I’ve a few random bits of news and updates for what is turning out to be a lovely sunny Friday here in Dublin. I’ve been busy sorting out my library with the aim of getting much of it online so it’s been a quiet week on the blog, but in the mean time I’ve noticed a couple of photography related pieces of news that you may be interested in.

Mavericks Update

First of all, a quick tip for any fellow Mac users out there. If you’re on Mavericks and have just updated to 10.9.3, Apple have for, whatever reason decided to hide the Users folder, but only for some users. I know many people have reason to access this folder, whether it’s to get files from another user or to access items in the shared folder. The thing is, this doesn’t seem to be hidden on my system, so it is perhaps dependent on the configuration, or maybe it’s just a bug. Anyway, if your user folder has seemingly disappeared, it’s the 10.9.3 update.

Luckily it’s fairly easy to get back. Macworld has instructions on how to unhide it. Alternatively if you need to get to the folder you can use the “Go” menu in the finder and just type “Users”. It’s unclear at this stage whether this is a feature or a bug, but if it happens to you this is how to fix it.

[UPDATE] It turns out that it was an iTunes update that was causing the problem and a fix has now been released!

Creative Cloud Outage

It’s been widely reported that Adobe have suffered a creative cloud outage over the last day or so. Supposedly they are working on it. It shouldn’t affect your desktop apps unless they happen to try and check in during this time, but you won’t be able to install anything new. Hopefully by the time you read this the issue will have been resolved.

It doesn’t do Adobe’s pushing of the subscription model any favours though. I know everyone has problems now and then, but this issue just confirms many peoples fears about the switch to an all subscription model with creative cloud. Luckily there have been work arounds for most of the issues and people shouldn’t have lost valuable work time over this, but if they had, the damage could have been pretty extensive. Could you imagine if a whole design department at a magazine for example weren’t able to use InDesign or Photoshop, even for a day? The system is supposed to be engineered so that doesn’t happen but some people were having problems running some applications because Creative Cloud was trying to check their accounts at that time. I’ve been fairly supportive of Creative Cloud, but this is a pretty big scare for people, many of whom were skeptical in the first place.

Monolith update

I’ve had a great response to my “Monolith” set of black and white Lightroom presets. A couple of customers have sent me examples of Monolith in use on their photos:

Here’s a set on Flickr from Rob Davis.

Here’s a blog post from Will Katerberg featuring some images from Florida graded with Monolith. I love the rocket shot by the way!

If you’ve used any of my presets and would like me to share a link to your work drop me an email with a link and a brief description.

I’m working on some video tutorials too to help you get the best out of the presets and how to use them as a starting point and modify them for your own purposes. Stay tuned.

Inspiration

I’m always on the lookout for new photography related blogs and websites for inspiration. Here are a couple of recent discoveries:

Eat Sleep Repeat is a great photoblog by Australian photographer Matt Silverlock, who was recently featured on VSCO’s Journal blog

Feast Magazine. I discovered this magazine in my local newsagent recently. It’s an Irish foodie magazine, but what drew me to it is that there is some beautiful Photography in it. If you’re in Ireland, have a look in your local newsagent and see if you can pick up a copy. A digital version is available on iTunes but not sure if it’s available outside of Ireland.

Finally, don’t forget to check out my new “Photos Only” blog. The idea is to just have a blog that’s all about the Photography and a little less about the gear and post production talk, which shall remain here!

Please Help Support This Site

I am a fine art Photographer and do not shoot commercially. If you like what you read here and want to help support the site, then please consider buying a Print, checking out my new Lightroom Presets