Living in the city you might expect that there wouldn't be much nature around, but nothing could be further from the truth. Nature is everywhere. Form the wild flowers growing on the side of the streets, to the beautiful trees to the canal banks and the parks. The summer growth creeps up on you, with just a few leaves, and then suddenly, in an explosion of nature, summer arrives with a great fanfare of green and yellow and red and all the colours of nature.

I promised that I would release a few more excerpts from my Iridient Developer book, and I’m a little late getting around to it, so apologies. In the book I go through each of the tabs in the settings window, and explain how the various controls work, especially in relation to working with X-Trans images. The following excerpt is from the section where I discuss the detail tab, and in it I talk about how to use and understand the Iridient Reveal sharpening method.

It's been a while since I've done one of these Street Photo diary posts. The last one was in March and it's now may. I haven't been doing as much street photography as I would like lately. For one, I was focussing on some writing, and getting my Iridient Developer book out. Secondly, because of all the lovely nature blooming around the city and the surrounding areas, I've been doing a lot more nature photography. I finally took my camera back to the streets recently though, and set about capturing the life around me.

It never ceases to amaze me the difference a good lens can make to your image quality. I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but until you've used some high end glass, you don't really know just how much of a difference it can make. There's a lot of misinformation out there on the internet (shocker) when it comes to what makes a good lens, or even the importance of good quality optics to begin with. One well known and somewhat infamous blogger, has even stated that the lens actually makes no difference in terms of image quality. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Over the past week I've reached two very important milestones, both here on the blog and in my photography journey. First of all, my new e-book on processing X-Trans files in Iridient Developer has become the fastest selling book that I've released to date! Secondly, my humble little blog has passed the million viewer mark!

I'm always trying out new blogging and social platforms to see if they're worth using, especially for photographers. Lately, the one that is getting the most attention seems to be Medium, and so I thought I would try it out too. I wanted to try it both for myself, and for an experiment to see how it would work as a photo blogging platform. so I could write about it for my fellow photographers.

Every now and then there is a kind of weather that we get here in Ireland that I really love. Where I live, we're sort of in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, and during the summer, sometimes we get a kind of misty cloudy rain, that has a real mountain like feel to it. It reminds me of so many episodes of the X-Files which took place in forest settings of Canada, and it has a real frontier feel to it, even though we're still just in a superb of the city. I always think of it as "Alpine" weather, even though this is probably just a name I've given it myself. 

This has been a long time coming, and it feels like I’ve been working on it for ages, but my third Fuji X-Trans guide is now finally available. This time, I’m covering Iridient Developer, and the e-book is a comprehensive guide to using the software for processing Fuji X-Trans files. I also cover some workflows for integrating Iridient Developer into a Lightroom Workflow.

I look forward to the sight every year. It's a fleeting moment, but worth the wait. The pink and white beauty of the cherry blossoms that burst forth every year, announcing spring to the world is one of my favourite sights. When the cherry blossoms bloom, the bleak months of winter are finally at an end, and this year more than ever, I've been eagerly anticipating the blooming of the cherry blossoms.

Iridient Developer has received a new update this weekend. The new version adds support for compressed raw for the X-Pro 2 along with support for a number of other cameras. The update also has some important bug fixes, including a fix for some bugs in OS X. 

When I wrote my extended review of the A6000, I was pretty scathing about the Sony 35mm f/ 1.8 OSS lens. In the article I wrote that it was one of my least favourite lenses and that it had some terrible chromatic aberration. Recently, I was going through some older images in y library, including some I’d shot with the Sony 35mm and as I went through them I realised that I may have been a bit hard on it. So I started shooting some more images with it, and I now realise that I was possibly wrong in my assessment of it, so here’s a second look at the 35mm lens.

Adobe has issued a series of updates to Lightroom and camera raw. The updates are mainly bug fixes, as well as adding support two new cameras. It's available now from the Adobe update panel.

Here's a very quick Lightroom tip for you. I often use the quick collection in Lightroom as a sort of temporary clip board or place to collect some images that I'm either collecting for a blog post, or for a comparison and so on. Sometimes I will be in the processing of going through images , and I may have set some search filters in the library or something similar, when I decide that I may want to add some images to the quick collection. However, I already have images in it that I no longer want, but I don't want to leave the current view to go to the quick collection. 

There are a lot of heated discussions in the the photography community when it comes to mirrorless cameras. For some, it's an "either or" situation. You are either a mirrorless shooter or your not. I began to think that the situation with mirrorless is very like the iPad (and tablets in general) market. Some people see iPads as the future of computing. I'm reminded of the comments the late Steve Jobs's made about the iPad and computing market after the iPad first launched. He made the analogy of iPads being like cars and computers being like trucks. While many people only need a car, he pointed out, there will always be people who need trucks. For me personally, this sums up how I feel about the camera market. Mirrorless cameras are kind of like cars in this analogy, or like iPads.

When Apple first released Aperture it was something of a revolution. It was the first application to be released which combined an asset management solution with raw processing software. It may be hard to imagine now but up till this point, the tasks of managing your images was separate form the process of developing raw files. While some people still work the old fashioned way, Aperture forever changed the way many photographers approach their workflow.