If you're a regular visitor here, you may have noticed a few changes on the site over the last little while, and also, you've probably noticed that it's been a while since I've posted an update. There's been a lot going on lately, and there's been a lot of technical issues that I've had to deal with on the site, so let me explain. 

There's a beautiful walled garden in the park near where I live. The park itself, Dublin's Marley Park, is a former stately home and grounds, and it's kept its walled garden which is now open to the public. As well as an array of flowers and plants, it's also home to a garden school and has lots of herbs and vegetables on show too. As with all gardens it's a constantly changing and beautiful living entity in and of itself, and I love going there to photograph.

I’m delighted to announce that Bleached Bronze for Lightroom is now available. Bleached Bronze was one of the very first presets that I made when I first started selling presets for Aperture . Since I stopped selling presets for Aperture, I kept getting requests for a Lightroom version of Bleached bronze. Well, it’s finally here!

One of the very first presets that I made when I first started selling presets for Aperture was called "Bleached Bronze". To be honest, I can't really remember how it came about, but I think it was an accidental discovery. I had originally been going for a "bleached bypass" look and instead came up with something that had rich browns and metallic looks, so I called it bleached bronze. It's the one set of presets that I haven't ported to Lightroom since I stopped selling them for Aperture, and it's the one set that I keep getting requests for. Well, I'm happy to announce that it's almost here!

I got up early last week and headed into the city to get some morning shots. I spent most of my time walking up along the river Liffey through the docklands. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was shining down. It was nice to get some shots of the buildings and bridges by the river, many of which have become Dublin icons.

I’ve been working on some new premium Lightroom presets, which should be available soon, but while I was experimenting I got sidetracked and ended up creating some Faux Film presets for Fuji X users. I was trying some different techniques and I have saved various “ingredients” which I use to then create whole looks. While playing around with some of these I decided to try combining some of what I was working on, with the fuji picture profiles that come with lightroom. I liked he results so I decided to keep going. The result was a set of film like presets that I think you might like.

If you have downloaded presets from somewhere and you want to manually install them, it's actually quite simple. You just need to copy them into the correct folder

As you walk along the quays in Dublin City, there's a haunting but strangely beautiful memorial to the Irish Famine. The set of statues which makes up the memorial represent the starving and dying people of Ireland that were forced to emigrate during the horrific famine of the 19th century. They were erected in 1997 and are sculpted by artist Rowan Gillespie. On a bright morning last week I was walking by and I noticed that someone had put flowers in the hands of the statues, which were beginning to wilt, which I thought was kind of metaphorical, so I got some shots of the scene while I was there.

Just a quick post for today, as I’ve lots on, and this is kind of a shameless plug post, but anyway. I often take simple shots that I use for embellishing blog posts, either here or on other sites. They’re usually nothing fancy and usually something that I just do quickly because I’m writing in a hurry. One of the things I’ll often do is give them a treatment of some kind to give them a stylised look which makes them more interesting. This is how my Film Candypresets sort of came about, and I’ve been using them in this context recently, so I thought I’d give you a quick example.

Apple rolled out an update for Yosemite yesterday, and part of that update featured a minor update to Photos for Mac. This was primarily a bug fix release, but one of the improvements listed is more reliable syncing. I’ve talked about in the past briefly about the issues that I’ve been having with syncing on Photos, namely that it stops intermittently and you have to re-start the application or the iOS photos app.

With the latest update to Lightroom CC, 2015.1 (I'm not sure if this has changed in Lightroom 6.1) Adobe has changed the way Lightroom handles emailing images. In the past when you choose the option to email some images by using the "Email Photo(s)..." option from the menu, Lightroom would open a dialog which let you see the images you were going to email, and allow you to enter addresses if you wanted to. It would then pass the photos on to your email client which would handle the actual emailing of the images. In the latest version Lightroom now seems to include its own email sending software, and now requires you to enter the details of your mail server, and compose and send the email directly inside of Lightroom.

Just a quick update on my Digital Download store. I’ve given it a fairly substantial re-design, including a new theme, and I’ve tidied up some of the organisation and menus, hopefully making it easier to find stuff. The download store contains my Lightroom presets, some presets for Photoshop too, as well as some textures for sale.

It’s time for another instalment of my “Recent Street Photography” series. (Note to self: come up with a better name for this.) I haven’t actually been doing as much street shooting recently as I normally would, and as I went to gather some shots for this street photography post, I actually thought I wouldn’t have that many, but it turns out, I actually had plenty.

The signature feature of the recent Lightroom CC 2015.1 update was the addition of a new "Dehaze" tool. The purpose of this new function is pretty straight forward. It is designed to remove haze from your images. In operation it couldn't be simpler. A single slider has been added at the bottom of the effects panel called "Dehaze" and sliding this to the right causes Lightroom to do its magic.

There was a beautiful Mexican sailing ship docked in Dublin last week, and I paid a quick visit as I was in the area. I only had my film camera and my iPhone with me, so while I did take some shots on film, they are yet to be developed. I did get some nice shots on my iPhone too, and once again, I' pretty impressed at how good the camera is on the iPhone 6+.