I’m totally blown away by the response to my X-Trans lightroom guide that I published earlier in the week. the response has been amazing, and some of you have sent some lovely kind words of support. It’s the highest volume of traffic my store has seen and it’s been hard just to keep up. So, a sincere thank you to everyone. I really am blown away by the response.

As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I really love Autumn. I love the colours and I love the light, and I wanted to capture it in a different way this year, so as well as shooting lots of photos (more on that to come) I set out to shoot some video too. In the centre of Dublin city there is a famous park, called "St. Stephen's Green". It's one of my favourite places in the city. It's not a particularly big park, but it's a lovely combination of trees and walkways, and when viewed from certain angles, looks like you could be somewhere in the countryside, and not in the heart of a city.

As many of my long time readers and followers will know, I’ve posted lots of articles and blog posts on this site over the years about processing Fuji X-Trans files. Over the last few years, I’ve covered lots of different aspects, and I have quite a bit of information on here. I’ve been working to collate all those separate blog posts into a single guide (well, a guide for each application) and I’ve previously posted my guide for working with Capture One. Since that time I’ve been hard at work on the guide for Lightroom, and I’m delighted to say that it’s finally finished and available on my store.

I didn't get to cover this at the time, but there were some issues with Capture One and El Capitan when it was released. Apparently the issue was to do with the Open CL support and it caused crashing. there was a work around which would temporarily disable Open CL support, but Phase One has now released an update which supposedly fixes the issue. If you had been holding off on updating to El Capitan because of this, then it's good to know that there is now an updated version which addresses the bug. You can get the updated version by using the "Check for Updates..." function in the Capture One menu.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Random Acts of Photography” post. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been a bit slow at updating the website lately due to personal reasons. I’ve been busy working on some stuff behind the scenes though, including my next Fuji X guide, and as I was looking through some images in my Lightroom catalogue, I found a nice collection of images from my home city of Dublin, so I thought I’d share some of those.

I wanted to share a quick update on some ongoing projects, and some other things that have been going on.Lots of people have been asking me questions, which I've only gotten around to answering a few, and I've promised some updates on various things, so here's a quick roundup of what's going on.

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.