Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
It was a bank holiday weekend here in Dublin this weekend, and as is traditional at the start of August, many people were away on holidays. The result of this is that the city was unusually quiet. I had headed out to shoot an episode of my “Street Photo Diary” companion video series and while I normally complain about how busy it is, for once it was nearly too quiet.
Despite the fact that Fuji’s X-Trans cameras have been out for several years now, and despite the fact that the issues with Lightroom are well known, there is still a surprising amount of misinformation being spread about this. What’s worse is that some of it comes from what you would think would be reliable sources. One of the most confusing issues surrounds what people call “worm artefacts”. Here is my attempt to set the record straight.
I recently posted a video to my YouTube channel about processing some Sony A6000 images in Capture One. In the video I mentioned some sharpening and noise reduction presets that I use. These should work with any Sony RAW file, so even those from the Sony A7 series or the A9. You can find links to download in this post, as well as the video itself.
While we see a renaissance of sorts when it comes to photo editing software, in my opinion, the management side has taken a back seat. If you look at many of the recent developments across newer and updated applications, most of the development has been on the image editing side. Lightroom, for example, has seen only minor changes to the database side of the application in years. There are lots of new technologies out there that would be really useful to photographers if they were all together in one application, and yet, in my opinion, there’s nothing that does everything. At least not yet.
I was returning home from a week in a sweltering London last Friday, and we had taken the boat home. I was never so happy to see cloudy skies after the month plus long heatwave. As we approached the shore of Ireland, the moody sky and sea made for some great images. From my Streets of Dublin Blog…
I’ve been taking a little break this week, and I got to spend some time in London. The city, like the rest of the UK and Ireland, is currently experiencing a heatwave, and as someone who doesn’t do well in the heat, I’ve found it quite oppressive and hard to function. Anyway, I haven’t really been taking many photos, but here are a random few from the few days in the city.
I’m happy to announce that my newest product is now available. It is a set of creative profiles for use with Lightroom (version 7.3 or later) and Photoshop Camera RAW. “Creative Profile Pack One” is a set of 45 creative profiles for Lightroom and Photoshop.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the one lens that I wished Fuji would make, which was a 16-70f/4. Well, today, Fuji announced their new lens roadmap, and on it is a new entry - a 16-80f/4 - which is even better than what I had hoped for!
I had this idea a while ago that I have been keen to try out for a while, but I only recently managed to do it. I have some colleagues who are visually impaired, and I was thinking about how people use photography as a way to collect memories of a trip or a momentous occasion, and I wondered what the equivalent might be for someone who was visually impaired. So I had the idea to try recording a soundscape.
Skylum software is having a flash sale on Luminar for the next four days from today, Thursday, July 19, through to Sunday, July 22. I normally don’t post these offers, as everyone who is on the affiliate programme will be shortly, and my RSS reader gets full of the same post, but it’s a pretty good deal, so I’m going to make the exception this time.
Fuji today announced a new compact camera, the XF-10. The XF-10 is an ultra lightweight compact camera, with a 28mm equivalent lens and an APS-C Beyer sensor. “The camera also includes enhanced Bluetooth capability.” It’s fairly inexpensive, retailing at $499. I’m not really a news site, so rather than go into every detail, here are a few of my observations, about the camera and the launch.
The last time I went to Glendalough to shoot has ended up being the gift that keeps on giving. Every now and then I go back to my collection of images from the day and discover something else, or rediscover a shot that I’d dismissed. In this case I discovered a series of shots of the tree line that I had previously glossed over.
It’s been my long-standing practice to use a “camera matching” profile in Lightroom whenever possible. Camera matching profiles are colour profiles that come with Lightroom, that attempt to make the colours of your raw file match the colours of your camera’s Jpeg output as closely as possible.
A few weeks ago I wanted to photograph something a little different, so we headed out to a place in North County Dublin where you can see Dublin Port from the far side, as well as watch the boats come and go. We timed the trip so that we would arrive as the sun begins to set, and I was only travelling light camera wise. I went equipped with the Sony A6000, with the only lens being the kit lens. I also had the Canon G7XII with me, which I had initially brought just to shoot video, but I ended up shooting stills with it too.
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!
White Balance is one of those controls that I think a lot of photographers don’t think about or don’t make use of enough. Many just leave it on automatic and don’t worry about it. Yet a poorly chosen white balance can probably affect your photos as much as an improper exposure, and when many people complain about certain cameras having “bad colour” in many cases this can be attributed to the white balance.
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.
