Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
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.
As much as I love shooting street photography, I often find myself wondering about the ethics of it. I generally shoot candid street photography, as I believe that this is a more representative form of the art, in my opinion. While there’s nothing wrong with taking photos of people in public, at least according to the law, I do sometimes question if it’s right or not.
If there has been one company more outspoken than any other on the subject of APS-C sensors vs Full Frame it has been Fujifilm. Because of the insistence of company executives that their X-Trans technology makes their smaller sensor superior to full frame, many fans of the company’s products have been active and vocal supporters of this viewpoint. It has reignited an argument that many had previously considered settled: the merits of full frame vs cropped sensor.
While there was nothing preventing you working with Fuji files on Lightroom Mobile before, now that the latest version supports presets and preset syncing, the workflow has gotten a lot easier. If you follow any of my techniques for sharpening and managing Fuji files, you can now apply many of these to Lightroom mobile as well. There are of course limitations still, but its come a long way in just one version.
Capture One is a complex application and I’m always discovering new things with it. It’s one of those things where there are often features or techniques hidden in plain sight. I’ve collected a series of tips below, which you may find useful. Some of these are from the point of view of someone moving from Lightroom, but they should be applicable to any Capture One user. You may, of course, know some or all of these already, but anyway, I hope this is useful.
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.
When Adobe upgraded the preset system in Lightroom 7.3, they introduced a bug into the way the software handles gradient selective adjustments in presets. Previously, if you used a grad as part of a preset, it would maintain the correct position regardless of the image orientation. However, after 7.3, grads now rotate if you apply a preset containing a grad depending on whether the image is portrait or landscape.
A few weeks ago when I launched Alpine for Lightroom, a few people wrote to me asking for a Capture One version. After some work and experimentation, I’m happy to announce that I now have a version of Alpine for Capture One. So what is Alpine? In a nutshell, Alpine for Capture One is a set of “Styles” that is designed to give your RAW images a stylised look. The idea for Alpine was to work with images of forests and mountains, to give the “woodsman” style of effect that is popular certain outdoor magazines.
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!
Adobe today released a set of updates for the various versions of Lightroom. This includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and the various mobile versions. One of the key features in the CC version of Lightroom is something that people have been requesting for a long time, and that is the ability to sync presets across devices running Lightroom CC.
While Sony’s APS-C E-mount lineup is known for not exactly having an exciting lineup of lenses, people often forget that you can use full frame E-mount lenses on these cameras too. Having said that, many of Sony’s full-frame E-mount lenses are quite expensive and heavy or both. However, there are a few new third party lenses coming out that are designed for full frame but I can see actually working really well on cropped sensors too. One of those is the new 24mm Autofocus lens from Rokinon.
In the world of digital imaging, it's often easy to get overwhelmed by the number of images we create. I personally have hundreds of thousands of pictures, and managing them can be a real chore. It’s also very easy to import a set of images, go through them once or twice, maybe share a few and then never look at them again. I know I’m guilty of this, but It’s important to occasionally revisit your older photos.
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’ve come across a few interesting tidbits-bits of information over the past week that I wanted to share, but none of it was long enough to put into individual blog posts, so I thought I’d compile it all into a singe compilation. This is pretty random, but anyway.
A while ago I wrote about my current workflow for processing Fuji files, and how I’ve simplified it recently. However, it was important to note that the way I work isn’t necessarily for everyone. A lot of it comes down to personal choice. I still get asked all the time by people as to which application they should use, and this is a tough question to answer because so much of it is down to personal choice. With that in mind, I wanted to see if I could break it down and come up with some methodology for helping people decide. So here is what I’ve come up with. It's not perfect, and as always, my best advice is to try different applications and see what works best for you.
There wasn't much announced in yesterday’s WWDC keynote targeted at photographers, apart from some new search suggestions and ways to share in Photos. There was, however, a couple of features in the MacOS finder that could actually prove quite useful. Those are the new gallery view and EXIF information in the finder.
