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
I recently came across a set of negatives that I took about a year ago, and I realised that I had never properly scanned them. This gave me the opportunity to record the process, something I had wanted to do for a while, but had never gotten around to it. So, in this video I show you the process of scanning film using a dedicated, if somewhat old, film scanner.
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!
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.
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.
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!
If you use Capture One, but find yourself tweaking the colours of your images a lot, then there’s actually a really useful feature in the software. You can create your own custom colour profile. This is sort of like being able to adjust the calibration like you can in Lightroom only it works in a different way.
I was up early the other day, and it was a lovely sunny, albeit cold May morning here in Dublin. I headed into the city with the intent of making a video I’d been planning for a little while. I wanted to do a “retro review” of the original Canon 5D, which I still own, and I’ve been shooting with on and off for 12 years or so. It was going really well too, that was until something broke inside my camera. That turned out to be the mirror. It fell off.
Lately, I’ve been getting a few emails from readers asking about the Sony A6000. In particular, people are interested in using the camera for street photography. I’ve shot street photos a lot with the A6000, and it’s one of my favourite cameras for street shooting. However, as I hadn’t shot this genre with it for a little while I thought I’d take it out for a spin, and record the proceedings as an episode of “Street Photo Diary.”
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”
