It was a beautiful sunny Autumn morning here in Dublin last Sunday, and so I set about doing something I had wanted to do for a while, but I had kept putting off for various reasons. When I saw the beautiful light, I decided to head out and shoot some video (semi-properly) on my Fuji X-Pro 2. I had shot some clips before, but I hadn’t set out to do a proper shoot. For this test, I wanted to try and shoot reasonably properly, so I took my tripod, and more importantly, a proper variable ND filter. While I had a few hiccups, for the most part I’m happy with what I shot. 

I've been running my own digital download store for a good few years now. I started by selling Aperture presets, and then moved to selling Lightroom presets and then ebooks. It's great that in this era the tools exist that allow you to easily create your own store and sell your products online. It's something that would have been difficult only a decade ago, but now it’s something that anyone can do. It is not without its downsides though. In the time that I've been running my store I've had a lot of ups and downs.

I conducted a fun and somewhat interesting experiment the other day I went out shooting with my X-Pro 2. Instead of the usual Fuji glass, I instead used a 50 year old vintage soviet era lens. The lens is the FED Industar 50mm f/2.8 from my old FED 2 camera. The lens gave some interesting results, and it was quite a bit of fun to shoot with. 

It may seem like a simple thing, but getting the correct white balance can have a significant impact on the overall look of an image. Often you may hear people complaining about the colours of a particular camera, and that they don’t like the colours that a specific brand of camera might produce. It is a common misconception that this has to do with the design of the sensor. In many cases much of what is perceived as differences in a camera’s ability to capture colours may be partly due to the way a camera’s white balance is calibrated. 

In my recent rediscovery of film shooting, I decided to try out a roll of Kodak Ektar 100. I've never shot with this film before, but it gets a lot of good reviews online, and having used and scanned a roll, I can say that they're not unfounded. I headed out on a sunny(ish) autumn day in Dublin and took some shots around the city using my trusty Eos 5 with a 17-40 f4/l lens.

I’m very pleased to announce, that after a very long time in production, my newest guide is now available. this e-book guide is called “Processing Sony A6000 Raw files in Lightroom: A Workflow and settings guide”. While that’s probably a bit of a mouthful, it pretty much sums up what this new guide is about. In the same way that I have previously written guides for Fuji X-Series shooters, this guide is designed specifically for Sony A6000 shooters who want to get the best from their camera when processing their images in Lightroom.

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.