Family, Photography and other misc news
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.
Its been a stormy and wet weekend. Luckily for us in Lincoln its been nothing like as bad as in the north of England and Scotland. Despite the wind, the Lincoln Christmas Market has been in full swing and the wet cobbles of Lincoln have been packed with shoppers unlike this shot I took a few weeks ago.
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.
Cameras and lens are a bit much but there are some presents that a photography would appreciate.
Here are a few ideas.
A well known news picture agency announced the other week that it would no longer accept Jpegs files from processed Raw files, but only out of camera jpegs with editing consisting of cropping, rotation or colour correction would be allowed.
Many people have issues with digital photography and it not being real, and there is a growing trust issue with more and more newspapers and magazines editing photographs to make them more newsworthy.
Leica M8
Leica Summilux 50mm f/1.4 ASPH 6-Bit
50mm, 1/200 Sec at f/1.5, ISO160
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom CC2015.3
On a MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.11.1
Events are a good place to start, people expect photographers at events.
The above shot was taken at the monthly farmers market in Lincoln, its a more interesting picture because its taken from behind the counter. Shot on my little Leica M4 film camera, the people in it are busy with their shopping and are not noticing me.
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.
So how many lens do you need? On the SLR front I have a wide angle zoom, standard zoom and a telephoto zoom.
Then I have a wide prime, a standard prime, a macro prime and a couple of big telephoto’s.
For my Leica its a bit different. Generally a rangefinder is only good with lens from 28mm to 75mm. Leica make a range from about 21mm to 135mm, but for the extremes you either need to use live view, or an EVF if you have a Leica M (type 240).
I currently have lens from 24mm to 50mm for my Leica with the hope to add a 90mm and possibly a 28mm.
Many people choose a lens for its handling or size, I know a photographer who owns and used two different 28mm. A very small f/2.8 version which is his favourite due to its very small size, but also has a f/1.4 for low light use.
I was hoping that the Leica X rumours were going to be a new X series camera with a viewfinder. Instead it seems the X-U may be a underwater X series camera. A new direction for Leica.