Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
It’s been my long-standing practice to use a “camera matching” profile in Lightroom whenever possible. Camera matching profiles are colour profiles that come with Lightroom, that attempt to make the colours of your raw file match the colours of your camera’s Jpeg output as closely as possible.
A few weeks ago I wanted to photograph something a little different, so we headed out to a place in North County Dublin where you can see Dublin Port from the far side, as well as watch the boats come and go. We timed the trip so that we would arrive as the sun begins to set, and I was only travelling light camera wise. I went equipped with the Sony A6000, with the only lens being the kit lens. I also had the Canon G7XII with me, which I had initially brought just to shoot video, but I ended up shooting stills with it too.
In this episode of “The Photo Geek Show” I take a look at behind the scenes of shooting one of my YouTube videos. I tried to shoot 3 videos at once, and things didn’t exactly go according to plan. I also look at how I edit and assemble the photos and video footage into a finished product!
White Balance is one of those controls that I think a lot of photographers don’t think about or don’t make use of enough. Many just leave it on automatic and don’t worry about it. Yet a poorly chosen white balance can probably affect your photos as much as an improper exposure, and when many people complain about certain cameras having “bad colour” in many cases this can be attributed to the white balance.
When I did a recent episode of my “Street Photo Diary” series of videos, in which I shot with the Sony A6000, I got a lot of questions about the lenses that I use. The two that I probably use the most when shooting street photography, str two Sigma Lenses, the 30mm and 19mm f/2.8. In this video, I go shooting with these lenses and give you a quick review as well as showcasing the process.
As much as I love shooting street photography, I often find myself wondering about the ethics of it. I generally shoot candid street photography, as I believe that this is a more representative form of the art, in my opinion. While there’s nothing wrong with taking photos of people in public, at least according to the law, I do sometimes question if it’s right or not.
If there has been one company more outspoken than any other on the subject of APS-C sensors vs Full Frame it has been Fujifilm. Because of the insistence of company executives that their X-Trans technology makes their smaller sensor superior to full frame, many fans of the company’s products have been active and vocal supporters of this viewpoint. It has reignited an argument that many had previously considered settled: the merits of full frame vs cropped sensor.
While there was nothing preventing you working with Fuji files on Lightroom Mobile before, now that the latest version supports presets and preset syncing, the workflow has gotten a lot easier. If you follow any of my techniques for sharpening and managing Fuji files, you can now apply many of these to Lightroom mobile as well. There are of course limitations still, but its come a long way in just one version.
Capture One is a complex application and I’m always discovering new things with it. It’s one of those things where there are often features or techniques hidden in plain sight. I’ve collected a series of tips below, which you may find useful. Some of these are from the point of view of someone moving from Lightroom, but they should be applicable to any Capture One user. You may, of course, know some or all of these already, but anyway, I hope this is useful.
I set myself a little project the other morning, and that was to venture around the streets of Dublin city looking for interesting colours I could see. It’s become something of a running gag now, that my “Street Photography” isn’t technically street photography. But then, the definition of street photography is so vague anyway, at this point it doesn’t really matter. It was an interesting exercise, and it was quite revealing to me.
The second episode of my new weekly YouTube series is now online on my channel. After thinking about it I've decided to call it "The PhotoGeek Show". Someone had suggested "PhotoGeek Weekly" but I know there is a good chance I won't get this out every week. Anyway, this week's episode came together nicely. I look at my collection of classic cameras, show you a nerdy Lightroom and Photoshop trick, and talk about B-Roll and Photo Books.
If you’re using Aurora HDR to create an HDR image, but want to do more work with it than you can manage in Aurora alone, then you can send the image to Luminar. Rather than saving it as a standard file and then manually opening it in Luminar, you can actually use Aurora HDR’s built-in plug-in system to send the image directly to Luminar.
When Adobe upgraded the preset system in Lightroom 7.3, they introduced a bug into the way the software handles gradient selective adjustments in presets. Previously, if you used a grad as part of a preset, it would maintain the correct position regardless of the image orientation. However, after 7.3, grads now rotate if you apply a preset containing a grad depending on whether the image is portrait or landscape.
A few weeks ago when I launched Alpine for Lightroom, a few people wrote to me asking for a Capture One version. After some work and experimentation, I’m happy to announce that I now have a version of Alpine for Capture One. So what is Alpine? In a nutshell, Alpine for Capture One is a set of “Styles” that is designed to give your RAW images a stylised look. The idea for Alpine was to work with images of forests and mountains, to give the “woodsman” style of effect that is popular certain outdoor magazines.
I’ve been plugging away at my YouTube channel for a while now, and I had this idea for something that I wanted to try, but it’s taken me some time to get it together. I have lots of different bits and pieces that I do, and I have a few different “series”, such as “Street Photo Diary”. Instead of all these disparate threads, I wanted to try and create one good video a week. With that in mind, here is the first episode of that new series. For the moment I’m calling it “The Photography Geek Show” although that may change. I’m open to suggestions!
Adobe today released a set of updates for the various versions of Lightroom. This includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and the various mobile versions. One of the key features in the CC version of Lightroom is something that people have been requesting for a long time, and that is the ability to sync presets across devices running Lightroom CC.
While Sony’s APS-C E-mount lineup is known for not exactly having an exciting lineup of lenses, people often forget that you can use full frame E-mount lenses on these cameras too. Having said that, many of Sony’s full-frame E-mount lenses are quite expensive and heavy or both. However, there are a few new third party lenses coming out that are designed for full frame but I can see actually working really well on cropped sensors too. One of those is the new 24mm Autofocus lens from Rokinon.
In the world of digital imaging, it's often easy to get overwhelmed by the number of images we create. I personally have hundreds of thousands of pictures, and managing them can be a real chore. It’s also very easy to import a set of images, go through them once or twice, maybe share a few and then never look at them again. I know I’m guilty of this, but It’s important to occasionally revisit your older photos.
