Fujifilm has just released its long rumoured, and much teased “half” digital camera, and it has, to put it mildly, decided opinions. The camera, which looks like a tiny X100 series, is an homage to half frame film cameras of old, with a 1.0 type sensor mounted vertically and a vertical screen on the back. Fuji has also designed the software of the camera to mimic film as much as possible, even including a film mode. When activated, this mode doesn’t let you see what you’re capturing it until you reach the end of the roll and “develop” it in the companion camera app. It’s either a nice nod to nostalgia or a gimmick, depending on who you ask. But the one thing Fuji really, really wants you to know is that this camera is “Fun”.

When PureRAW 5 was announced a couple of weeks ago, I had only briefly tried it and the initial release had an annoying bug in it, so I wasn’t able to test it properly. However, since that was quickly fixed, I have been trying it out properly to judge how much of an improvement it is over previous iterations. In particular, I have been looking at two main areas. Firstly, how good is the new X-Trans specific mode and secondly, does Deep Prime 3 address some of the issues of the previous version on non X-Trans images. 

Last week Capture One (the company) held an event which they had been hyping up for a few weeks to launch the latest version of Capture One (the software) as well as giving an update on the company’s direction. At least that’s how they billed it. They had been selling it pretty hard in the emails that they had been sending out to customers, but in the end, the reality didn’t match the hype. But there was one important fix that wasn’t mentioned in the event…

DxO has released Nik Collection 8, bringing new Photoshop masking features, a redesigned plugin panel, and updates to Silver Efex and Color Efex. It’s an update that adds more flexibility for those using the suite within Photoshop. I’ve gone through the key new features and pricing details in this post.

Adobe has just rolled out the latest version of Lightroom, introducing an exciting new AI-powered feature: Landscape Masking. This addition promises to revolutionize how photographers and editors work with landscape images by allowing not only the selection of entire landscapes but also individual elements within them. In this post, I’ll share my hands-on experience with this new tool, highlighting its strengths, quirks, and potential.

The latest version of Pure Raw is now available from DXO. The software, DxO Pure Raw 5, was announced about a month ago at the photo plus show, and it features new versions of the companies Deep Prime AI-based processing and denoising algorithms. It also features some interface changes and some much requested workflow improvements.

A few weeks ago I got to spend some time in Berlin, and so of course I took the opportunity to try and photograph the city whenever I had a chance. While I actually had a bunch of different cameras with me, I ended up taking quite a lot of photos on my iPhone. I will cover the other photos I got with both my Fujifilm and Canon cameras in a later post, but for now, I thought I would collect all the iPhone ones into a single story!

I haven’t been using Capture One as much over the past year, and it’s for one simple reason. The lens I have with my Canon R6II isn’t supported by the software. Now, I could get into how ridiculous that is as the lens in question, the Canon RF24-105 f4-7.1 is a kit lens on several of Canon’s Cameras, but instead I’ll focus on a solution. Based on some of the comments on Reddit and Capture One’s own forums (before they inexplicably closed them) I know this isn’t the only mainstream lens not supported. So if you still want to use Capture One, but you need lens corrections, there is a solution. It’s not ideal, but it does solve the problem. Enter DXO Pure Raw.

I think I can safely say that the internet and social media has made April Fool’s Day one of the most hated days of the year. Every time it rolls around, we have to put up with a deluge of stupid jokes and a few that are good enough to be fooled by. Then there’s the actual news that you just assume is a Jobe because it’s so out there. Yes, a fun time is had by all. Not. I only partook in this ritual once and something happened today that made me think of it, but more on that in a minute. It was years ago, and it was on my old “Aperture Blog” blog. It was towards the end of Aperture before it was discontinued, and I put out a fake screenshot that I made in Photoshop and claimed that Apple had finally released Aperture X. I didn’t think anyone would fall for it as it was so obviously a joke. I was wrong.

Ever since it was released in the Asian markets a few weeks ago, I’ve been quietly obsessing over Canon’s new Powershot V1 compact camera. The original launch was somewhat muted here in the west, with no-one really getting their hands on it apart from a few Japanese photographers and filmmakers. Now that Canon has officially launched it worldwide, we’re getting more details and coverage, and I have to say, I really like what I see.

I was scrolling through instagram the other day - as one does - when I realised, after scrolling for several minutes, that I hadn’t seen a single photograph from an actual photographer. Sure, there were a few still images, but they were either from celebrities, or part of news stories. The majority of what I was seeing was reels and ads. It seems Meta really, really wants to turn Instagram into TikTok. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the worst of both worlds.

I had all these plans for a series of posts on the blog last week, and even a video I wanted to shoot, but instead I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time chasing down a bizarre Mac bug. It seems to have resolved, but the cause still eludes me. It started with a Lightroom crash, and ended up leading to a complete puzzle that plagued both my Mac Studio and my MacBook Pro. It involved several calls to Apple and even baffled them. This might not sound like a riveting read, but it’s actually a curious tale and I learned a few things along the way.

Lough Ennel in Co. Westmeath is a pretty unassuming lake in the Irish Midlands. It’s not particularly large by international standards, and if you were to ask the average person on the street here in Ireland, they’d probably tell you they’ve never heard of it. But recently it’s become somewhat famous because of a natural phenomenon that occurs there every evening during winter. A spectacular starling murmuration.

I recently came across an iOS camera app called 65×24, and I have to say—I'm loving it. It is designed for capturing images in the 65:24 aspect ratio, reminiscent of the legendary Hasselblad XPan and Fujifilm TX-1 film cameras. It also has a nice minimalist interface, that I really like.

I had been quite looking forward to our trip to Switzerland. I had never been to the country before and was pretty excited about the adventure. Our journey, while not specifically for photography, had the promise of lots of photo potential, but unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. We travelled to a little town outside of Lake Zurich and on to the City of Geneva, also on a lake!

I had done a bit of research before travelling, and both spots looked beautiful and scenic. What I didn’t realise though, was that apparently at this time of the year, both locations are frequently covered in low cloud. Luckily, we still got some hours of sunshine, and I was able to see some shots of the amazing scenery, but the low cloud and bitter cold had other ideas.