I feel like this blog has turned into a long series of me apologising for not updating the blog. In some sense it’s almost become comedic, and if it wasn’t such a pain from my point of view I’d be laughing more (although I’m doing my best to try and see the funny side). I’ve had a crazy couple of months. So much so that even though it’s nearly March as I write this, it still feels like early January. I keep thinking Christmas was last week, not two months ago. So what’s been happening? Well, a bit of a rollercoaster to be honest.

In this post, I express my frustration with Capture One (the company, not the software), regarding recently announced changes to their licensing model for perpetual licences that will take effect in 2023. I express disappointment with this change, as I feel that it makes perpetual licences unattractive and forces customers to switch to a subscription, which I previously criticised for being overpriced. I also feel that the company's timing of the announcement, after the upgrade cycle for Capture One 23 had ended, left some customers feeling duped.

DxO has just released a new batch of Optics Modules. This latest release includes 1,693 new modules, providing unparalleled corrections for a variety of popular camera models and lenses. Some of the camera models that are now supported by these new Optics Modules include the Canon EOS R6 Mark II, the Fujifilm X-T5, and the Sony A7R V

With the new year already begun I thought I’d take a brief pause to look back on the last year in terms of photography. Photographically speaking, 2022 was a difficult year for me. I didn’t take nearly as many photographs as I would have liked, but I ended up taking quite a bit of landscape photography, a genre of which I haven’t really done a lot. Check out this post to see a review of some of my favourite photos and photographic exploits from last year.

Just a quick note to update you on some updates from DXO labs. They have announced a special discount for the holidays and also the addition of new DxO Optics Modules for the company’s software range, and the release of Photo Lab 6.1

There’s an old axiom about never telling people your plans publicly until they’re set in stone, and I recently made that mistake when I shared a blog post a little while ago about what I had planned for this website. I had mentioned that I wasn’t happy with Squarespace, and that I was planning to move back to WordPress. Well, you may have noticed that nothing has actually happened….

Just a quick note to let you know that DXO labs are offering up to 50% off on the company’s photography software for Black Friday. The offer started yesterday and runs until November 21, 2022, and finishes at 11.59 pm local time on Monday, November 28, 2022. Here’s what’s available in the sale (from the press release)

As the last vestiges of summer have now long faded away, my favourite time of the year for photography has come. I love Autumn, and indeed winter, for shooting street photography, because of the light. The low sun here in Ireland creates a beautiful golden character to the light and as the season turns from Autumn to Winter, and the sun gets lower, you get beautiful long deep shadows.

Capture One has today announced the release of Capture One 23. The new release features improvements to importing, a new smart adjustments feature, the ability to save layers in styles, and fixes a long-standing limitation of variants. Capture One 23 also makes a limited version of Capture One live available for everyone.

I recently set about testing my new(ish) Sony 16-70 mm lens out for street photography, and I decided to film it for another episode of Street Photo Diary. I was also trying out a new GoPro to film the POV shots. I had previously used an old GoPro Hero Session to do these, but the quality wasn’t great and the battery, which can’t be replaced, would only last about a half an hour (after a few years of use).

In this video I show you a quick tip on how to avoid one go the most annoying problems with Lightroom’s processing engine: Clarity Halos. That is the issue of dark or bright halos or blurry shadows you get when you use too high a clarity setting on a high contrast image.

Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom Classic version 12 along with the corresponding versions of Lightroom Desktop, and Photoshop Camera Raw. All of these feature some significant improvements to masking and other new features. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m only going to talk about Lightroom Classic.

DXO today announced new a new version of the company’s flagship Raw editing Software: DXO Photo Lab, as well as a new update to the company’s lens and distortion correction application, DXO Viewpoint.

I haven’t really been taking that many photos over the past few months for various reasons, which has been a bit frustrating for me. I do have a little collection that has been slowly gathering over the past few months, and so it’s time to resurrect a long-running series, that I used to do ages ago: “Random Acts of Photography”.

I wanted to get a more flexible lens option for my mirrorless cameras, as I’m kind of stuck with primes apart from the Fuji 18-55mm. Which is fine for certain types of photography, but not ideal when you want flexibility. I really wanted to get the 16-80 Fujifilm lens, but you just can’t get it anywhere right now, especially here in Ireland. It’s been on the waiting list at most of the stores in Dublin, and you can’t even get it on Amazon. The other option I have been considering is the Sony equivalent, which is the 16-70 f4 Zeiss to use on my A6000. Recently, I saw that my local camera store had this lens second hand at a great price, and so I went in to check it out.