Because we’re pretty terrible at looking after plants, and because everything we plant usually dies, we’ve been looking for ways to decorate our balcony without condemning some poor flowers to their untimely ends. So my wife came up with the ingenious idea of creating a garden out of windmills. I was sceptical at first, but now that I’ve seen the finished product, I’m really impressed.

I’ve created a new set of presets for Fuji users and I’m happy to announce that I’m giving these away for free. Basically, I really like the various film simulation modes available on Fuji’s cameras, and the corresponding picture profiles in Lightroom. They’re good on their own, but they also make a good starting point for some further manipulation. So, using the various profiles as a starting point, I created my own set of “Variations” of these.

After much rumour and speculation (or deliberate leaks) Canon has finally officially announced the 5D Mark IV. The new camera is the latest version of the venerable 5D line which revolutionised the DSLR market when it was first released, being the first mainstream DSLR with a full frame sensor. The new 4th generation version has an improved 30mp sensor, shoots 4k and has built in WiFi and GPS.

My next eBook guide is almost ready to go. I’ve been working on this for what seems like forever, and it’s now in the final stages of production. I wanted to do something similar to my previous Fuji X-Series guides, but for the Sony A6000. I’ve written a lot about the A6000 over the past few years and its a great little camera.

I've said this many times on this blog, but Autumn is my absolute favourite time of the year. I love the golden leaves on the trees and the Autumn light. While the season is only beginning here in Ireland, already the trees are starting to turn. The once dense green foliage has started to thin out and the canopy of leaves has gone from a deep lush green, to a speckled patchwork of green and gold.

After a topsy turvy weather ride this year, we finally had a few nice and sunny days here in Dublin, and I made sure to make the best of them. I managed to spend a good bit of time out shooting some street shots and I finally feel that my mojo is starting to come back a little.

I’ve added two new bundles of Lightroom Preset packs to the store. Previously I had created a bundle of my first 6 presets, and I’ve been waiting till I had another 6 to do a second bundle. Well, with the recent release of FilmLUX I now had another 6 Lightroom Preset packs, and so I’ve created another Bundle. 

In the first part of this series, I posted some of the images that I had recently taken using colour film. I had left some black and white rolls in to be developed too, but they take a bit longer, so I couldn’t share the photos at the time. Well, they’re finally back, so read on for the results of the rest of the experiment.

Last week I posted about some of my recent adventures shooting film, where I talked about shooting some colour negative film with my Canon EOS 5. the other day I was walking past the same spot where I took one of those shots, and as I had my Fuji X-Pro 2 with me, I thought it would be fun to take the same shot again to compare the two. 

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”