Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
Leica being a small company are not always the fastest at releasing updates and bug fixes to their camera firmware but recently we have seen quite a few updates.
This week it was the turn of the Leica Q.
The smaller camera manufactures such as Olympus, Fuji and Leica are very good at releasing new functionality for their older cameras and its something that the bigger manufactures could learn from.
I love music, and used to play the guitar and currently play the banjo and piano. I now have my Hifi setup in the end room which has been turned in a music/library/studio room.
I also have some decent powered speakers in my office linked to my MacPro and my iTunes library which mostly consists of ripped CD’s. Where we listen to the most music is in the kitchen which with our love of cooking and baking we both spend a lot our time.
For my birthday last year we have had a Sonos One in here, its pricey for what it is but does perform very well and needs little else to make it work. It came with one years free Deezer subscription which is now coming to an end, and so I was pleased to see that Apple music in beta has now arrived for the Sonos. Once my Deezer subscription expires i’ll give the Apple music a trial and see how that goes.
The think to remember with most of these streaming systems is you need to invest in the time and energy to let the service learn about your musical tastes. Of course once a service is setup how you like its hard to move and go through that again which is what most of them are hoping.
If you want good contrast and soft light and shadow in your studio flash photographs the key is to get the light close to your model.
The light here is very close to the model, a very large soft box above the model giving strong directional light, but with very gentle soft shadows, this is caused by the light being so close to the model. The camera was a Nikon D200 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom shot at about 90mm. This shot is straight from camera with my Default Lightroom D200 People pre-set applied. This applies a little sharpening and a mask, a little contrast and some fill. As its stands its pretty good, but I wanted to clean up the skin a little so it needed a round trip to photoshop.
To make the Photoshop work a little easier I dropped the contrast and slightly brightened the image, then it was off to Photoshop.
This is an old image but I wanted to see what the latest version of Photoshop could do with it. With the skin cleaned up I whitened the eye and darkened the pupil a little, added a touch of blur to the skin to soften it then darkened the background.
Then back to Lightroom, for a final finish; add contrast, a make the image a touch darker and then crop.
All in all a quick edit and I have to admit Photoshop is getting faster at this kind of thing. Most of this I could have done in Lightroom but taking it to Photoshop and using layers just made it faster and easier.
So with the release of iOS 9.2 we finally got the ability to use the Camera Connection kit on our iPhones and I have to admit its about time Apple. While the iPad does make more sense for this kind of work, for those of us with iPhone 6Pluses it can be useful.
This afternoon I set about testing it out.
A quick walk around the wet streets of Lincoln soon gave me a small selection of images. Back at my desk the memory card came out of the camera in was plugged into the phone. Into the photo app to import the shots then into Lightroom Mobile for a bit of an edit. The top shot is the results.
Today Apple released the second major update to iOS 9. The thing that interested me with this update is they have enabled support for the camera connection kit on the iPhone.
If like me you have a iPhone 6 Plus then being able to import photographs direct to the phone and then into an application like Adobe Lightroom mobile could be very useful.
I look forward to giving a go.
This weekend is the Lincoln Christmas Market. If you have to commute into and out of Lincoln be prepared for a long wait. Even if like me and my wife you commute on a motorcycle it can take you a while to get in and out of the city.
Today I took my little Leica M8 into the city to shoot few street scenes. They were then imported into my iPad; I edited the Jpegs in Lightroom Mobile.
As an experiment I set the aperture to f/5.6 to give me a bit of depth of field, the ISO to 640 to give me a reasonable shutter speed and prefocused to about 4 meters. Then as views appeared I took a shot.
Most were rejected but a few had a bit of interest. It was also a useful test of Lightroom Mobile and how I could integrate it into my usual workflow.
The above shot was a test of two things. The first was my pre focusing technique, I selected the focus and aperture first then as the scene developed I raised the camera to my eye and took a single shot. Fast and unobserved.
Refocusing and using the zone focusing technique is very fast but does take practice, and is something that I am not that good at.
The second test was me working on my mobile workflow.
After taking this and a few other photographs, I took the memory card and imported it into my old iPad2. I had shot RAW & JPG (DNG and Black & White JPG), I then used Lightroom Mobile to drop the contrast and reduce the highlights of the JPG and boost the shadows.
For a JPG its not a bad shot.
I got the chance this week to have a go with the new iPad Pro, wow; its big. As I stated before if your into graphic arts and working with a stylus this may be the tablet for you. For the rest of us, I think i’ll stick with a regular iPad and when using my desktop MacPro, my Wacom tablet.
Still its an impressive piece of kit.
When I am out and about shooting, it can range from a day in the studio, to a couple weeks on a remote Scottish Island with limited internet.
With such wide subject matter and locations, I am always reconsidering my equipment.
I have often discussed the cameras, but with the release of the latest Microsoft Surface and Apple’s iPad Pro I thought I would reassess my mobile computing needs.
My output is generally large prints or digital files for customers, or output to the web.
If your just outputting to the web I have proved that any camera (shooting jpg and RAW), you can load the jpg files into any old iPad and with products like Adobe’s and Snapseed apps for the iOS you can edit and produce pretty good output to the web and do some quite complex editing.
I have taken trips for a week or more and just used the iPad as a back up device and to upload the odd edited jpg to the web, but for serious work you always end up having to use a laptop or desktop. This means if your packing an iPad you have to wait till you are back home or at the office.
This is where many feel the Microsoft Surface or Surface Book is the perfect compromise; but I currently feel if your going to go that far you might as well just pack an Apple MacBook Air and have the advantage of Mac OS.
Lets not forget though, if your into social media, or promoting your business via social media, getting the jpg onto your iPad, a quick edit then upload , it is a fast way to work.
The iPad Pro is now out and a lot of people are asking me should they get it?
With many of these things, we want the toys but we do not ask each what problem is it that we want it to solve.
The Apple iPad Pro and Microsoft’s surface are all trying to bridge the gap between the modern tablet and the laptop.
From a photographers point of view I don’t think the iPad Pro is any better then say a normal iPad. Until software like Lightroom Mobile supports a RAW import driven workflow you are still tied to using a full blown computer.
You can tether with a laptop using programs such as CamRanger which supports Canon and Nikon cameras but you are stuck with a jpeg workflow.
At the moment I see the iPad Pro as being something for graphic artists. The pencil is very clever and people who have to draw will love it.
The keyboard while nice is still in someways an afterthought. For some functions you can use the keyboard but others are touch only and you have to move your hands off the keyboard to touch the screen. The iPad and the Microsoft Surface both suffer from this but at least the Surface is a full blown laptop and can use the full version of Lightroom so work with a RAW workflow, but the Surface does seem to have issues with its USB ports and people report issues with tethering, a normal laptop is possibly better.