I had this great plan to start the new year with a fresh blogging schedule, and a renewed energy. Of course that didn’t happen. It’s two weeks later and I’m only getting around to writing my “new year” post now. Like many a New Year’s resolutions, they crashed and burned on day two! But now that I have a moment, let me update you on a few things that have been happening, and some plans for the next little while.

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….

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t posted regularly in a little while, so I wanted to give you a quick update. I’ve been busy with client work, so I haven’t had time to write or blog for the past few weeks. So here is a quick update on what’s going on and what’s planned.

Last week I launched my latest set of presets for Lightroom, called StreetLux. The idea of StreetLux was to create a set of presets that worked to mimic the high contrast film look that is popular with some street photography enthusiasts. I had posted a few samples when I launched the set, but I wanted to get some more, so I went out specifically to shoot some.

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!

Last week I launched my latest in a series of guidebooks for Fuji shooters. This one focussed on using Jpegs, and how to shoot and process them to get the best results. It dealt with some of the quirks of Fuji’s in-camera options and so on. I was actually surprised at how successful it was, and I was actually afraid my store would crash on the first day, as the interest was so high. I want to really thank everyone who bought a copy as I really wasn’t expecting it to be so successful. For this who haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to give you a taste, and so here’s an edited excerpt from the guide about how Fuji’s Highlight and Shadow Tone options work…

My main computer is an ageing 2012 Mac Pro. At the time it was reasonably well specced, but lately, I have been really struggling with it, especially with newer versions of Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications. In particular, it has become increasingly difficult to run multiple applications at once, and with the most recent round of updates, I cool no longer run Lightroom and Photoshop simultaneously. 

I recently published a new photo essay over on my Streets of Dublin website, and I thought that I would share the story behind it here, as well as some behind the scenes information. The Idea came about by accident really. I was in the area taking pictures for something else, and I realised that this amazing looking building was nearing completion, and my wife and co-editor on the Streets of Dublin thought it would make an interesting story. 

I wanted to do a look back at the photos I took for my Streets of Dublin project in 2016. I typically keep a running collection of images that I mark as five stars during the year. Now that we’re at the end of the year, that’s accumulated quite a bit, and going through it to find the “best” shots for this post hasn’t been the easiest of tasks.