Category: Photography

First an apology, the idea behind this photo is a blatant rip off from one Chris Bennet took last year.

Often when out at a lake or river, people come along and start to feed the birds, the ensuring flock of birds wheeling around can be a great opportunity.

When you get home and review your shots you generally find a lot of blurred unsuitable photographs, but sometimes within that blurred set is something that does look interesting.

In the shot above it has a lot to recommend it.  It was a shame that the main bird was not central and I just cut off its feet.  I have added more blur in post production and some vignetting to draw the eye to the centre.  Overall a nearly shot.

I found out from my good friend and fellow photographer Chris Bennett that Scott Kelby is coming back to the UK with his Light It! Shoot It! Retouch It! tour.

I have the book and its a great guide and useful for anyone who shoots people.

This weekend I made one of my occasional visits to Hartsholme Park.

The weather indicated that Sunday would be best, so on a bright but cold Sunday morning I headed off with my big Gizo tripod and an SLR with my longest/fastest lens.  In this case a Nikon D200 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 with a TC14 teleconverter attached.  This gave me a reach of up to 420mm.

Wildlife and Sports are two of the hardest photographic skills to master.  Subjects often far away and fast moving.  Its less how good your camera is but more how familiar you are with your subject and your camera.

I tend to customise my camera somewhat.  I turn off the focus activation from the shutter button and have it set to the AF button of the back.  I also reduce the number of active focus sensors available to the camera so that it will not get to confused and can concentrate its resources to a few key sensors.

Its great to see Fuji really making a comeback in the camera market. I was incredibly excited when the large sensor’ed compact X100 was announced. Having given it a try, its very close to a perfect small compact. For my large hands the aperture ring was a little difficult to operate, and a number of users have reported that its focus can be a little hit and miss, but it is a camera I love, though I do not own it.

They followed this with the X10, which in many ways I found most impressive. Unfortunately it suffers from the problem of most compacts. a tiny sensor that is prone to noise.

The X-Pro1 is what many people wanted the X100 to be, and really is aimed at the Sony NEX-7 and also the Leica M8/9 users.

At £1500 for the body and the lens coming in at about £500 each in the UK, its not a cheap system, but with Fuji’s history the lens are likely to be better then Sony’s.

Fuji’s Medium format and Large format lens are up there with the very best.

The concern is going to be the performance, the X100 was a little disappointing and Nikon has proven with the Nikon V1, that performance can be stella from a none SLR type camera.

If you love Black and White then Nik software’s Silver FXPro is the go to program.  A lot of my favourite images have been edited in this software.  Its a relatively easy way to produce great Black and Whites.

The Black and White snow scene I posted yesterday was just a straight Adobe Lightroom V3 conversion to Black & White from a Nikon V1 RAW file.  The original intention was to get a sunset shot and have the windows of the buildings on the hill reflecting the brilliance of the sunset.

Unfortunately it just did not work, so I tried a quick Black & White, and this I feels works much better.  Generally I try to decide if a shot is going to be colour or monochrome, before I shoot, but sometimes you don’t know what is going to work until you get back to the office and start processing your images.

The shot above is another image from the same day, again meant as a colour shot, and as a colour shot it works very well, but I wanted to do some testing of the Black & White conversion within Adobe Lightroom V4 Beta to see how it stacks up.

I am quite impressed and feel its done a great job.  I’ll try a few more images and see how they work out, but if your into Black & White, Lightroom V4 maybe all you need.

As you can see above LR3 does not do a bad job either.

Its been a cold last few days, too cold and icy to get out to do much photography, but I went for a short walk last Friday and took a number of quick snaps of the snowy scene.

On Sunday the temperature really warmed up and now the snow is going fast.  At least that means an easy motorcycle commute tomorrow.

One of the advantages or is that a disadvantages of living in the British Isles is that the extremes of weather do not last long.

Cliff Mautner the award winning Wedding photographer has been luckily enough to be lent a D800 to test.

Heres a few pictures from his blog, enjoy.

http://www.cmphotography.com/blog.cfm?postID=46&its-here-the-nikon-d

With the camera show season starting today in Japan with the Camera and Imaging Show, the new cameras are now coming thick and fast.

Earlier in the week it was the fantastic Nikon D800, yesterday Olympus announced the OM-D, playing on their OM legacy.

The OM series of cameras most would say, peaked with the OM 4ti, a fantastic camera, with some of the most advanced metering and flash ever seen, some would say we still don’t have metering as good as this now.

The new OM-D E-M5 model is actually a lovely little micro four thirds camera with built in EVF, finally I hear the cry.  The major reason I picked a Nikon V1 over the arguably better micro four third cameras was the built in EVF.

With a metal body and weather sealing I hope it sells well.  I have never owned an Olympus camera, but they have produced many classics which have come to close to tempting me, most recently with the Pen range.  This again I feel comes close but i’ll have to try it in my hand first.