Family, Photography and other misc news
At the bottom of Strangford Lough on the east coast is the little town of Portaferry, here we caught the ferry to Strangford to visit Castle Ward.
Before we headed over we had a good walk round. Its quite a photogenic little town and worth a look round even if you are only going there to catch the ferry.
While on holiday in Ireland I only had the iPad available to me as my main computing device.
Each day I backed up my photographs and imported them into PhotoSmith so I could add metadata to them.
After my visit to National Trust Village of Kearney which was my first photographic trip of the holiday I backed up to the iPad as usual and then tried to import them into PhotoSmith, but all I got was blank images. I then tried my favourite iPad RAW processor, PhotoRaw. This had the same problem.
So I put the memory card somewhere safe and put in a fresh formatted one. For the rest of the holiday things were fine, so I suspected a faulty memory card. Once I got home I imported and synched everything up to my master Lightroom catalogue. My laptop had no trouble reading the first memory card.
So what was the issue, well it turns out there is a bug in iOS8 at the moment, which causes issues if you shoot RAW+JPG. It turns out by coincidence that the first days shoot was which the camera set to RAW+JPG, but the following days shooting was RAW only thus I did not have the problem.
Hopefully iOS8.1 will fix this issue.
Our first trip out, took us to the National Trust Village of Kearney on the east coast of Strangford Lough. At the time the sun had not yet come out, so here is my desaturated photograph of the village. I have also added a colour tint, brown to the shadows and blue to highlights, this has given it a bit of a older film feel.
With the Ireland trip being for pleasure I can forgo my normal strict photography practice and play around with the photographs a lot more. After importing them into Lightroom on Monday I looked at the shots that I had specifically intending to work on in Photoshop.
I took photographs to post process using three techniques while away:
The techniques involved are broadly similar so I thought today I would show you one of the panoramic shots I took.
Now today many cameras do in-camera panoramic’s but these leave you with a jpeg file, what I like is starting with raw files. To do a really good job you can get a pano head for your tripod but these are all shot handheld.
As you can see I took six shots with a good deal of overlap, all as RAW. The final shot was just a marker so I new where the set ended. Its just a shot of the palm of my hand at the maximum shutter speed to make a dark frame.
After a very basic edit in Lightroom all six images were opened as layers in Photoshop using the Lightroom Merge to Panoramic in Photoshop command. This created image at the very top.
Seems odd to start a blog entry about my recent holiday, titled leaving Ireland, but yes we are now home again and I have spent most of today GPS tagging my photographs, importing them into Lightroom and of course backing everything up.
As always when I take a boat trip to some of the other British Isles, I like to spend sometime on deck if the weather is suitable and take a few photographs of other passengers looking out to sea at the views. My little Leica is ideal for this kind of thing, as are most small mirror-less cameras.
So to wet your appetite for some of my Irish photographs I’ll leave you this with one.
I have just spent the week in Ireland and Scotland on a photography trip. I was travelling light, with just the Leica M and iPad.
One of things I often like to do is log the GPS co-ordinates into my metadata. Now many compacts now have built in GPS but for more advance systems this is either missing or requires an add on. Nikon and Canon do a plugin to the hot shoe, the Leica T for instance has a GPS built into the external EVF. One of the handgrips available for the Leica M 240 has GPS built in.
There are other ways to get the data in and both myself and Chris Bennett use GPS4Cam a simple little iPhone utility.
While shooting in Ireland, I did a little testing with the camera set up in different ways, so sometimes I shot RAW+JPG and other times just RAW. The camera is faster and more responsive just shooting RAW but I also often like to have a JPG in Black & White to evaluate along side the RAW.
While sorting out the images back home I discovered that the GPS4Cam desktop client was unable to read the Leica RAW files, now these are standard DNG’s not proprietary. It has in the past had no trouble at all with Nikon proprietary NEF RAW files so I did not expect this.
The solution was quick and easy, just open up the Q code image in Photoshop via CameraRaw and save as a jpeg, then it had no issues.
So has the Photokina announcements given me GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome).
Well yes it has. The Panasonic LX100 / Leica DLux and the Leica X are top of my tree but the M-P (240) is also up there.
We rarely need new cameras now, most cameras in the last three years are excellent and the improvements in image quality are very minor. Buying a new camera now is all about what inspires you and will make you go out and take more pictures.
We are often better off keeping our old cameras and learning how to use them better but a new camera can inspire ones photography, the trick and the difficulty is finding the camera that truly inspires and not one that interests you just because its new.
A difficult choice, now wheres the credit card 😉
Leica M8
Leica 24mm f/3.8 Elmar-M
24mm, 1/125 Sec at f/4.8, ISO160
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom V5.6
On a MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.9.4
The original X1 was one of the first large sensor’ed compact cameras, Sigma were the first and this came just afterwards. For many this was the preferred option, traditional digital cmos sensor and simple direct controls. It had issues, the first being slow autofocus, poor manual focus implementation and no viewfinder but the quality lens and sensor produced great images.
The X2 was a disappointment, a minor improvement but by then a number of companies had released similar cameras and now Fuji had there fantastic X100, also with direct controls and a fast f/2 lens and a real viewfinder. Yes it also had focus issues but it also had come great features.
At Photokina the other week, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, Leica released the third version of the fixed lens X, this time badged just Leica X type 113.
It seems they have learnt from their previous mediocre upgrade and really gone to town with this one.
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/6139702522/leica-announces-updated-x-typ-113-with-f1-7-lens
It still does not have a viewfinder but Leica do an optical viewfinder for it, plus you can use the external EVF from the Leica T series, this particular EVF has the neat trick of having a GPS receiver built into it.
The camera features a lot of ergonomic features of the X Vario and includes the neat auto-manual focus design, so you can finally focus manually with the excellent well damped lens. The lens is also the fastest in its class at f/1.7.
I have read some of the beta tester reports and the image quality looks good so look forward to when Steve Huff gives a real world test.
It has neat looks and I find myself really wanting to try this together with the D Lux they released. I feel a bit GAS coming on.
I have my photographs all in a single master Lightroom catalog not counting my yearly backup catalogues, and for me that works well.
My main computer is also my laptop and it’s getting on a bit now so I have started to think about either replacing it or supplementing it with a new desktop.
I’ll need to keep the laptop and would also like to use Lightroom on it too.
This brings up the issue of operating with two Lightroom catalogues and keeping work in sync.
After the Collingham show I decided to give a two catalogue two computer workflow ago.
I borrowed Caroline’s MacBookPro, logged in and created a blank Lightroom catalog, I then dragged and dropped my Lightroom settings folder into the Catalog folder from Dropbox where a script I have keeps it all in sync.
This then quickly and easily gave me a working environment just like my machine.
Now for the easy part, import the Collingham pictures and get editing. I used my presets for an initial edit and gave them a quick rank, then selected my picks with the flag option.
Now to get them onto my main computer.
I exported all the photographs as a fresh catalog so as to preserve the original to the desktop folder on the laptop included raw files.
If I do adopt a two machine strategy I’ll create a shared area on the main desktop computer to put the files onto but for this test I just used AirDrop and dragged and dropped the exported folder to my main machine.
Now time to start work on my main machine.
First job was to launch Lightroom and import the catalogue and files, I now had everything up to date and in the master catalogue. I then did a little editing on a couple of the picks.
Later that evening I picked up Caroline’s laptop and launched my Lightroom with the small catalogue just containing the Collingham pictures and reviewed them again. I found a couple more picks and did a quick edit on them.
Now this was the interesting bit. I had two Lightroom catalogues on two different computers, both with different edits. Could Lightroom cope.
Once again I exported the Lightroom catalogue but this time only exported the database not any files, they were already on my main machine and if any metadata updates in the case of jpegs or dng’s had taken place the overwrite could loose me data (Note I sometimes shoot RAW + JPG but never just JPG).
Again I transferred the database over using airdrop, a very useful and fast way of transferring documents on a adhoc nature if your on the same local network.
Now for the import on my master catalogue, first job, backup my master catalogue, just in case it went horribly wrong. Then for the import, how would it handle duplicate entries?
Well it turns out very well, as you can see above there is a tick box to preserve the duplicated files as a virtual copy. Also my fear of overwriting the files and not exporting the actual files is not an issue as the database can also be imported at this point with the option to bring in Metadata and develop settings only and not the original files if you so wish.