I take a lot of street photography, mostly for my ongoing Streets of Dublin project. Every now and then I like to share some of them here, and I haven’t done an update in a while, so here are some that I’ve taken over the last few months (some longer). I may have posted some of these before as part of other stories, but It’s nice to have them together as a collection. I’m going to try and do this as a regular series. Anyway, enjoy!

When I was shooting a lot with my Sony NEX–7, before it died on me, I would occasionally use Nikon lenses on it, with a Novaflex adaptor. I really liked the results, but I didn’t do it that often, because personally, I found that the process of manual focussing was a little to awkward for my style of shooting. Even with the great focus peaking feature (which isn’t always accurate unfortunately), it just wasn’t worth it for the amount of times I wanted to do it. With my newer A6000, I had put off trying to shoot with Nikon lenses because of this, but I recently took the opportunity to try it out, and boy, what a difference.

I posted some of my images from the recent trip that I took to Nice, in the south of France last week. As I wrote, most of the time I just used my iPhone to take photos, mainly because we were there to relax and take it easy. I did have my little fuji with me too though, and I did get to take some shots with that too.

I recently took some time off to have a well deserved holiday in the beautiful seaside city of Nice in the south of France. Normally when I travel I take an assortment of cameras, with the main one usually being my D700 with 28-300 lens. However, as the primary purpose of this trip was to relax and unwind, I wanted to travel light and, to be honest, I had considered not taking any cameras and just enjoying the sunshine. Of course, the photographer inside me wouldn't let that happen! I decided to bring my X-E1 and an old Film camera, but I ended up taking most of my pictures with my iPhone.

I've been using the new version of Lightroom pretty extensively over the last day or so since it came out, and I have a few observations to share. This isn't a comprehensive review by any means, but rather some initial findings based on using it in real-world conditions. If you have any questions about the new version or anything you would like me to test, let me know in the comments below and I'll do my best to cover it in a future post.

Adobe today announced the long awaited release of the next version of Lightroom. In fact there are two versions, Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6. Lightroom 6 is the stand alone boxed copy and Lightroom CC is the version that comes as part of a subscription. The CC version also includes access to various cloud services and the Lightroom Mobile apps. There are several new major headline features and lots of smaller ones.

When Photos for OS X finally launched, one of the nice things about it is that it effectively makes a copy of the library on your iPhone, including all the albums you might have. I never really paid much attention to the albums in Photos on my iOS devices, as I never actually created any albums in it. However, some apps do and those albums are synced over too. One of those is for VSCO cam images that you save back to your camera roll from the VSCO cam app.

Spring is normally a quiet time for me with design work, but this year, I've been swamped, so my photography blog has taken a bit of a back seat. I want to do both, but unfortunately I just haven't been keeping up. I'm in the process of re-designing my long idle design portfolio and website too, so when I keep mentioning the design work I'm doing, I'll finally be able to refer you to what I'm talking about. I'm actually working on some interesting projects, but I can't talk about them now. 

Anyway, I haven't been totally abandoning the photography side of things. I've been doing some bits and pieces that you may find of interest. 

I've been a bit quiet, photographically speaking, over the last week or two. I've been busy working on some design jobs, so I haven't updated the site here as much as I would like. Anyway, as it's a beautiful spring day here in Dublin, here are some daffodil shots to celebrate the changing of the seasons. 

If you're an Iridient Developer user and a Fuji X-Trans shooter (X-Pro 1, X-E1, X-E2, X100s, X100t etc) the developer of the software has posted film simulation presets to match the ones that are available in camera. They've actually been available for a little while, but they've just posted some updated versions. 

I’ve been using Capture One to process my X-Trans files more and more lately. I had posted some initial findings before about this, and since then, Capture One has pretty much become my standard application for processing files from my X-E1. I’m really happy with how the software performs, and it does a really good job with Fuji’s files. Not only does it produce nice and sharp artifact free images, but the colour is really great too, even without having to do anything.

It was cloudy here in Ireland for this morning's solar eclipse, but luckily just as it reached its peak, the clouds briefly cleared and I was able to get a few shots out my window. I used live view to capture these, so I wouldn't be looking through the lens at the sun.

I’ve been using my iPhone a lot for photography lately and I’m having a lot of fun shooting with it. There’s lots written about iPhone photography and there’s lots of articles giving you lots of tips and dos and don’ts for shooting images with your iPhone. I wanted to share a few from my own experience though. These are just some random tips that I’ve been thinking about over the last little while. Some may seem pretty obvious, and some you may not agree with, but there tips are just things that I’ve personally found. Anyway, without further ado, here are ten tips for getting more from your iPhone photography. 

A lot of the time when I'm out photographing, I take pictures that, while not exactly the most fascinating subjects, I still like to take. Sometimes, there's something about an otherwise bland scene that I really like, and it's usually to do with the way the light is falling in the scene. Sometimes people don't get what I see in a scene, and that's ok. Not every photo has to be a masterpiece, and not every photo has to be art gallery worthy.  Photography is, of course, all about light, and sometimes I love an image because of the way the light interacts with whatever is in the scene.

I’ve been a big fan of Jay Maisel’s work for a few years now. Even though he’s a very famous photographer I only really came across him a few years ago when he did a class on kelly training. I had seen his photography before but I never knew whose work it was. When seeing him being interviewed, it struck me that the then 80year old artist is not only a great photographer, but also a great philosopher as well, especially about all things photography.