Family, Photography and other misc news
After rebooting my Mac recently I have been getting an iCloud login prompt pop up. It would not accept my credentials so I just had to cancel it.
All the iCloud functionality still worked. Eventually I got fed up with it and had a quick search on the net to see if any one else had the issue and if there was a fix.
Well it turns out quite a number of people had the issue but the fix was very simple. Just go into your iCloud settings, logout then login back in. Problem solved.
Collections in Lightroom are very useful ways of collating photographs together, I have various studio shoots, Black & White collections and family holidays all as various collections.
One of the very useful options is Smart Collections. You can define a rule, e.g. a studio shoot on a set date and have all flagged photographs automatically appear in a Smart Collection.
I was using this the other day to help me sort a studio shoot and wanted to potentially fine tune the sorting the following day if I had a few spare moments. I knew I would not have my laptop with me but I would have my iPad, so I looked for the sync option. Imagine my surprise when it was not there.
It turns out you cannot sync smart collections only standard collections, so I had to create another collection and copy the contents of my smart collection over to the standard collection to get them to sync across to the iPad using Lightroom Mobile.
The problem now is that tomorrow night when I flag up some more photographs to make final selections from, while they will automatically appear in my Smart Collection they will not appear in the sync’ed collection.
Come on Adobe, you have added some great new features in Lightroom CC, please add the ability to sync Smart Collections.
I was reading Terry White’s website this weekend and caught this review of a new product by Westcott, an LED flexible light. Similar to a small softbox but flexible, it looks like a cool and useful product.
Last week I quoted Henri Cartier-Bresson who said that “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”.
Well this past week I have been practicing my street photography and zone focusing. Basically pre-focusing manually and then taking the shot as soon as the scene develops.
This can be for me a very hit and miss affair, but I am getting better.
While in my local coffee shop I snapped a quick shot of the barista who was making my coffee. Despite me reading recently about always being prepared, I had not increased my ISO enough and still had the lens set to f/8, so my shutter speed was close to 1 second, rather then the 1/60 second upwards I prefer to get a sharp image, still you can see what was going on and its not an unpleasant image despite nothing being in focus due to very severe camera shake.
So maybe Henri Cartier-Bresson was right?
If you don’t get Black & White or Rangefinders move along now.
Leica’s do cause debate and a Black & White only camera even more.
So yesterday Lecia announced the replacement to the old Lecia Monochrom. The old camera was based on the M9 the new on the CMOS M 240 P.
Output from the new camera and we have only seen images from prototypes is very like the old but better high ISO performance and the old one was no slouch.
What may get people to upgrade is the better electronics. The M9 series gave great image quality but is was the feel and noise of the shutter and the low resolution LCD screen that let it down.
The colour M 240 does fantastic Black & White and with the ability to use the colour channels in your preferred editing software you can adjust the tones as you like.
For hardcore Black & White users, getting rid of the Bayer filter and the noise and artefacts it can produce gives more of a film feel. It does make tonal adjustment more difficult and the use of red, orange, blue and green filters where appropriate is required.
For most of us a colour camera is likely the better choice.
Of course the Lecia Monochrom is not the only Black & White camera. There is now a Black & White medium format back available.
I hope Leica continue to make the old Monochrom as an introductory model like they did with the old M9 which became the ME.
It looks like Black & White is here to stay whether taken with digital colour, digital Black & White or film.
Reviews at http://www.slack.co.uk/2015/Elliott.html
Leica M8.2
Leica Elmar-M 24mm f/3.8 ASPH
24mm, 1/1500 Sec at f/5.6, ISO260
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom V5.7.1
On a MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.10.3
Last night while riding the BMW home in the late afternoon sun, I saw a view that really made me appreciate living in the English countryside. There was a hint of rain in the distance so black dark clouds were in the distance but in the foreground was the brightly lit rapeseed fields and fresh green of the up coming crops. The colours and contrast against the dark sky with the sun streaming through gaps in the cloud to form columns of light against the dark was simply stunning.
If I had stopped to take a photograph and submitted it for criticism then photo editors and critics would have complained about my heavy handed and unrealistic use of Photoshop and HDR techniques, but this was real and in front of me. Inspiring stuff.
Spring now seems to be in overdrive. I managed to prune a few bushes and trees but all that has to stop now, not only are the trees full of blossom but the bushes seem to be full of Blackbirds and Thrushes making their nests. A pair of house sparrows has even figured out, how to get under the corner end tile on the roof and make a nest there.
This weekend we took the opportunity because of the fine sunny weather to plant out the peas, beans, and cabbage, as well as the lettuce we have been raising in the cold frame. The pigeons were looking interested so it will be interesting to see if they last the week.
Monday morning we had a frost again despite the improving weather so we need to get some more seed trays planted up just in case what we have planted out does not survive.
On Tuesday night as I mentioned yesterday, I installed Adobe Lightroom CC.
Unfortunately I could not get it to launch on one of my computers. A quick reboot, uninstall and re-install. I even tried a permission repair on the boot drive.
Then I remembered the last time I had an issue with an Adobe CC app. Log out of Adobe Creative Cloud and the log back in. Voila it now works.
The big news for photographers on Tuesday was the release of Lightroom CC, also known as Lightroom V6.
Biggest update for me is support for off loading processor intensive tasks to the graphics card. I’ll be interested in how MacPro’s now run Lightroom.
The big updates that are photo related are HDR and panoramic support built into Lightroom. No more round trips to Photoshop or third party plugins.
Facial recognition and tagging is now built in, so their Pro app now has a feature that most amateur editing apps have had to a couple of years now.
The other two things I was very pleased to see was an erase blush for the grad filter so you can selectively remove its effect and a simple thing but something that could get me using Lightroom Mobile more is the ability to add photographs into collections during import.
I have created a little test library and have started using it for testing but for now my real work is being done on V5.
I had a few issues, first it would not run on one of my machines and I have also managed to make it crash when using the crop tool. I may wait for the first point release before updating my Master library and using it for real.
Oh, and the difference between Lightroom CC & Lightroom V6, well if your a creative cloud user then you get Lightroom CC, if you purchase the standalone version you get Lightroom V6, apart from the Lightroom Mobile features being missing the two are at the moment the same, but apart from bug fixes and camera RAW updates, Lightroom V6 may not get feature enhancements like Lightroom CC will.