The Lockdown Posts
- At July 22, 2020
- By John
- In Book, News, Photography
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Monday, March 23rd, 2020, the day all our lives as we had known changed. The Covid-19 pandemic had taken a foothold in the United Kingdom and the Government announced that Lockdown measures are to be put in place, forcing us to stay in our homes, bar essential trips to the shops for food and some daily exercise. Our daily lives suddenly changed beyond comprehension.
The mantra became
“Stay Home, Stay Safe, Protect the NHS”
Most people, like me, suddenly found themselves with more time on their hands. A lot more time. A time perhaps, to finally start some of the projects you’d been putting off for years. Social media suddenly became much more important in our lives, to help us stay in touch, communicate, inform, entertain and ease the boredom. For myself, it was a time to finally begin sorting out my large library of photos, update my software, improve my photo processing skills and make some photo books. I posted one or two pictures to Facebook, as I occasionally did anyway, but at the behest of my sister, it soon became an almost daily ritual. These would become my Lockdown Posts.
A snapshot of the Lockdown posts on Facebook
My first official Lockdown post occurred on the 1st of April, and I continued posting almost daily until the 5th July, 2020, although as Lockdown began to ease, so did I, so I didn’t quite conform to posting one image every day. The end date was originally going to be the 4th of July, but I extended this to the 5th which was the 75th Anniversary of the NHS; it just seemed more appropriate.
At first, the images were pretty much selected at random, but at some stage (around late May perhaps?) it just seemed perfectly logical to make them a subject of a book. From then onwards, some of the images were paired up and chosen with the book layout in mind. Many of the images are re-discoveries or previously unprocessed and long-forgotten images, but the whole process proved quite a voyage of rediscovery and quite a cathartic one at that. It’s resulted in a bit of a Hodge-potch of 90 images, but one that provides an interesting snapshot into my photographic body of work. They are all now posted on my Lockdown Gallery, and you can see them all together here.
Lightroom 5 Up To Speed by Piet Van Den Eynde
- At June 12, 2013
- By John
- In eBook, Review
- 0
New LightRoom 5 eBook from Craft & Vision
Hot off the press after the general release of Lightroom 5 from Adobe, Craft & Vision have released a 77-page eBook complete with companion videos, by Piet Van Den Eynde, claiming to provide Everything You Need to Know About the Adobe Lightroom 5 Upgrade. This seems like super quick work from Craft & Vision, but as Piet lets on within his introduction, it’s largely based on the Lightroom 5 beta version. As we know now the official pukkah release is pretty much the same as the beta version with the bugs straightened out. Priced at a very reasonable $5 (around £3.20) and cheaper than a monthly photo periodical, I thought this worth a punt to see whether I’d glean any hidden gems within Lightroom 5.
Read More»Images Published in OnLandscape Magazine
Ice Jewels of Jökulsárlón 4×4 Portfolio
I was delighted to find 4 of my images are featured in the 4×4 portfolio section of the Issue 55 of the web based OnLandscape magazine. The 4×4 Portfolios feature four images selected on a “theme of some sort; that hang together in a creative way”. I chose 4 images from my visit to Jökulsárla beach at Jökulsárlón in Iceland last year, where I spent quite a while photographing ice fragments swirling around amongst the shallow waves of the foreshore of the black volcanic beach.
Read More»An Exhibition of Photographs by Ansel Adams
- At March 19, 2013
- By John
- In Ansel Adams, Exhibition, Photographer, Review
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Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea
“Ansel is important to us because he was a good artist; in his best days he was a terrific artist” ~ John Szarkowski, photographer & curator
If you browse any book about “icons of photography“, from photography’s inception to the current day, you’ll be hard pressed to find any mention of pure landscape photographers. It seems such a sad state of affairs that photographs of our beautiful and amazing planet are held in such low esteem by the so called photographic hierarchy. The one exception of course is Ansel Adams.
Read More»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»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»The Rise of the eBook
- At August 16, 2012
- By John
- In Book, Instruction, Magazine
- 0
From real books to eBooks
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»Digital Landscape Photography by John & Barbara Gerlach
- At October 16, 2011
- By John
- In Book, Review
- 0
Book Review
I used to buy quite a lot of photography books, too many according to my wife, but not so many these days. My recent acquisitions are mostly coffee table books from photographers I really admire and aspire to. It’s been a while since I bought anything to do with technique. That’s not to say I think I have perfected my techniques, far from it indeed, it’s just that most books in this category are firmly pitched at the novice or endless photo manipulation in Photoshop. I’m pleased to say
Read More»Monkey in The Eye
- At September 02, 2011
- By John
- In Magazine, Published Picture
- 0
Published Photograph
It’s always nice to get some recognition when you are a photographer, especially as an amateur like myself, so it was with great pleasure that I found out that one of my pictures had been selected for the cover page of August-September edition of The Eye Magazine. The Eye is a free bi-monthly magazine published in Uganda where I have been working and is an insiders guide to touring and travel in Uganda. You can generally find free copies in all the major hotels and on the major airlines travelling there, so it has quite an extensive circulation within the country.
Read More»Drilling Into Success by Robert Combden
- At March 15, 2011
- By John
- In Book
- 0
Book Publication
Many of you who read my blog may not know but I’ve been employed within the oil industry most of my life. This has included a substantial amount of time working on drilling rigs both offshore and onshore. Many of my photographic opportunities then, have been in and around the drilling locations where I have worked in, and through time I’ve amassed a fair collection of industrial related photographs too.
One of these pictures has been used for a book cover that has just been published. The book is entitled Drilling Int Success which is by Robert Combden. Robert hails from North-eastern, Newfoundland and who like me, has spent most of his life working on drilling rigs. The book details his life as a rig hand and contains anecdotal tales and stories of his life within the oil patch and is written to bring a fuller understanding of the processes of drilling a well and what life is really like on an oil rig.
Robert’s book is available in Chapters, Coles and Indigo stores in Edmonton, Alberta, and Costo, Chapters and Coles in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
As for the picture, well it’s quite an old one, being of late 2004 vintage and around the start of my rekindled interest in serious photography. It was taken with a Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2, which some may remember as an 8 megapixel, fixed lens, bridge camera. It had a 7 times optical zoom lens with the equivalent of a 28-200mm focal length, an electronic viewfinder and a fold-out rear 1.8-inch rear LCD screen. 8 megapixels was a pretty formidable specification back then, but these days you can get that on a phone. Never-the-less I got achieved some pleasing images with the A2 at the time, although the files were pretty noisy by today’s standards. It wasn’t long however, before I was smitten by the lure of a Canon 20D and even that seems somewhat old fashioned now.
