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 News
My next eBook guide is almost ready to go. I’ve been working on this for what seems like forever, and it’s now in the final stages of production. I wanted to do something similar to my previous Fuji X-Series guides, but for the Sony A6000. I’ve written a lot about the A6000 over the past few years and its a great little camera.
Before I started this blog, I used to write about Apple and technology on various blogs. It was in a typical old fashioned blog style, where it was a mix of links to news articles that I found interesting, with some commentary added by me on things that I found to be comment worthy. I stopped doing it a long time ago, but I’ve missed the experience. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about doing something in this kind of format about photography.
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.
In keeping with my earlier post today, I wanted to share some of the other projects I'm working on. Specifically in terms of the e-book guides I've published recently. I currently have two guides out for Processing X-Trans files in Lightroom and Capture One respectively. I'm currently working on a third guide as well as some updates.
One of the biggest complaints that users of Sony’s Aps-c format E-mount cameras such as the A6000 have is the lack of good, inexpensive prime lenses. In my recent long term review of the A6000 I made this point, and I wished for an equivalent to Fuji’s excellent 35mm f/1.4. In fact, the lack of a good fast native prime for the format has been a real issue. Fortunately Sigma has just addressed that gap in the lineup with the launch of the new 30mm f/1.4mm prime lens for e-mount (and m43).
Sigma today announced a very interesting new product. The inspiringly named MC-11 is a lens mount adaptor designed specifically to adapt Sigma's lenses for use on Sony e-mount systems. It comes in either canon EF or Sigma SA versions for use with corresponding sigma lenses.
This past year has been kind of a weird one for me. I achieved a lot of what I had planned for this site, and for my photography career, but I also had some setbacks, both personally and work wise. In this post I'll take a look back at 2015, and talk about some plans and goals for the year ahead.
I was fortunate to have some of my Photography picked up on by editors, and used in two different fairly major publications this year. One was a book, and the other was use for an international advertising campaign.
I didn't get to cover this at the time, but there were some issues with Capture One and El Capitan when it was released. Apparently the issue was to do with the Open CL support and it caused crashing. there was a work around which would temporarily disable Open CL support, but Phase One has now released an update which supposedly fixes the issue. If you had been holding off on updating to El Capitan because of this, then it's good to know that there is now an updated version which addresses the bug. You can get the updated version by using the "Check for Updates..." function in the Capture One menu.
Apple rolled out an update for Yosemite yesterday, and part of that update featured a minor update to Photos for Mac. This was primarily a bug fix release, but one of the improvements listed is more reliable syncing. I’ve talked about in the past briefly about the issues that I’ve been having with syncing on Photos, namely that it stops intermittently and you have to re-start the application or the iOS photos app.
I'm a big fan of Sony Products, and anyone who follows this blog knows that I've a soft spot for their cameras. I currently have an A6000 and I've previously shot with a Nex 7. I've also been eagerly following the developments of the A7 line with great interest. I've said it before, but Sony are one of the few companies really innovating in the imaging space. Not only are their sensors used by pretty much every other major company now, but they're constantly pushing the envelope in the camera market. From the RX1 which brought a superb full frame sensor to the compact camera form factor, to the A7 Line which made full frame really affordable and small. The A7 line certainly isn't perfect, but with the recently announced A7 R Mark II Sony are getting pretty close to it.
As I’m sure any iPhone, iPad or Mac owner out there knows, Apple held its annual WWDC conference yesterday. Among the many things it showed off was the next version of OS X, called El Capitan, which will focus on performance and user interface improvements. While some highlights were revealed at the show, the presentation didn’t show all the features, and one of those that didn’t make the keynote was an update to Photos for the Mac.
Spring is normally a quiet time for me with design work, but this year, I've been swamped, so my photography blog has taken a bit of a back seat. I want to do both, but unfortunately I just haven't been keeping up. I'm in the process of re-designing my long idle design portfolio and website too, so when I keep mentioning the design work I'm doing, I'll finally be able to refer you to what I'm talking about. I'm actually working on some interesting projects, but I can't talk about them now.
Anyway, I haven't been totally abandoning the photography side of things. I've been doing some bits and pieces that you may find of interest.
I received an interesting email tonight from Apple regarding Aperture which it seems is being sent out to all registered Aperture customers. The text of the email is as follows...
Yesterday on February 19th, Adobe Photoshop celebrated its 25th birthday. It’s hard to believe that 25 years ago the first version of the venerable photo manipulation software was launched.
While it probably doesn't get the attention that other important innovations of the late 20th century get, such as the personal computer, Photoshop is still one of the most influential inventions of the time. When you think about how much of the visual world we live in today has been influenced by computer graphics in one way or another, from advertising to movies, and much of that can be traced back to Photoshop.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about what the then rumoured 5K iMac would mean that for photographers, and how you would now be pixel peeping on such a display even just looking at images. It was sort of a tongue in cheek piece, but now that the Retina iMac is real, I thought it would be important to have another look at the implications of a 5k display for photographers. If you're considering one of these new iMacs (I know I am !) then there are a few things you may want to ponder first!
