Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Video
In this second episode of my new travel and photography vlog, I spent a few days in London. It was actually two separate short trips, and I took the opportunity to do some street photography on the streets of London, as well as relaxing and enjoying the unseasonably good weather of last week.
I’ve started a new series of videos on my Youtube channel, which I’m pretty proud of, covering my travel photography. I’m currently on the road with a few stops across different cities and towns in Europe, so I thought I would cover the trip with a series of Vlog style videos. The first is set in the beautiful city of Cambridge in the UK.
Perhaps it is the designer in me, but I love capturing images of details, whether it’s graffiti, street art, quirky objects, or simply bold colours and textures. Dublin city is full of these sights. I recently set out on a photo walk/shoot to capture a set of this kind of imagery for my Streets of Dublin project, and I decided to record the process of processing these when I got back to the computer.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, I posted a collection of photos that I took around the local area following a rare snowfall here in Dublin. When I was shooting those, I had also filmed my progress with a GoPro mounted in the Camera’s hot-shoe. After a day of editing, I cut down the 50 minutes of footage into a video, and it’s the start of a new series I’m planning to do on my YouTube channel: “Photo Walk Diary”.
It was a lovely sunny day in Dublin the other day, and it was surprisingly warm after a long cold spell. I grabbed my cameras and headed out to do some street and cityscape photography in the city. As well as trying to get some new street photography, I also wanted to shoot another episode of “Street Photo Diary”
They say the best way to learn is by making mistakes. Well, if that’s true, then I learned a lot making this video. I was in two minds whether to even share it or not, but in the end I was convinced to put it up, regardless. The video itself isn’t too bad, but I made some mistakes when shooting that I’m kind of embarrassed about. So here’s what happened…
When Lightroom first came out, one of the biggest complaints that people had, was that the colours would change when importing RAW files. This led to the inclusion of colour profiles, designed to mimic a camera’s various picture modes, and this seems to address the problem. However, as time has gone by and Lightroom has supported more and more cameras, the quality and accuracy of the included colour profiles have started to vary significantly. If you find that, even with selecting a colour profile that matches what you shot in camera, the colours are still quite a bit off, then this trick may help you resolve the problem.
One of the bad habits that I’ve found myself doing a lot over the past few years, is being a bit lazy when it comes to post production. Even though I use a lot of different applications, I still find that I have gotten into this mental head space of always trying to do everything in the one application. This wasn’t always the case though. I used to work across multiple applications, usually starting in Lightroom, and then using Photoshop and maybe some plug-ins.
I’m happy to introduce my first new digital product of 2018, and something that I’ve been working on for quite some time. Today I’m launching a new set of LUTs based on my “Film Candy” series of Lightroom presets. This set of 75 LUTs contains looks from both Film candy 1 and 2 and have been designed to be used in popular video applications as well as stills software such as Luminar 2018 and Photoshop.
As mentioned in several previous posts, I’ve been planning to do some more vlogging and videos, and I’ve wanted to get a small and unobtrusive camera for that purpose. I’ve been trying out several options, and so I used a christmas gift voucher haul to splash out on a new one. I settled on the Canon G7X Mark II. It’s a small, 1inch sensor compact camera, that does good video, and it has a flip over screen for self monitoring.
Since my initial testing of the X-Pro2 in 4K the other day, I’ve had a chance to do a little bit more shooting, and to do a comparison of the various film simulation modes. I’ve put together a compilation of clips of the same scene, using the various film simulation modes, and these are all ungraded and straight from the camera.
With the release of firmware 4.0, the Fuji X-Pro 2 now supports 4K video. I did some quick testing, recording some footage in some local parks. There is a mix of hand held and tripod. All was shot using ProNeg Standard as the film profile. There was some very light colour correction done in Final Cut Pro as well as a custom profile to give the footage a slight grade, but this was kept to a minimum. I didn’t stabilise or adjust the geometry of any footage, so as not to affect the detail.
For a while now, I’ve been running a series of posts here on this blog called “Street Photo Diary”. I’ve also been practicing and testing various setups to allow me to produce “Vlog” style videos. After much testing and messing up, I have finally come up with a reasonable setup and idea, and that is to make a video version of my “Street Photo Diary” series. And so, a new monthly (for now) video series is born, also called “Street Photo Diary” !
I was having an impromptu photowalk the other day and I decided to record my progress with a GoPro mounted to the camera’s hot-shoe. This is the result! I started out with the intent of doing some street photography, but I ended up walking around a local park, because the Autumn colours were so nice, and the light was just right too.
I’ve been talking about working with Fuji Jpeg files a lot recently, and I wanted to show one way in which I regularly work with them, and that is to use Apple’s Photos application. So, in this video, I take a look at how I go about editing Fuji Jpeg files in Apple’s Photos Application on the mac.
