I read some sad, but not entirely surprising news during the week. It seems that the company that makes Holga cameras is shutting down. I’m not hugely surprised by this. The Holga craze of a few years ago was pretty much killed by Instagram and the iPhone. I only noticed recently how many of the places that used to sell Holga cameras had stopped selling them (in lieu of Fuji Instax cameras). 

It seems to be the season for updates. Hot on the heels of Capture One yesterday, Adobe has announced updates to many applications in its creative suite including a major new version of Photoshop. 

I had a nice little surprise waiting for me when I opened Capture One this morning. A dialog popped up letting me know that a major new version has been released, Capture Pro 9. It’s available now, for the upgrade price of €99 if you’re a Capture One 7 or 8 user. There are some big new features in this release, including a brand new processing engine. I’ve just upgraded my copy, and I’m going through it now. Once I’ve had a chance to play around I’ll have a more detailed report, but in the mean time, here are some of the key new features (from their website)

I’ve said many times on this site that Autumn is my favourite time of the year for photography. I’m sure this is the case for may photographers out there. The combination of colour and light make for some beautiful scenery. It’s well and truly into winter now and I thought I’d look back on the lovely fall season that we’ve just had. Here in Dublin we’ve had a beautiful Autumn. It was very warm and we were blessed with some lovely sunny days. It certainly made the season even more beautiful here in Ireland.

I’ve been going back and forward about whether or not to write this post. I wanted to say something about the recent horrific events in Paris and yet, I didn’t want it to feel like I was making it about me. But, as Stephen Colbert pointed out on the Late Show, it’s ok to try and find a connection with the city, to show solidarity in whatever form you can. So this is my tribute to Paris. It is what it it. It’s only tenuously about photography, but it’s a subject that I hold dear, as it’s a city I hold dear.

Here's a really useful tip I came across over the weekend. While I don't use Apple photos that much, other than for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, it is handy for that very purpose. Because your photos library is the default repository for most imaging apps on iOS, if you want to get photos into an application on your iPhone or iPad it's useful to put them into Photos on the mac and let it sync across. Importing is easy enough, you just drag photos into ...well, photos. However, there's no way to import directly into photos from other applications such as Lightroom. Fortunately there's now a work around. Sort of.

When I launched my latest guide book for processing X-Trans images in Lightroom, I promised that I’d publish a few excerpts from it, so here, as promised is a small segment….

As Autumn becomes winter here in Dublin, I've been back out taking more street photography. The centre of the city is still a construction zone and will be for some time. That has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it offers some interesting opportunities for photography, but on the other hand, it makes moving around the city difficult, and it reduces the room you have when trying to frame things. Of course limitations can sometimes be a benefit too, and so I've tried to use the limited space as an advantage rather than a limitation whenever I could.

Adobe has released the latest version of Lightroom, which restores the old import dialog and has lots of bug fixes as well as support for some new cameras and lenses. Camera Raw 9.3 has also been released with the corresponding camera and lens support

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.