Autumn Reflections
- At November 25, 2012
- By John
- In National Park, UK Landscape
- 0
Sometimes good photographs come just by chance and that was certainly the case with this one. I’d been up in the Lake District and was out shooting with Doug Chinnery in Borrowdale. We’d just been to the quarry featured in the Joe Cornish DVD With Landscape In Mind, and although a wonderful location, somehow I didn’t feel that I bagged any particular inspiring shots, even though the location, light and autumn foliage had been spectacular. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t seem to work. We’d probably spent the best part of a couple of hours at the quarry and the late afternoon autumnal glow was beginning to subside. Badly in need of a decent cup of tea we headed back down the path towards the village of Grange.
We had just descended the hill and arrived along the banks of the Derwent river, when suddenly these gorgeous golden-orange reflections from the birch tress opposite flooded across the water. That cup of tea would have to wait. I was drawn to the stones amongst the reflections so waded out into the river with my tripod; thank god for my wellies. It was obvious the light wasn’t going to last long, so I shot with the EF 24-105mm f/4.0 lens on my camera, but perhaps not the best choice but it would have to do. I took a few frames in portrait mode but they just didn’t work. Then I spotted a pattern of five stones amongst the reflections so waded a little further. I hastily put on a polarizer, ND (soft) grad upside down to balance the brightness and shot a couple of frames, but 5 stones weren’t working. I re-framed on just four stones; I just liked the way seemed to balance the foreground even though even numbers are not supposed to work. I shot just one frame then the light started to fade. I shot several more frames but the moment had gone and the glow subsided but that one frame was my shot of the day.
From my first shot to the frame above was just 5 minutes. I used a small aperture of F/22 to lengthen the exposure and smooth out the water, but that only resulted in a 2.5 second exposure. I would have liked much longer and wanted to put on a 4-stop ND but if I had I would have missed the shot. Lucky for me I didn’t.
A New Magazine from Craft&Vision
I felt a tad reluctant to write another post about Craft & Vision so soon but this is worthy of a mention. They have announced a quarterly magazine called Photograph and Issue One is available for purchase from their website now. It’s a little different from you’d normally expect from a magazine as it’s purely a PDF download and without any advertisements. If you’ve previously bought any of the Craft&Vision eBooks before then you’ll be in familiar territory as it continues pretty much in the same contemporary and classy style.
Read More»Firmware Update for the Canon 5D Mark-III Annouced
Canon have announced a new firmware update from the Canon 5D mark-III. Nothing unusual in this you may think but this update won’t actually be available till April 2013. That’s around 6 months, so what’s going on?
Well, the firmware update is primarily in response from feedback from the movie fraternity to provide substantial improvements in the video facilities such as providing HDMI output. Most of this may be of little consequence if you’re primarily a stills photographers, however, as some recent online rumours have suggested, the autofocusing abilities will also be greatly enhanced to allow autofocusing with lenses apertures down to f/8. Currently autofocus can only be achieved with apertures down to f/5.6, so this means that 1.4 and 2x extenders can be used with many more lenses and should significantly improve the the 5D mIII ability in the sports and and wildlife genres. This will truly mark the 5D mIII as an all allrounder, and put it up there with capabilities of the previous 1D series cameras.
Why the long wait you may ask, six months is some way off? Well I suspect many of these changes are still under development or in the testing phase, although there are rumours to suggest the firmware release will coincide with another major camera release. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Details from the Canon website can be found here.
Essential Development – 20 Great Techniques for Lightroom 4
- At November 01, 2012
- By John
- In Book, eBook, Instruction, Lightroom 4, Lightroom News, Review
- 0
New Book from Craft & Vision
There is a new eBook offering from Craft & Vision entitled Essential Development – 20 Great Techniques for Lightroom 4. It’s also by a new author to the Craft & Vision stable, Seán McCormack, who many may recognise from the Adobe Lightroom forums and for his regular Lightroom Blog at Pixeq. Seán has been involved with Lightroom since the early beta versions where his forum activity of attracted the attention of Adobe. He was subsequently invited to become a Lightroom beta tester and has been involved with all Lightroom editions since. Thus he has a well established pedigree as an authority on Lightroom.
I’ve been an avid Lightroom user since those early beta versions too, having migrated from the original Rawshooter program by Pixmatic (where Adobe acquired the original Raw processing software). In that respect
Read More»Big Stopper Shocker
- At October 16, 2012
- By John
- In Filter, Gear, Location, UK Landscape
- 3
The Ultimate 10 Stop Filter
I’ve owned a Lee Big Stopper 10-stop filter for almost 2½ years now and have become quite a fan of long exposures and the effects that this filter can produce. It’s become a staple accessory to many a photographers kit bag and it opens additional artistic opportunities to a landscape photographers day once those golden hours have disappeared. Prior to the Big Stopper I used a B+W 10 stop filter, which is of the screw-in type, Read More»The Worlds Top 10 Most Expensive Photographs
It doesn’t seem so long ago when I was discussing a picture by Australian landsscape photographer Peter Lik with a group of fellow photographers, that had sold for a million dollars. Having been to Lik’s gallery in Las Vegas and witnessed the crass commercialism first hand, I guess I wasn’t too surprised. But only in America hey? However, something the other day made me want to find out what was so appealing about that picture as to command such an amazing price. During my research I was stunned to find out it’s now not even in the top ten most expensive photographs in the world today.
Read More»Lightroom 4.2 Update Released
- At October 03, 2012
- By John
- In Lightroom, Lightroom 4, Lightroom News, Software
- 0
Adobe Lightroom Update
Adobe Labs have just released Version 4.2 of Lightroom, their popular digital photography software. This provides additional camera raw support for over 20 new cameras, a plethera of new lens profiles and fixes for a whole host of bugs introduced in previous releases of Lightroom. One new feature is support for the Adobe Revel Cloud based image service, but you’ll need a sunscription to make use of this.
It seems Adobe have taken notice of the feedback from the onlne Lightroom comunity with many of the requests and bug notifications from users addressed within this release. Of particular note for me (and one that I complained about) is
Read More»The Canon 6D – A New Challenger to the 5D’s Reign
- At September 29, 2012
- By John
- In Camera, Gear
- 1
A New Full Frame DSLR From Canon
As an occasional visitor to the Canon Rumours website I was aware that a new Canon DSLR was imminent but I must admit the announcement of the EOS 6D at the 2012 Photokina show took me by surprise. I, like a few other I suspect, were contemplating an EOS 3D, something that would sit in-between the 5D MIII and the EOS 1DX in Canon’s line up. However the more I look at the 6D’s specs the more this camera seems to make sense, so lets take at look what’s in stall for potential 6D owners:
Read More»The Rise of the eBook
- At August 16, 2012
- By John
- In Book, Instruction, Magazine
- 0
EBooks aren’t really anything radically new, as the hypertext editing system and electronic documents have been in existence since the 1960’s but didn’t proliferate until the birth of the world wide web and then not in the form that we know now. Even electronic book readers have been around since 1998, but these early devices failed to capture the imagination on an unsuspecting public. It wasn’t until 2009 when Amazon released their first Kindle and the Sony e-reader emerged that eBooks seemed to provide a serious alternative to the paper varieties.
Read More»Adobe Release Lightroom 4.1 but Disappointment for Flickr Users
- At June 01, 2012
- By John
- In Flickr, Lightroom, Lightroom 4, Lightroom News, MAC OS, Plug-in, Software
- 0
Adobe have released an update to Adobe Lightroom with version 4.1 available for download which is free to registered users. Version 4.1 brings support to several new cameras (notably the Canon 5D MIII, 1DX, and Nikon’s D4, D800 & D800E), some bug fixes, new lens profiles, and rather surprisingly, some new features too. This was not dissimilar to the release of Lightroom 3.1 which also added new features, presumably some which were still incomplete at the time of the official release but which the team wanted including. New features include the ability to process 24 and 32 HDR files, save photobooks as JPEGs, and publishing via Adobe Revel.
Read More»