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
As you have probably figured out by now if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I really love the Cherry Blossom season. There is something so beautiful and magical about the pink petaled flowers and their fleeting lifespan that is special to watch every year. I had been tracking the progress of the blossom from the first buds appearing on the bare branches, to the final few days as the flowers begin to fall.
It was a beautiful spring day in Dublin today, so I went for a walk through the park to shoot the cherry blossoms with my Fuji X-Pro 2. I also wanted to try out something new, (well, technically old), that I got, so I filmed the whole thing. I acquired an old GoPro (first generation) so I decided to do a kind of Vlog style (kind of) video and I so I set about recording my progress with a GoPro mounted on the Camera’s hot shoe.
For me, the Intelligent Search features in Apple’s Photos app, or what Apple refers to as “Advanced computer vision”, was one of those things that gets announced and then most people promptly forget about. However, once you actually try it, it’s actually pretty impressive, and while not perfect, it shows where the technology is going.
In this video, which is a follow on from my street photography vlog video, I discuss editing the shoot. I take you through the whole process from import, through rating and then processing the images to final output. I try to discuss why I like certain images, and why some things work and others don’t.
I really want to start doing more video and in particular I want to do a series of vlog style videos. I’ve been putting it off out of fear, and general procrastination, but yesterday I finally got around to making my first attempt. I won’t call it a resounding success because a lot of things didn’t exactly go according to plan, but it turned out reasonably well all things considered. I consider this as a learning exercise. A beta version if you will.
I was recently working on some bracketed exposures that I shot while on a walk by the coast north of Dublin. It was a beautiful and moody day, but the light was pretty strong, and I was shooting with my D700, which hasn’t the greatest dynamic range. With that in mind, I shot multiple exposures with the aim of combining them later so as not to loose any detail in the highlights and shadows. I originally tried combining the exposures in Lightroom, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so instead I decided to use Aurora HDR.
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.
With most cameras that are released these days having video, it may seem like a pointless exercise to point out the benefits of having the feature. However, if you read the comments on reviews of new cameras (and you probably shouldn’t for your own mental health) there’s always someone who complains about the video functions, saying that they are a photographer and “real photographers” don’t care about video. Even if you don’t like shooting video, I think that there are times when it’s a real benefit to have video in your camera, and the other day I came across a perfect example.
I was walking through a local park here in Dublin the other day, and I loved how the low Autumn sun was creating these lovely patterns of Dappled light on the ground. In the shadows of the trees there were patches of sunshine that danced as the breeze blew the leaves. It was quite beautiful and relaxing, and as I had my trusty X-Pro 2 with me I decided that I would shoot some video as well as stills.
It was a beautiful sunny Autumn morning here in Dublin last Sunday, and so I set about doing something I had wanted to do for a while, but I had kept putting off for various reasons. When I saw the beautiful light, I decided to head out and shoot some video (semi-properly) on my Fuji X-Pro 2. I had shot some clips before, but I hadn’t set out to do a proper shoot. For this test, I wanted to try and shoot reasonably properly, so I took my tripod, and more importantly, a proper variable ND filter. While I had a few hiccups, for the most part I’m happy with what I shot.
Because we’re pretty terrible at looking after plants, and because everything we plant usually dies, we’ve been looking for ways to decorate our balcony without condemning some poor flowers to their untimely ends. So my wife came up with the ingenious idea of creating a garden out of windmills. I was sceptical at first, but now that I’ve seen the finished product, I’m really impressed.
Here's a little distraction for a rainy Friday. I was taking some photos in the Stephen's Green park in the centre of Dublin yesterday, and as I was lining up a different shot, I noticed some commotion in the lake behind me. There was a guy there feeding the seagulls, and they were getting quite frenetic. So I shot off a sequence on high speed with my D700.
As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I really love Autumn. I love the colours and I love the light, and I wanted to capture it in a different way this year, so as well as shooting lots of photos (more on that to come) I set out to shoot some video too. In the centre of Dublin city there is a famous park, called "St. Stephen's Green". It's one of my favourite places in the city. It's not a particularly big park, but it's a lovely combination of trees and walkways, and when viewed from certain angles, looks like you could be somewhere in the countryside, and not in the heart of a city.
After my first rather unprofessional test of the A6000 with the new XAVC codec last week, I set out to create a better video on Friday. This time I used my good Nikon 24-120 lens and a tripod. Unfortunately I still had a few issues, but they were entirely my own fault. Still, I think it's a nice result, and I was lucky as some interesting things happened while I was filming.
I've been a bit quiet, photographically speaking, over the last week or two. I've been busy working on some design jobs, so I haven't updated the site here as much as I would like. Anyway, as it's a beautiful spring day here in Dublin, here are some daffodil shots to celebrate the changing of the seasons.
I was coming back from a week in London on Saturday, and our flight was approaching Dublin at sunset. The view out the window of the plane was amazing with the sun just sitting above the clouds. As we began our descent it looked even more impressive, so I grabbed my iPhone and fired up the hyper lapse app, and recorded our descent through the clouds, and then down until we landed.
Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a bit of footage of Dublin City and I wanted to do something with it so I began putting this little video together a while ago.
