Now that the Sony A7RII is shipping to customers, there are lots of reports coming in about the camera. More importantly there are now raw files available online that you can download and check out, and Lightroom and ACR (along with Capture One) all now support the camera too. I've been reading a lot about this new Sony for a while now, and I am very interested in it, as it seems like Sony has really listened to its customers and created a very impressive camera. 

After my trip to Berlin last week, my wife and I travelled by train to Frankfurt and then on to the picturesque town of Heppenheim. This sleepy little hamlet is nestled in the hills of southern Germany among vineyards and forests and is a beautiful setting with gorgeous old medieval buildings and according to Wikipedia, the town has 408 cultural monuments that are under monumental protection.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Berlin for a few days as part of a trip to Germany. Berlin is a city that I've always wanted to visit, as it has a reputation for attracting both artists and funky technology startups. I had also heard that it has a somewhat bohemian vibe to it. I was not disappointed. While I wasn't there specifically to photograph, I couldn't not shoot really. I wasn't able to see as much of the city as I would like to, but what I did see was great.

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.