I briefly covered the recent 7.3 version of Lightroom which was released during the week on the day it was released, and since then, I’ve had a chance to dig a little deeper. The update has delivered some substantial changes to the software, including some big under the hood changes.

Adobe has just released a major new version of Lightroom that includes some significant changes. The biggest and most notable one is the inclusion of new Raw and “Creative” profiles. However, there are also some major changes under the hood. Specifically, they have changed the file format that presets use. If you have any of my guides or presets, you may be wondering what happens.

For the latest episode of my ongoing “Street Photo Diary” series, I decided to set myself a little challenge and use one of my older cameras: a Canon 5D Mark1. The original Canon 5D, was the first consumer level full frame camera, and despite getting old, I can still get some good results from it.

I’ve been busy working on my latest set of Lightroom presets, and I wanted to give you a taste of what I’ve been creating. It’s actually been a while since I last made a set, so it’s good to get back to it. My inspiration for this was to come up with a way to creatively grade some photos I had taken in a forest I had visited a while ago. That’s where it started and it kind of snowballed from there. I have made a short video giving you a demo of the work in progress.

Last Saturday we decided to go for an impromptu drive into the countryside around Dublin and north County Wicklow. We headed for the picturesque area of Blessington, and the famous lakes, which are nestled in the Wicklow mountains. The lakes are actually artificial and were formed 50 years ago by the creation of a dam which flooded the valley. They now provide hydroelectric power and drinking water to parts of county Dublin.

With my Patreon channel operating for more than six months now, I’ve recently made a few changes to how I run it, and to the rewards schemes. After struggling for a while, it became obvious to me that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew with it, and I had also made it a bit too complicated. So, I’ve simplified it considerably, and I’m trying to get back to what I had originally intended to do with it, which was for it to be like a “directors commentary” on my main blog and various other photography activities.

A few years ago I was in Oslo, Norway, and I took lots of photos when I was there. There was one set of images that I really liked from that trip, but I never really used them. Recently when looking back over some old photographs, I realised that this particular sequence of shots would make a good photo essay, so I set about preparing them, and I decided to make a video of the process. 

Last week I was approached for an interview about one of my photography projects by a fairly prominent online newspaper here in Ireland. The piece they were interested in was a project I did charting the progress of the cross-city tram construction that took place in Dublin over the past few years. The request came out of the blue and took me a little by surprises, but they did a good article following the interview.

On1 have recently released a new version of their photo editing application, On1 raw, bringing the version number to 2018.1. I’ve covered this software in the past and I’ve been quite critical about it. So much so, that I really don’t want to keep being negative about it. The new version has loads of new features, and as I’ve covered lots of different RAW software in the past, I should really cover this too. But I don’t want to, And here’s why:

This may seem like something of an obtuse question at first, but bear with me and let me explain what I mean. When you take a photograph of something, what is the most important thing to you about that photograph? Is it the subject of the photo - the person, place or object that you captured? Our is it the photograph itself - the art of the image, the style of the photo, or the creative way that you captured it?

Whenever I set about editing an image or a whole shoot, I usually break the task down into two passes. First, I do any necessary corrections to the picture, and then I do more creative editing. I use this approach regardless of what software that I’m using, and by doing this, it makes it a bit easier to manage your editing process, and also to make multiple versions of an image. Let me explain a bit further.

In this Lightroom Quick Tip video, I sow you how to convert your Lightroom presets for use with Photoshop Camera Raw. It’s a fairly straightforward process and only takes a minute. 

Without a doubt, my all-time favourite TV show is Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Every time I re-watch the show, it reaffirms my belief, that for me, it is one of the best TV shows ever made. Aside from the story, the performance of the cast, and its optimistic viewpoint, what I most remember about my first time watching the series when it originally aired, was that it got me interested in cinematography for the first time. 

I’m starting a new series of Luminar QuickTips on my YouTube channel and I’ve just posted the first of these. In the video, I look at using the Sunrays filter to enhance an image that already has a sun in the shot. 

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing this piece for a little while now. I have a draft of it going back two years, and every time I try to write it, I stop, for fear of the inevitable backlash. You see, for me, while the internet has undoubtedly been a positive influence on photography as an art form, and as a way to help new and up and coming photographers, it can also be an overwhelmingly negative force.