Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
Ever since it was released in the Asian markets a few weeks ago, I’ve been quietly obsessing over Canon’s new Powershot V1 compact camera. The original launch was somewhat muted here in the west, with no-one really getting their hands on it apart from a few Japanese photographers and filmmakers. Now that Canon has officially launched it worldwide, we’re getting more details and coverage, and I have to say, I really like what I see.
I was scrolling through instagram the other day - as one does - when I realised, after scrolling for several minutes, that I hadn’t seen a single photograph from an actual photographer. Sure, there were a few still images, but they were either from celebrities, or part of news stories. The majority of what I was seeing was reels and ads. It seems Meta really, really wants to turn Instagram into TikTok. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the worst of both worlds.
I had all these plans for a series of posts on the blog last week, and even a video I wanted to shoot, but instead I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time chasing down a bizarre Mac bug. It seems to have resolved, but the cause still eludes me. It started with a Lightroom crash, and ended up leading to a complete puzzle that plagued both my Mac Studio and my MacBook Pro. It involved several calls to Apple and even baffled them. This might not sound like a riveting read, but it’s actually a curious tale and I learned a few things along the way.
Lough Ennel in Co. Westmeath is a pretty unassuming lake in the Irish Midlands. It’s not particularly large by international standards, and if you were to ask the average person on the street here in Ireland, they’d probably tell you they’ve never heard of it. But recently it’s become somewhat famous because of a natural phenomenon that occurs there every evening during winter. A spectacular starling murmuration.
I recently came across an iOS camera app called 65×24, and I have to say—I'm loving it. It is designed for capturing images in the 65:24 aspect ratio, reminiscent of the legendary Hasselblad XPan and Fujifilm TX-1 film cameras. It also has a nice minimalist interface, that I really like.
I had been quite looking forward to our trip to Switzerland. I had never been to the country before and was pretty excited about the adventure. Our journey, while not specifically for photography, had the promise of lots of photo potential, but unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. We travelled to a little town outside of Lake Zurich and on to the City of Geneva, also on a lake!
I had done a bit of research before travelling, and both spots looked beautiful and scenic. What I didn’t realise though, was that apparently at this time of the year, both locations are frequently covered in low cloud. Luckily, we still got some hours of sunshine, and I was able to see some shots of the amazing scenery, but the low cloud and bitter cold had other ideas.
DxO has announced PureRAW 5, the latest version of its RAW processing software, set for release on April 15, 2025. The update introduces local adjustments for targeted noise reduction and sharpening, a redesigned interface, and the third generation of the DeepPRIME denoising engine. Fujifilm users also gain access to a new DeepPRIME XD3 X-Trans Beta mode for enhanced detail recovery.
If there’s one thing that really annoys me more than anything else about Lightroom, it’s the halo effect you get when you use the clarity slider. If you haven’t noticed this before, I apologise in advance for pointing it out to you, because once you see it, you can’t unseen it. Once I figured out what it was I see it everywhere online. I’ve been on a quest to find away around it, and I’ve already posted a video about this before. Now I’ve come up with another potential solution to the problem. Or at least a partial solution.
In this super quick Lightroom tip, I’ll show you how to import Lightroom presets directly into Lightroom on your iPad, without the need to install them on the desktop version first!
Adobe has unveiled the latest update to Lightroom Classic. Most of the improvements are under the hood or behind the scenes type things, although there is one major new user facing feature…
I have an exclusive DxO Offer for my readers: a 20% discount on Valentine’s Day. This special offer is valid only on February 14th, so if you’re interested, please see the details in the main post…
We recently took a trip to Switzerland and visited both Lake Zurich and Lake Geneva where I braved the cold and low clouds to try and get some photos. It started with an incredible sunrise flight out of Dublin, and I managed to get some photos and video of Lake Geneva and Lake Zurich during breaks in the otherwise cloudy, foggy and incredibly cold weather. We ended the trip with an incredible flight out of Geneva over the Swiss alps before arriving back in Dublin.
This month, DxO reached a significant milestone with the release of its 100,000th DxO Camera and Lens Module. Having developed this technology for over two decades, the company is marking the occasion by offering a first-ever glimpse behind the scenes of its calibration lab.
In this video I show you a handy workflow tip to make it easier to reset your adjustments in Lightroom without reseting your Crop or Geometry edits.
In early January we took a road trip to capture sunrise and sunset in the southeast of Ireland, starting with the world's oldest working Lighthouse: Hook Lighthouse, Co. Wexford, followed by a spectacular sunrise over the estuary of the river Slaney. Finally, we visited a Co. Wexford Beach made famous for being used in the movie “Saving Private Ryan”.
I’ve just released my latest Lightroom quick tip video, and it’s a video version of a recent blog post I shared a little while ago, about the oft forgotten about global colour correction tool.
In early January my wife and I decided to get away for a few days to relax before the new work year started. We headed to a nice relaxing retreat in Co. Wexford, and while the trip was mostly for a holiday, of course we snuck in some photography time! The last time we were in Wexford we had visited the beautiful and famous Hook Lighthouse in the south of the county, but we had done so at noon during the summer, so the light was a bit flat. This time we aimed to visit it at sunset, to capture it in better light. So we set off on the drive down the peninsula towards hook head and its namesake lighthouse. We were not disappointed.
As we commence the new year, I am undertaking a virtual organisational process. As part of this endeavour, I am harmonising the pricing of my Lightroom Presets and Capture One styles on my Gumroad Store. Effective immediately, all products will be priced at a new, lower base price of €10.
