There was a nice little surprise for Sony A6000 owners yesterday when Sony announced a new firmware for the camera. Version 2 added one big new feature, and that is the XAVC-S codec. Up till now, if you were recording video on the A6000 you were stuck with the rather awful AVC-HD codec and a low bit rate, and frankly the quality wasn't the best. You could record uncompressed HD from the HDMI port on the camera, and having tried that in the past, the difference is remarkable. But adding an external recorder defeats the purpose of having a small camera. With the new firmware, Sony is adding a much better codec and the results are pretty great.

One of the interesting tidbits, buried in the list of bug fixes for the Lightroom CC update that was released yesterday was a mention of improvements to Fuji X-Trans processing in Lightroom. Any long term follower of this blog, knows that Lightroom’s poor quality X-Trans rendering has long been a bug bear of mine, and I’ve sought ways to minimise it and ways to avoid it altogether. In the announcement yesterday, Adobe has dealt with the first problem, that of the colour blur, and the company has stated that they are working with Fuji to improve edge rendering and detail on X-Trans files.

Adobe has issued the first major update to Lightroom CC as part of it's massive 2015 update to Creative Cloud. The update adds a few new features, as well as support for some new cameras and a whole lot of bug fixes.

I'm a big fan of Sony Products, and anyone who follows this blog knows that I've a soft spot for their cameras. I currently have an A6000 and I've previously shot with a Nex 7. I've also been eagerly following the developments of the A7 line with great interest. I've said it before, but Sony are one of the few companies really innovating in the imaging space. Not only are their sensors used by pretty much every other major company now, but they're constantly pushing the envelope in the camera market. From the RX1 which brought a superb full frame sensor to the compact camera form factor, to the A7 Line which made full frame really affordable and small. The A7 line certainly isn't perfect, but with the recently announced A7 R Mark II Sony are getting pretty close to it.

I wrote a while ago about my new iPhone Photography blog, and so far it seems to be going well. More importantly, it’s been encouraging me to shoot more with my phone. I’ve been using any available opportunity to get shots for the blog, and it’s proving an interesting experience. If you haven’t stopped by and checked it out already, you can see it at The Photography Geek site, which is on Tumblr (so if you’re a Tumblr user, please follow me)

As much as I love mirrorless cameras, there's one thing about the current designs that unfortunately is a bit of a problem for me. The issue is the viewfinder. My problem is not the electronic display itself, but rather the physical design of the viewfinder. Most of the mirrorless cameras that I've used are a real pain to use in bright light if you're a glasses wearer. 

As I’m sure any iPhone, iPad or Mac owner out there knows, Apple held its annual WWDC conference yesterday. Among the many things it showed off was the next version of OS X, called El Capitan, which will focus on performance and user interface improvements. While some highlights were revealed at the show, the presentation didn’t show all the features, and one of those that didn’t make the keynote was an update to Photos for the Mac.

If you use Photos for mac as well as on an iOS device, you may have come across an issue where Photos syncs some of your images and then stops. If this is happening to you there is actually a pretty easy fix. 

Ive been out shooting some more street photography lately. I like shooting the street genre as it allows me to both get practice, but also try out various shooting styles, although I try and not take it too seriously. Most of what I shoot is on the streets of Dublin City for part of my ongoing art project “The Streets of Dublin”. Over the past few weeks I’ve been both out shooting some more, and also sorting through my library, and collecting all the street shots into one collection.

Wow, Phase one is really churning out the updates to Capture One. the latest version has just been released, and it adds a few new features to its already extensive list, as well as adding support for new cameras including the company’s own recently released Phase One XF medium format camera.

It’s hard to believe it, but a few days ago Canon announced the official 10th anniversary of its game changing 5D Camera. The Canon 5D was the first digital camera to make full frame affordable and to it to the masses. It was the first enthusiast camera to have a full frame sensor, and it brought with it a huge step up in terms of image quality when it was first released back in May 2005. I was one of those who bought one of the 5Ds in the first year of its release, and it was a game changer for me too, in terms of my photography.

When Adobe introduced the Aperture importer in Lightroom 5 it offered a way for Aperture users to import their whole libraries into Lightroom, giving users who wanted to migrate a path to convert their libraries. There's another use for the Aperture importer though. You can use it to import single projects from Aperture.

I've recently been going through some of my older images, and re-processing some photos that I'd never been particularly happy with. One such set was some of the images I took when I was in Oslo a few years ago with the X100. I was using the little Fuji as a back-up camera at the time, and I've never really done anything with the files properly. I had done some rough processing in Aperture, but I hadn't given them the love they deserved, so I decided to import the project into Lightroom and re-process a few of them.

I’ve been wanting to start some sort of blog to showcase some of my iPhone photography on an ongoing basis for some time, when I realised that I already had the perfect platform sitting idle. I’ve had a Tumblr blog that I haven’t really been doing much lately, and it’s set up to a fairly decent domain name too, thephotographygeek.com. Not only that but I’be already been sort of using it for iPhone photography, as I’ve been automatically sharing my Instagram pictures on it for a while now. After a little bit of tidying up over the last little while, and with a fresh coat of virtual paint, it’s now been transformed into an iPhone photography blog.

I had brought my film camera with me on my recent holiday to Nice with the intention of shooting some film when there. I’m not a newbie to shooting film, I used to shoot film all the time, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done it and a lot of things have changed since then. I’ve gotten pretty rusty too. When I used to use film predominantly, I mostly shot Kodak Elite Chrome (transparency film). I would get it developed in a pro lab in Dublin, and I would scan it myself on my Canon film scanner. Elite Chrome is now gone and so is the pro lab I used to use. In fact it’s surprisingly difficult, and expensive to get film developed properly in Ireland any more. Several attempts that I’ve made in recent years have been pretty bad, with the film being severely scratched and damaged by various labs. However, with the resurgence lately I wanted to give it another try, and with a holiday to an exotic location as the ideal excuse, I thought why not give it a go.