I’m starting a new series here on the blog, where I discuss my sources of inspiration. These are the things, and people that have inspired me over the years, both photographically and otherwise. Today I want to discuss the work of the great Japanese master Katsushika Hokusai. 

Quicktime is one of those things that people love or hate. Whatever your feelings on it are, it does do one thing really well, and that provides a way of allowing any application to open any movie file, so long as they have the right codec installed. Instead of an application having to directly support multiple video formats, they can just support QuickTime, and then if there’s a codec for the format installed, they can read that format. Which got me thinking, we really need something similar for images.

There’s an issue that can occur with Fuji cameras when you go to charge the battery. The light on the charger flashes, and instead of charging the battery, it will drain it completely. I’ve had this problem a couple of times now, and at first, I thought there was something wrong with my battery, but it turns out that it’s a fairly common issue with the charger. I’ve googled it and researched the problem, and while it’s fairly well known, as is typical with such things, there’s a wide range of conflicting opinions as to the cause and solution. So here’s what I found works for me…

While Fuji no doubt has a great range of lenses, and it certainly has some high-quality Primes, there are a couple of holes in its lineup still, in my opinion. There is one lens, that is very popular on some other systems, and it’s the lens I miss the most from when I had it for my Canon 5d. For me, it’s the ideal walk around focal length, and that is a 24-105mm equivalent. For a Fuji X-series system, that would be a 16-70mm.

One of the key new features of Lightroom 7.3 and the corresponding Photoshop release, was the addition of creative profiles. If you’re not familiar with these, they are sort of a cross between presets and LUTS, and can be applied to both RAW and JPEG images (and of course tiff, and psd etc). You may be wondering how to create these new profiles. Well, it’s actually pretty easy, but you need to use photoshop. What follows is a basic guide. I will do a more in-depth version in a future post which goes into the more technical details.

I was up early the other day, and it was a lovely sunny, albeit cold May morning here in Dublin. I headed into the city with the intent of making a video I’d been planning for a little while. I wanted to do a “retro review” of the original Canon 5D, which I still own, and I’ve been shooting with on and off for 12 years or so. It was going really well too, that was until something broke inside my camera. That turned out to be the mirror. It fell off.

I’ve been building up a collection of Styles in Capture One for some time, and I originally had the intention of releasing hem as a styles pack, but I was never really happy with them as a complete pack. However, I’ve developed quite a few over the years, and they’re just sitting here on my computer, so I thought I’d share them anyway.

I’m pleased to announce that my latest set of Lightroom presets are now finally available. I had previewed these a while ago, with the intention of releasing them shortly thereafter, but then Adobe went and changed the preset format, so I had to delay the launch until I made sure everything was working ok. The advantage of the delay is that the set is now compatible with both Photoshop and Lightroom, and I’ve also included 5 creative profiles too. So without further ado, introducing Alpine for Lightroom and Photoshop.

When Skylum released the latest version of Luminar last month it had some significant improvements to the RAW processing engine. This included some much-needed features such as a significant speed increase and automatic lens corrections. I wanted to see how well it could now be used as a RAW processor for Fuji files, and so I put it through its paces and came up with some basic workflows. 

Lately, I’ve been getting a few emails from readers asking about the Sony A6000. In particular, people are interested in using the camera for street photography. I’ve shot street photos a lot with the A6000, and it’s one of my favourite cameras for street shooting. However, as I hadn’t shot this genre with it for a little while I thought I’d take it out for a spin, and record the proceedings as an episode of “Street Photo Diary.”

Over the years I’ve covered a lot of different applications and ways of working with Fuji raw files. During the time I’ve been shooting Fuji cameras, I’ve changed and honed the way I edit and process images, and while I continue to do so, I’ve started simplifying things considerably. Whereas before I worked with many different applications, I’m now pretty much just using a few.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new iPad. In fact, it’s been a while since I had an iPad that was actually usable. I hadn’t upgraded since the iPad 3 as I had nothing but trouble with that model, and it kind of put me off. But with the numerous apps coming out on iOS for photographers, I was starting to feel a little left out. I had been considering an iPad Pro, but I just couldn’t afford it. So when Apple announced the new 6th generation iPad with Apple Pencil support, I decided it was finally time.

In the past, I haven’t really covered the notion of using X-Transformer converted Fuji raw files with Capture One, because I didn’t really see the need. Capture One does a pretty good job on its own of converting Fuji RAW files, so I didn’t really see the point of going through the process of using X-transformer to convert the images first. However, I recently came across a situation where you may want to use X-Transformed DNG files, which I hadn’t thought of before, but now it seems obvious. 

I was recently back in one of my regular overseas haunts, the beautiful German town of Heppenheim. I’ve been there several times before now, and you can find some of those previous visits documented on my blog. The sleepy little German town is partly modern, but also partly medieval, and that is its real charm. In this post you can see some of the photos that I took while there.

I've finally finished editing the final part (final, for now!) of my Travel Vlog series and it's now online on my YouTube channel. In this episode, I go to the little town of Heppenheim in Germany to enjoy a few days in the beautiful countryside, and to photograph the gorgeous medieval town and its surroundings.