Despite being widely rumoured, Sony still managed to make quite a splash when they announced the new A9 earlier this week. The new high end camera looks like it could be a genuine game changer for mirrorless cameras, and could cement Sony’s place at the number 2 spot, if not push it to number 1. I have been using Sony cameras on and off for the past few years, and I was eagerly waiting to see what this new high end alpha might entail. The camera is exciting in and of itself, but whats more exciting is Sony’s approach to the camera market. Let me explain.

As you have probably figured out by now if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I really love the Cherry Blossom season. There is something so beautiful and magical about the pink petaled flowers and their fleeting lifespan that is special to watch every year. I had been tracking the progress of the blossom from the first buds appearing on the bare branches, to the final few days as the flowers begin to fall.

A little while ago I posted a quick tip for Lightroom, where I showed you the way to adjust the brightness of an image using the curves tool. I was using the curves adjustment, as I wanted to make the distinction between a brightness adjustment and an exposure adjustment. In Capture One, if you want to make a brightness adjustment, rather than an exposure change, there are actually 4 different ways that you can do this. 

Over on my Store Blog, I have another sort of behind the scenes post describing how I use some of my presets in real world projects. For this article, I looked at how I used QuickLux 2 on my recent Street Photo Diary post. You can see the full details including some before and after examples on my Store Blog.

It’s been another month, and so it’s time for another issue of my Street Photo Diary series. Every time I do one of these I always end up having difficulty coming up with an intro for the piece. Having just watch “The Big Bang Theory” and Sheldon’s “Fun With Flags, behind the flag, a retrospective” I’m tempted to do a humorous take on that, but instead, something else occurred to me.

As spring is here once again, the Cherry Blossoms are blooming, and I just love the beauty of these fleeting flowers. On a beautiful sunny day I was in a local park here in Dublin and I was taking some images of the beautiful cherry trees there. I shot the photos using a Fuji X-Pro 2 and for post processing, I wanted to go with a nice film look, and so, after trying out a few different presets, I eventually settled on using my own FilmLUX set as my starting point.

A while ago I talked about switching from PhotoShelter to PhotoDeck for image sales as the former didn’t properly support EU vat. However, since then I’ve gone back to using Photoshelter. I’m not using it for sales though. I’m using it to manage my ever growing library of images. It may seem like an odd choice, and while it’s not perfect, It’s actually working out reasonably well.

The other day I posted a possible work around for an annoying Lightroom bug that had been frustrating me. When working with Sony ARW files, when you move from one image to another in the develop module, it can sometimes take seconds (sometimes 10 or more) before moving the sliders have any effect. The not really a solution, solution, that I offered was to wait till the Auto button enabled before trying to edit. Well, after a bit more research, I think I’ve found the source of this issue.

It was a beautiful spring day in Dublin today, so I went for a walk through the park to shoot the cherry blossoms with my Fuji X-Pro 2. I also wanted to try out something new, (well, technically old), that I got, so I filmed the whole thing. I acquired an old GoPro (first generation) so I decided to do a kind of Vlog style (kind of) video and I so I set about recording my progress with a GoPro mounted on the Camera’s hot shoe.

If you’ve been a long-time reader of my blog you’ll know that I’m a bit of a stickler for image quality. A lot of what I’ve written has been about maximising image quality and how to get the best possible results. For some of you, this may seem like an obvious thing to care about, and yet, for some reason there seems to be this movement in the photography community out to demonise caring about image quality.

It seems like only a short time ago that your choices for RAW conversion software, especially for Fuji shooters was somewhat limited. Now there seems to be a new release every month, and it’s great that there is a wealth of choice out there now. The latest piece of software to come across my desk is a new version of Picktorial. This new major update to version 3.0 brings full support for Fuji files, and it’s not using the Apple engine, but the company’s own. I’ve been using a beta for a little while and I’m intrigued, especially with the Fuji conversion.

This is a tip that I shouldn’t have to write. There has been some serious performance issues in the last few versions of Lightroom. It seems worse for  raw files from some cameras rather than others, but the issue seems reasonably widespread. While getting extremely frustrated at this bug the other day, I noticed something that may save you tearing your hair out.

A long time ago, in a version of Lightroom far far away…well, ok, a previous version…there were separate controls for brightness and exposure. Since then Adobe, apparently feeling that this was too confusing for the average user, decided to roll it into a single “exposure” control. However, brightness controls still exist in other applications, and while the exposure control is probably fine 90% of the time, there are still times when you may need to use a basic “brightness” adjustment in Lightroom. 

I’ve written a few times now about using Iridient’s X-Transfomer to pre-process Fuji X-Trans files for use in Lightroom. As I have previously mentioned, there are lots of different combinations of settings that you can use, all of which will give you differing results. In my previous post, I thought that I had found the best combination, which was to apply a low level of sharpening in both X-Transformer and Lightroom, but since then, after more experimenting, I’ve come up with a different way of using it.

I’m having a special deal on some of my Lightroom Presets this week. My 2016 Collection Bundle is on sale as is my Black and White Bundle.