I was recently working on some bracketed exposures that I shot while on a walk by the coast north of Dublin. It was a beautiful and moody day, but the light was pretty strong, and I was shooting with my D700, which hasn’t the greatest dynamic range. With that in mind, I shot multiple exposures with the aim of combining them later so as not to loose any detail in the highlights and shadows. I originally tried combining the exposures in Lightroom, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so instead I decided to use Aurora HDR.

A new photography App has gained some popularity on various photography sites and forums recently, and a few people have asked me to have a look at it. It’s called Raw Power and it works as either a stand alone application or as an editing extension to Photos. It’s this latter option that has most people interested, as the App adds some of the functionality that Aperture had back to Photos. Specifically, it gives you control over the raw decoding process.

When Luminar was first announced I thought that it looked interesting, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay it that much attention. A little while before it was released the company that makes the software, Macphun, asked me if I’d like to take a look at it, and they sent me a beta copy to try. I was intrigued by what I saw. Initially I was mostly interested in it as an alternative RAW converter, but after using it for a while I see now that it’s so much more. 

A while ago I released a set of Free Lightroom presets for Fuji users based on my own “variations’ of the Fuji Film simulation presets, or more specifically, the corresponding colour profile in Lightroom. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the follow up to that first set is now available. 

If you’re an Instagram user, you’re probably familiar with the importance of Hashtags. Just like on Twitter, hashtags let you assign a topic to your photos, and using hashtags allows other users to find your work. If you want to grow your account you really need to use this technique as doing so can mean a big difference in the amount of people that see your work. There is a dark side to using hashtags on Instagram however, and it’s to do with the rise of aggregate accounts.

I was recently working on a photo of Dublin’s famous Ha’Penny bridge that I had taken with my X-Pro 2 and an idea came to me. I was processing the image in Lightroom, and I wanted to see what it would look like in different converters. As I’ve written so much about it, and as I had an image that I was working on for a real world project, I thought that while I was at it, I should try a whole bunch of different converters and see what kind of results I got.

For quite a while I’ve been using Photoshelter to host my online image library. Initially it served as a place that I could deliver image files to clients, sell stock and also manage print sales. I really liked the service and it had a lot to offer, but I’m afraid that I’ve had to move to a different host. I didn’t want to, but the reason was quite simple. After two years or saying that they would do something about it, Photoshelter still didn’t properly support EU Vat law. 

I wrote a post yesterday where I compared my new T-Pan for Lightroom Presets , applied to some Fuji X-Pro 2 images, against some real film. It wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously, and wasn’t meant as a scientific comparison. I wanted to show, that I could mix images from both together in a single story and they would work together well. However, someone suggested that It wasn’t a fair comparison, because the film I was using Ilford XP2 wasn’t “real” black and white film.

I’m really proud of how well my T-Pan set of Lightroom presets turned out. I’m not just saying that as a shameless plug. I set about creating something that would work well to emulate black and white film, and I think the results work really well. I’m sure it’s not perfect. It’s not a full simulation as such, but rather an artistic interpretation, but I think it comes close. To see just how close I decided to do a little experiment

Welcome to the first edition of Street Photo Diary for 2017. Considering I’ve been doing about one of these a month that means I’ve been doing the Street Photo Diary series for about 2 years now. For the new year, I’m going to try and keep to that schedule, so here’s the first instalment, for January!

I’ve been updating and modifying some parts of my website recently, with more changes planned in the near future. There’s one new section that I wanted to let you know about as I think you might find it useful. On my portfolio and services site, I’ve added a new section for “Camera Samples”.

I’ve been shooting some film again recently. I really do like shooting film, and I would shoot more were it not for the down sides, of cost, and scanning and so on. Being a perfectionist when it comes to image quality, it frustrates me that I can’t get film scanned properly without doing it myself, and being a busy professional, it frustrates me to have to take the hours it takes to properly scan film. 

Today was a busy day for Fuji as it launched three new cameras and a whole series of lenses. The biggest headline grabber will of course be the new medium format Fuji GXF. While fuji Announced the development of this camera back at Photokina, today was the official launch, with a release date and price set. Fuji also announced the release of the X100F, the latest version of their original X-Series camera, and the X-T20. I’m not really a “news” site, so for full coverage, I’ll send you to the excellent roundup over on Fuji Rumours. Below is some select bits and pieces that I’ve found particularly interesting.

I’m delighted to announce that my first set of new Lightroom Presets for 2017 is now available. It’s called T-Pan and it’s a new set of Black and White Presets. I came up with the style when working on trying to copy the look of some film that a friend had asked me to scan, and I’m pretty happy with the results. T-PAN is an attempt to create a realistic set of monochrome film presets, and it is aiming to re-create the experience of shooting with a professional grade black and white film.

When Capture One 10 was announced just before Christmas, I was very excited by the initial results that I saw with X-Pro 2 files, but I’ve realised now that my enthusiasm may have been over-rated. Since that time, I’ve been trying to lock down some base settings to use as the basis for some recommendations for my guide and to be honest I’ve had difficulty coming up with results that work for everything. It’s been a process of discovery, and I've learned some interesting things along the way. I’ve come up with some experimental settings, and I wanted to put them out there for people to try.