As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve recently been shooting more film. It’s been somewhat of a therapeutic exercise, although, the length of time it’s taken me to scan the film has been somewhat frustrating, but more on that in a minute. It’s also been a bit of a learning experience, both shooting and post-processing the film. For this part, I’m going to look at some of my recent attempts at shooting colour negative. I have some black and films white left in with the lab for processing, and I’ll talk about that in part 2.

A while ago I wrote about some of the things that I had planned for my digital download store, and one of those was to implement an updated theme and a re-design. Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve now implemented this, and the store now has a shiny new design. Well, sort of. I’ve updated the theme that runs the store and this includes a lot of the functionality of the individual elements. On the home page, it may not look that different, but there is a new framework there which will allow me to change it over time, and I hope to make it look better.

I was a big fan of Mythbusters when it was on, and I'm a big fan of Adam Savage. I regularly watch/listen to his podcast on Tested.com: “Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project. I love Adam's insight into the creative process and as someone who has worked in the creative arts for many years, I know where he's coming from a lot of the time. He often puts words on experiences or feelings that I've had working as a creative in ways that I could not. One of the things that he's talked about several times on the podcast is something that I've experienced many times throughout my professional life, and he calls it "Imposter Syndrome"

A few years ago my wife and I spent a few weeks in New York and Washington DC. I had a great time there and I took the time to get lots of photos. While I’ve posted many from the trip int he past, I was generally focussing on the more “Travel” kind of photos. Recently I was going back over these images and I realised that I have shots from the trip that would fall into the “Street” genre. 

Lightroom’s noise reduction tools are pretty good, and can help reduce digital noise in an image quite effectively. However, one of the things that sometimes occurs with images taken on a digital camera is that the overall image may be ok, but there may be excessive noise in the shadows. This is because most digital cameras are noisier in the shadow part of the image than they are in the brighter parts. While this is decreasing with modern cameras, it can still be an issue, especially when pushing an image in Lightroom.

I’ve long complained about the lack of certain metadata functionality in Lightroom. I don’t particularly like the interface for entering metadata as it is, but the software lacks certain key features that I have long missed since moving from Aperture..... Recently I set about trying to find a solution, and it came in the form of a plug-in from John Beardsworth called “Search Replace Transfer”

With Photokina just around the corner, and with most of the major manufacturers probably going to announce new cameras, I’ve been thinking about what my ideal camera would be. Without getting into brand wars and camera maker loyalty, I am particularly keen to see what Nikon will announce. They’ve been on a roll lately with the D500 and the D5 and considering that the D810 and D750 starting to look a little old, an announcement might be on the cards.

(From the Photography Geek)

Over the last little while I’ve been trying to sort out some of the ever sprawling mess that is my photo library. While sorting through a drive falloff images, I found a lot that I had either forgotten about or wasn’t happy with the way that I had originally processed them. One  particular set was from a trip I trip I took to Washington DC a few years ago, and in particular to the beautiful suburb of Georgetown. 

Before I started this blog, I used to write about Apple and technology on various blogs. It was in a typical old fashioned blog style, where it was a mix of links to news articles that I found interesting, with some commentary added by me on things that I found to be comment worthy. I stopped doing it a long time ago, but I’ve missed the experience. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about doing something in this kind of format about photography.

Adobe has released an update for Lightroom which provides support fort the Fuji X-T2 as well as some bug fixes. Hopefully it fixes the memory leak that I reported on last week (it is listed as one of the fixes).

I’m delighted to announce, that after much delay, my latest set of Lightroom Presets, FilmLUX is now available. I came up with the idea for FilmLUX a little while ago when I was in the midst of scanning lots of old slide and transparency film. I noticed that the results I was getting had a really nice quality to them, and they weren’t quite like what I was getting from other presets. With this in mind I set about trying to create my own, paying close attention to the results I was getting from my own film scans.

It’s been a while since I last released a set of Lightroom presets, despite my plan to release one set a month this year. I’ve actually been working on a new set for a while now though, and I’m excited about the results. Called “Film Lux” it’s a continuation of my “Lux” series,and this time it’s about some more realistic film styles. 

I’ve been plagued by a nasty bug in the latest version of Lightroom on the Mac. It’s affected me several times now, and the same action triggers it, so it’s not a a random one off. On top of that I’ve read similar stories online from people with similar issues. Basically, every so often, when you open the import window, the memory usage of Lightroom goes through the roof and the application becomes frozen. If you don’t force quit the application quickly after this happens, the entire system hangs.

As I only have a limited set of lenses for my X-Pro 2 at the moment, so I have been keen to try some of my other glass on the camera via adaptors. The X-Pro 2 has some nice focusing aids, and I have some interesting lenses, so I wanted to see what kind of results I could get. Lens adaptors can actually be quite expensive, depending on the brand, but there are cheaper options available. As this was more of an experiment than anything, I went with some of the cheaper adaptors that available. 

In one of my earlier X-Pro 2 diary entries I pointed out an issue that I was having with the X-Pro 2 and using auto focus on small objects in a scene or objects close to the camera. The camera’s autofocus would refuse to lock on to smaller objects such as flowers and so on, and instead it would focus on the background. At the time, I wrote that it was probably something that I was doing wrong. Well, I’ve been trying a lot of things and I finally found the solution