There's a stretch of walkway that runs along by the canal that has a regular metal railing. The position of this fence is such that in the morning, when the sun is shining you get really strong shadows of the bars on the bright concrete slabs that make up the walkway...

At the “Spring Forward” event held today in San Francisco which was mainly about the Apple Watch, Apple also announced the new 12" MacBook. The new laptop is a departure from the previous generation of Apple notebooks, and represents the first major departure from the existing designs in quite some time. The new MacBook is not replacing either the MacBook air or the MacBook pro but comes with a Retina Display and is incredibly thin. If you’re a photographer looking for a new laptop the sleek design and retina display of this new model might be tempting. It’s evening here in Dublin and I’ve been mulling over a cup of tea, so I thought I’d share some of the mostly random thoughts I’ve been having about the new notebook.

Following on from my first impressions post the other day, I spent a bit more time shooting with my new iPhone on Friday. I headed into the city to do some street photography, armed with my Fuji X-E1 and my iPhone 6. I had been intending to shoot mostly with the Fuji and get some sample shots with the iPhone, but after a while I ended up putting the X-E1 away and just using the iPhone. I was simply having too much fun with it.

I went for a photowalk around the docklands area of Dublin a couple of weeks ago. It was a bright, but cold winter morning and the Docklands is always full of interesting subjects. I walked around for about an hour before the cold got the better of me (it was minus 1 at the time).

I received an interesting email tonight from Apple regarding Aperture which it seems is being sent out to all registered Aperture customers. The text of the email is as follows...

I recently upgraded my phone to an iPhone 6 plus (from an iPhone 5) and I was curious to see what the camera was like, especially with Apple's recent publicity on the matter. I was out in the city today for a little while so I decided to try it out. I didn't spend too much time with it, so I don't really have any major opinions as to the quality yet, but instead here are some images that I shot, and some observations on using it.

To celebrate the start of spring I’m giving discounts on everything on the digital download store including all my Lightroom presets and ACR Presets and Texture Box one. I had mentioned this briefly in a previous post, and that it was for this week only, but I’ve decided to extend it for the whole month. To take advantage of this, all you need to do is use the following coupon code at the checkout:

springishere

This will give you 20% off your total purchase. You can use it as often as you want for the month of March.

Iridient digital has released a major upgrade to it’s Raw Processing software Iridient Developer. I’ve covered this software numerous times on the blog, in particular in relation to it’s ability to decode Fuji X-Trans files. Version 3 is a significant upgrade over version 2 and has a lot of new features in it. The update has addressed most of the (few) criticisms that I’ve had of the software in the past, and it now has a lot of functionality for processing images.

This is a quick tip for any fellow Squarespace users out there. If you're a photo blogger and you use Squarespace you may have come across the following problem: You want to add a series of images to your blog post and you want them all to appear in a row, one after the other. The simplest way to do this is to add a gallery block to your post, and use the stacked mode for the gallery. This will add any images in the gallery one after the other in a "stacked" fashion, but for some reason known only to the folks at Squarespace, this method doesn't allow you to use the Lightbox functionality (so that when you click on an image it will apear large in an overlay)

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)