I had an interesting experience on Saturday. We had decided to pay a visit to Dublin’s Phoenix Park, a place I hadn’t ever actually been to before, which is probably considered a cardinal sin for people who live in Dublin. The Phoenix Park is a huge park land just outside the centre of Dublin. It’s one of the biggest public parks in Europe and houses the Dublin zoo, as well as the residence of our President, among numerous other attractions. I had been years ago to the Zoo, but I had never really been around the park.

Ever since Adobe announced the last update for Lightroom, ( Well, the one that came before the rushed out fix) there has been a lot of debate about that new import dialog. People are not happy. I have avoided trying to weigh in on the issue because I haven't really had the time or the energy, but the discussion has raised some interesting points, so I feel that I should add my two cents. Actually, a lot of what I think on the issue has already been said by some others

Here's the latest in my series of Street Photography diary posts. I'm not going to talk too much about this one, and just let the pictures speak for themselves. This is also going to be a shorter collection than usual. The changing light here as we are now deep into winter provides some great opportunities for shadows and warm autumn light. While you might generally consider Autumn a time for nature and landscape photography, the beauty of the season works for other types too. I just love the Autumn light here in Ireland, as the Sun is low, The shadows are long and everything has a golden hue. 

Adobe announced upgrades to both the desktop and mobile versions of Lightroom today. On the desktop, the main features are a revamped import window, and the ability to use the de-haze functionality in local adjustments (such as the brush or gradient). The iOS version of Lightroom mobile receives some significant updates, the biggest of which is that it is now free. You can now use it without a creative cloud subscription, but you loose the ability to sync with Adobe cloud.

I’ve been using the little Sony A6000 now for almost a year and it’s a great little camera for the price. One of the things that had been frustrating me however is that I always found that I wasn’t quite satisfied with the look of the raw files when processed in Lightroom. To me, the colours never looked quite right, and so I set about doing something about it. Having shot lots of test shots on multiple cameras for comparison, I’ve developed two approaches to addressing my concerns. First, I tweaked the default white balances, and second, I tweaked the calibration settings in Lightroom to come up with what I believe is a more pleasing look.

Autumn has begun in earnest here in Dublin city, and the city trees are starting to turn form the rich summer green to the beautiful gold of Autumn. Not only are the trees changing, but the light is too. I love the Autumn light. Being relatively far north here in Ireland, the Autumn and winter months bring a lower Sun which gives it a warmer colour and longer, more dramatic shadows. 

If you've updated to iOS 9 and you're using the new Apple News app, you can now get this blog's content in Apple News. For the moment Apple News is only officially available in a very few select countries, but I'm assuming it will roll out to more soon. There's a very simple work around to get the application if you want ti though. You simply need to set your iPad's region to USA and Language to US English, and reboot your iPad (or iPhone). Once you do that you will see the news App.

I must confess to being an unashamed Apple fan. I’ve been buying Apple products and following the company’s developments since my first Mac, a PowerPC 7100 (remember them?) It was using a Mac that first got me into using Photoshop and graphics, and without it, probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. Needless to say then, I’m always interested Apple’s new announcements, and in particular how they relate to my fields of Photography and Design. Last week’s keynotehad lots of exciting potential for Photographers, so I’ll share my thoughts (in a somewhat random order) on these developments and how I feel they may impact photography.

One of the useful settings on your Fuji Camera is the Dynamic Range settings, or DRO for short. What DR does is allow you to capture more information in the shadow and highlight areas when shooting JPEG files, effectively extending the dynamic range of the shot. This information doesn’t translate directly into the raw files. I this tutorial I'll show you how to get close to the in-camera settings.

I've been kind of in a rut lately when it comes to shooting street photography. I've been doing the typical thing of blaming everything else. It's the weather (in fairness, it was) or it's the fact that there's roadworks everywhere in Dublin right now, but the truth of the matter is it's just me. Not one to be undeterred, I decided that to get my mojo back, I'd try something different. I do like black and white images, but lately I've been mostly shooting colour, so I decided to set my camera to black and white, and see what happens. 

Something occurred to me recently while thinking about photography. You often hear photographers trot out the old trope of “it’s not about the camera, it’s about the photographer” but in many ways that’s not really the whole story either. Another way of looking at it is: “It’s not about the Photographer, it’s about the Image”. Last week, there was a very powerful image in the media, showing once again the importance of photography. The disturbing yet moving photograph of the child’s body washed ashore on the Turkish coastline shocked the world into action, and yet how many people know who the photographer was? Outside of the photographic community, I doubt anyone who is not into photography can name the photographer of that striking image.

I’ve previously tried using Nikon lenses with my Sony A6000 and I’ve been mostly pleased with the results. There were a few minor issues though. For one, the focus rings on the Nikon lenses that I own are really bad. There’s a significant lag between when you turn the ring and when it catches the mechanism underneath. This makes manually focussing a tad tricky. Secondly, you have to control the aperture with a ring on the adaptor which has no stops, so it makes setting a specific aperture quite difficult. Using the Metabones adaptor with my Canon lenses was a much better experience.

I’ve started a little experiment that I wanted to share with you. I’m working on some tutorials on how to photoblog, and as part of my research I’ve been trying out various platforms. One service that was missing from my repertoire was a wordpress.com blog. Unlike a self hosted Wordpress installation, a wordpress.com blog is fully hosted, and is kind of more like Tumblr. I was curious to see how the platform worked, and how it differed from a self hosted Wordpress install, so I set up a blog to test it out. The blog in question is called Photo Wander

This is the second part of my two part guide on Processing X-Trans files in Capture One. In the first part I looked at changing the default settings and creating a user style to apply those settings in import. I also looked at how to manage Raw + Jpeg pairs in Capture One. In this second part I'm going to look at a few of the common Capture One adjustments and how they affect processing Fuji files in particular. I'll also show my methods of integrating Capture One with Lightroom.

A while ago I had a post about how much I was enjoying the combination of Capture One and Fuji X-Trans files. I wrote about how I really like the way Capture One renders Fuji Raw files, in both terms of details, and colour. I didn’t go into much detail though about some of the settings that I use and how I manage my workflow when working with Capture One. I’ve been wanting to write up a sort of guide to my common settings, and also some workflow tips for each of the various applications that I use, and so, here is the first one.