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 Editorial
I’ve been busy with a few ongoing projects at the moment and I wanted to provide you with a few updates that I thought you might be interested in. I’m working on a few interesting things here for the blog, and also a few new interesting products for my store, so stay tuned for that. In the mean time, here are a few updates that you might be interested in...
Adobe yesterday released a new update to Lightroom. This brings the release to 2015.7 for CC users or 6.7 for non creative cloud owners. Among the numerous bug fixes and new camera and lens support were a couple of new features. One in particular bears a bit of discussion. Apple has added the option to use Smart Previews instead of originals as a way to speed up Lightroom.
I've been running my own digital download store for a good few years now. I started by selling Aperture presets, and then moved to selling Lightroom presets and then ebooks. It's great that in this era the tools exist that allow you to easily create your own store and sell your products online. It's something that would have been difficult only a decade ago, but now it’s something that anyone can do. It is not without its downsides though. In the time that I've been running my store I've had a lot of ups and downs.
After much rumour and speculation (or deliberate leaks) Canon has finally officially announced the 5D Mark IV. The new camera is the latest version of the venerable 5D line which revolutionised the DSLR market when it was first released, being the first mainstream DSLR with a full frame sensor. The new 4th generation version has an improved 30mp sensor, shoots 4k and has built in WiFi and GPS.
I was a big fan of Mythbusters when it was on, and I'm a big fan of Adam Savage. I regularly watch/listen to his podcast on Tested.com: “Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project. I love Adam's insight into the creative process and as someone who has worked in the creative arts for many years, I know where he's coming from a lot of the time. He often puts words on experiences or feelings that I've had working as a creative in ways that I could not. One of the things that he's talked about several times on the podcast is something that I've experienced many times throughout my professional life, and he calls it "Imposter Syndrome"
With Photokina just around the corner, and with most of the major manufacturers probably going to announce new cameras, I’ve been thinking about what my ideal camera would be. Without getting into brand wars and camera maker loyalty, I am particularly keen to see what Nikon will announce. They’ve been on a roll lately with the D500 and the D5 and considering that the D810 and D750 starting to look a little old, an announcement might be on the cards.
An interesting topic came up for discussion recently between some colleagues. We were talking about how nice it would be if Lightroom let you sync projects between a laptop and a desktop, and someone suggested that you could just put your catalogue on dropbox and sync it that way. If you google this there are lots of tutorials for various ways to set this up, but in my opinion, while that might sound like a good idea or a simple solution, it's something that I personally would avoid doing, and here's why.
There's lots of advice out there about blogging, and how to grow your traffic. Much of it often seems very academic or even has the feeling that, if you follow it, it would look like you're trying to spam your readership. Even so, if you're running a blog there are things that are important to do to maintain and grow your readership. As someone who has been blogging for a long time now, I thought I'd share my personal experience of one of the most important things you can do, and that's to keep posting regularly.
It never ceases to amaze me the difference a good lens can make to your image quality. I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but until you've used some high end glass, you don't really know just how much of a difference it can make. There's a lot of misinformation out there on the internet (shocker) when it comes to what makes a good lens, or even the importance of good quality optics to begin with. One well known and somewhat infamous blogger, has even stated that the lens actually makes no difference in terms of image quality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I look forward to the sight every year. It's a fleeting moment, but worth the wait. The pink and white beauty of the cherry blossoms that burst forth every year, announcing spring to the world is one of my favourite sights. When the cherry blossoms bloom, the bleak months of winter are finally at an end, and this year more than ever, I've been eagerly anticipating the blooming of the cherry blossoms.
There are a lot of heated discussions in the the photography community when it comes to mirrorless cameras. For some, it's an "either or" situation. You are either a mirrorless shooter or your not. I began to think that the situation with mirrorless is very like the iPad (and tablets in general) market. Some people see iPads as the future of computing. I'm reminded of the comments the late Steve Jobs's made about the iPad and computing market after the iPad first launched. He made the analogy of iPads being like cars and computers being like trucks. While many people only need a car, he pointed out, there will always be people who need trucks. For me personally, this sums up how I feel about the camera market. Mirrorless cameras are kind of like cars in this analogy, or like iPads.
When Apple first released Aperture it was something of a revolution. It was the first application to be released which combined an asset management solution with raw processing software. It may be hard to imagine now but up till this point, the tasks of managing your images was separate form the process of developing raw files. While some people still work the old fashioned way, Aperture forever changed the way many photographers approach their workflow.
I want to apologise for the lack of updates this week. I've not had a very fun week. What started out as someone coughing on me in a line at the bank, turned into a cold, which I then thought was becoming the flu, ended up as a bad chest infection that had me taken to hospital by ambulance the other night with a fever and a ridiculously high heart rate. Special thanks to my Apple watch for the heads up on that one.
I've been using a defunct Pantone Huey Pro to calibrate my display, for pretty much as long as I can remember. While the device hasn't been officially supported for a while, it had continued to function until recently. Since El Capitan came out, the software hasn't been working properly, and my display has been slowly drifting. On top of that, somewhere along the way, the gamma got screwed up, which I didn't realise. So the upshot of this is that my screen was too bright, and so I was outputting my images too dark.
Late last week there was something of a blog storm over a video photographer Matt Granger posted about his experiences with Sony’s customer service. If you haven’t seen it already check it out. Basically he had a terrible time getting customer service for his professional Sony cameras. After he posted the video, many of those in the photographic community who also use Sony products chimed in with their own similar stories of Sony’s poor customer service. While I haven’t had to deal with Sony’s customer service here on for any of their Photography products, I too have heard the stories, and have had to deal with the company for other issues.
I recently read an interesting post on Medium about the advantages of side projects. In the case of the article I read, it was talking about web development, but it occurred to me that the same thing can be true of photography. Depending on your business model, a side project could actually be quite beneficial to you.
I recently wrote a post about some features that I'd love to see in an upcoming version of Apple's Photos for the Mac. I also have some ideas on photographer friendly features that I'd like to see on iOS at some point. Some of these I've wanted for a while and written about before, so I'm not so optimistic, but these are features I'd really like to see in iOS at some point. I've tried to keep these ideas to things that would be reasonable to implement, or in-keeping with what one could expect at the operating system level.
I normally try to keep the topics on this blog as positive as possible. I try not to court controversy by objecting to anything too strongly, but there’s something that’s been bothering me for a little while now, and it’s Photoshop. With the most recent update, Adobe made some significant changes to the Photoshop interface, and in my opinion, they’re not very nice.
