Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
So today, Nikon finally announced the company’s new Mirrorless cameras, the Z7 and Z6. I say finally because the leaks and rumours seem to have been going on for months, not to mention Nikon’s own teasing of the new system. So now that they’re official, what do I think?
Adobe has released another round of updates to Lightroom across its various versions, and also to Camera RAW for Photoshop. Lightroom Classic features new book module updates, as well as some bug fixes, and the usual camera support.
Adobe recently introduced a new feature for the mobile version of Lightroom CC that people had been requesting for a long time, and that is the ability to use presets. What’s more, they also added preset syncing between the desktop and mobile versions of Lightroom CC. You can now use all of your Lightroom presets, and profiles on your mobile device, and the process is fairly simple. You will however need to use Lightroom CC on the desktop. You will also need a creative cloud subscription.
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.
An age-old measure of the performance of many types of recording is “signal to noise ratio”. In essence, it looks at how much noise there is compared to useful signal in any given medium, whether it’s an analogue transmission or even a digital recording. There’s one thing that I’ve noticed a lot recently, and that is when people compare cameras they often look at 1:1 crops to compare the results. In particular, they use this to compare noise performance between cameras. However, when comparing cameras of different resolutions, this may not actually give you an accurate comparison. The reason for this is that when doing this you’re only looking at one part of the equation, the noise, without considering the other part: the signal.
Today, I’m happy to announce the launch of my latest set of Lightroom Presets: StreetLUX. I got the idea for StreetLUX when I was processing my most recent set of photos from my Street Photo Diary series, and I was originally using my Monolith Presets. I wanted a high contrast look, but I wanted to create something a little more “film like” so I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new set. But I didn’t stop there and I also created a set of colour presets too, which were inspired by the “chrome” style of films from the past.
If you haven’t seen them before, a Lensball is basically a polished glass sphere. That’s pretty much all there is to it, but once you’re aware of it, you start to see them cropping up everywhere, in Instagram and other online photos. A little while ago, the company that makes them sent me one to review, and I’ve been having fun with it ever since.
In the latest episode of “Street Photo Diary,” I decided to shoot some street photography with the Nikon D700. The D700 is probably still my all time favourite camera. I love the ergonomics of it, and I love the images it produces too. While it is a big and heavy camera, and it may not seem like the first choice for shooting street photography, after a while, you don’t even notice the weight or the bulk.
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.
