It's February already, and it's time for another edition of Street Photography Diary! If you're new to the site, this on-going series is basically a random collection of my recent street photography, accompanied by an equally random collection of thoughts on the images, the process, or sometimes on subjects only loosely related!

Here's a quick tip for Lightroom users out there who may have the VSCO film presets installed. Say for example, you're working on an image, or set of images, but you don't want to use the full VSCO presets on them. You might not want them to look too "processed" for example. If you don't want to use the full VSCO presets, but still want a different look, then you should try using one of the VSCO calibration profiles without using the full presets. 

Instagram has finally added what I'm sure is probably the most requested feature: multiple account support. With the latest version of the app on both iOS and Android, you can now have more than one account (you can now have up to 5). You can also easily switch between them and post to multiple accounts as well. 

Photo Ninja from picture code has added partial support for Fuji’s new X-Pro 2 camera. Currently the application only supports uncompressed raw files, and compressed raw has yet to be supported. You can get Photo Ninja, including a trial version from Picture Code’s website.

Yesterday Sony released the spiritual successor to the A6000, the A6300. I say spiritual, because the A6000 is still being sold. As many of my log term readers know, I’ve been using the A6000 for over a year now, and I recently wrote a 3 part real world review of the camera. The successor has been rumoured for quite some time, and now it’s here. I’m very impressed with what I’m reading about it, at least with the specs on paper. At first glance the A6300 may seem like a minor evolution over the A6000, but in my opinion, it’s a massive improvement over the older camera, especially in the area of video. In fact, for video, I think that it’s revolutionary to have these features at the price point and size.

If you haven't come across it before, Affinity Photo is a Photoshop competitor from Serif labs, the same people who brought us the excellent Affinity Designer (an illustrator competitor). The software got a lot of attention when it was launched, and Apple named it the best Mac App of 2015. With this quick first look, I'm going to talk about my general impressions of using it, and I'm not going to go too in-depth, butI'll follow this up in a little while with a full review.

The recent Lightroom and Camera raw updates added support for the newly announced, but yet to be released, X-Pro 2. I was curious to see how the raw files looked given the history of Lightroom and X-Trans files, but as the camera isn’t out yet, I can’t exactly rent one. After doing a bit of searching however, I did come across a couple of sites with sample raw files you can download.

Adobe has just announced the latest upgrade for Lightroom. As well as bug fixes and new lens support, the CC version adds a new feature too. Called Boundary wrap, the new feature enhances the panorama feature in Lightroom. Unfortunately for those with the non subscription version, this new feature is only available for CC users.

I normally try to keep the topics on this blog as positive as possible. I try not to court controversy by objecting to anything too strongly, but there’s something that’s been bothering me for a little while now, and it’s Photoshop. With the most recent update, Adobe made some significant changes to the Photoshop interface, and in my opinion, they’re not very nice.

It's been a while since I've taken any night shots. It's not something I do that often, not for any particular reason (other than fear of getting mugged!) Anyway, over the weekend I had the chance to take some pictures of the Grand Canal area of Dublin City after dark. I had my Sony A6000 with me, along with a sigma 30mm and 19mm lens, and my somewhat ancient Manfrotto tripod. 

Welcome to my first street photography diary post of 2016. I've had a relatively productive start to the year, photography wise. I seem to be getting my groove back when it comes to street photography, well a little anyway. There's been some great light here in Dublin in January, and that always helps. The crazy roadworks continue too, but they're making things even more interesting, especially now that they've started laying tracks for the tram system upgrades.

I opened Capture One this morning to find a new update in the update notification panel. If you’re a Capture One Pro 9 user, 9.0.3 is now available.

I haven't really covered Iridient developer much since version 3 was released ( a good while ago now), which I must apologise for, as there's actually some cool features in the updated version. I actually don't use it as much as I used to any more, which is why I  haven't really written much about it, but there is one really good feature that I've been meaning to post about, and so here it goes. If you're using X-Trans files with Iridient Developer 3, there's a special demosaicing mode for black and white images, which maximises the quality of monochrome images from the camera, and it has a really nice look to it.

Last week I released my latest set of Lightroom Presets, “Coffee Tones”. The presets are a set of film like coffee coloured filters for use in Lightroom. I wanted to share some more examples that I’ve used the presets on, including some shots that I took this weekend. I also wanted to thank everyone who sent kind comments on the new set.

After months of rumours and speculation the long awaited X-Pro II from Fujifilm has finally launched, and from the looks of it, it was worth the wait. While the new model looks very similar to the original one, there are lots of changes.