some point, but I'm just reluctant to spend several hundred euro to get it fixed when they're going for less than €400 now second hand. 

I had also been looking at the A6000 as a possible replacement. Over Christmas, there were some good deals at one of my local camera stores so in the end, one day when I felt like some retail therapy I decided to treat myself.

I had mentioned last week that I was almost ready to release Film Candy 2 for Lightroom, and I'm delighted to announce that the new set of presets is now available from my digital download store. Film Candy 2 has been a labour of love for the past year, and I'm really happy to finally make it available. 

On its official “Lightroom Journal” blog yesterday, Adobe posted a somewhat unusual post warning users that the next major release of Lightroom, Lightroom 6, would have new system requirements. Specifically, the Mac version would require 10.8 or higher, and the Windows version would require Windows 7 or higher.