Category: Photography

I often wax lyrical about golden light and the great light we have in the Autumn and Spring, well last night while I was in Yoga class the light through the window was just fantastic.

The day had been glorious and hot but there was thunderstorms forecast for the evening.

While I was in Yoga class and unable to take advantage the sky turned black while the hills turned a bright golden hue that was truly dramatic.

I bet as I am free tomorrow the light will not be like this.

Having a number of cameras ranging from Large Format, Medium Format, and smaller, I try to choose the camera that is right for the purpose.  Travelling with a camera does place limits on what you can do.  When travelling by car there is no real limit and on some of my trips to remote Scottish Islands I have taken the Large Format for landscape, the SLR and long lens for wildlife, then my Leica M as a carry everywhere camera.

We often go on holiday on the motorcycle and so on these occasions little cameras like the Nikon Series One the V1 are all we carry.

Quite often its the weight and size of the camera that drives what we carry.

Another set of Leica M rangefinder firmware updates were released recently, as well as fixes there were tweaks allowing one to switch off the live view button and disable the movie button etc.

Leica have been listening to their customers and changing a number of things about the camera.  One good thing about Leica is they tend to also release update to there old cameras, in this respect they are like another well respected company, Fuji.

Continuing to support your older cameras does encourage one to buy that brand again.

This weekend was the Waddington Air show.  Its been many years since I have been, there always seems something else that I need to do, but luckily the last three places U have lived have been near the major flight paths so this has enabled me to grab the odd shot from home.

On Saturday the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight flew over, so on Sunday I made sure I was ready with my Nikon D200 and 70-200mm telephoto zoom.

The weather was somewhat overcast but I managed to get a shot of them.

As always the show ends with a display from the Red Arrows, this is a shot from back in 2009, its a bit of a cheats shot as it is actually a composite.  Once again the weather was not good, so I pasted the Red Arrows onto a background with better weather and once of them in the distance.

Last week I mentioned common keyboard shortcuts that I use with Adobe Photoshop, today I thought I would share some of the common keyboard shortcuts I use with Adobe Lightroom.

Open Catalogue…Command-Shift-O (for Command use Ctrl for Windows users)

Grid View…G

Loupe View…E

Compare…C

Survey…N

Show/Hide Toolbar…T

Show/Hide Side bars…Tab

Full Screen Preview…F (note this is new for Lightroom and caught me out)

Next Screen Mode…Shift-F (in older versions this was F)

Add to Quick Collection…B

Group into Stack…Command-G

Flag…P

UnFlag…U

Reject…X

Star Rating…1 or 2,3,4,5

Develop Mode…D

White Balance…W

The majority of Leica rangefinder users tend to only own two modern new lens due to the high price of Leica glass, but many of us have a collection of older classic lens to complement our gear choice.

When choosing rangefinder lens it is very popular today to go for the fastest glass one can afford.  My two fast glass lens are my Leica 50mm Summilux (f/1.4) and my Leica 35mm Summicron (f/2), both the fastest 50mm and 35mm lens I can afford.

Having such light strong lens to quote the term used by Thorsten Overgaard, allows you to use selective depth of field and the lens control light very well, you can often shoot direct into sunlight without risk of flare.

The problem with them is of course price as already mentioned and size, while small compared to modern SLR autofocus lens they are large for rangefinder lens and they often intrude into the viewfinder causing framing issues.

So today more and more photographers are choosing two lens at each focal length, e.g. a 35mm at f/1.4 or f/2 and a smaller cheaper version at say f/2.8 or slower.  These lens are small, allow all the viewfinder to be seen and of course are much cheaper.

I was thinking of blogging about the new D800/D800E replacement, the D810 but many other sites have done it far better reviews, but I did have a few thoughts about it.

See Thom Hogan site for a good review.

The big thing about this update is that they have dropped from two versions to one.  With the new D810 we get a none AA filtered D800E with the improvements we saw in the D4S.

With a sensor at 36 MP it’s going to be rare moiré shows up; in fact I hardly ever see it on my 10 MP non AA Leica M8 plus we now have tools in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to deal with this.

Will I be getting this?  Well maybe, though I might see if I can now pick up a late model D800 but either will have to wait until I have upgraded my computers. At 36 MP these cameras need computers with lots of horsepower and RAM to cope well and process your images speedily.  My late model 2008 MacBookPro is not really up to that.

Ideally I would still love a D800 body with the D4 sensor, a great blend of size, ergonomics and manageable RAW files, but Nikon seem to have forgotten the old D700 user base.

For those of you lamenting no increase in MP from 36, do remember the new 56 MP sensor is still not ready, maybe the D900 in a year or two will have this and computer and memory/harddisk manufactures will rejoice as we all upgrade our computers again.