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Tour de Yorkshire (France) – or back on the bicycle again

Well the Tour de France has come to the UK again, and this looks like the best tour yet for us.  Cycling was mainly for kids when the tour first came to the UK 40 years ago back in 1974.  A very few strange people cycled for holidays and some people commuted to work but the car was taking over.

Over the last ten years cycling has become incredibly popular in the UK and as a sport its something we are now world leaders in.

So where are we going with this.  Well it may come to a surprise to people who have known me for that last twenty years but once I was a very keen cyclist and would happily jump on my bicycle and do a seventy mile ride round some of Lincolnshire.

When I moved into my flat my bicycle was stored in my mothers shed for ten years and then at the old house it sat at the back of the garage for another ten years.

Me and Caroline did get the bikes out once and do a ten mile ride but with the garage full of motorcycles and garden tools it was always to much bother to get them out.

Now we have moved into the new bungalow with lots of room the bicycles are stored in the garage but are easy to get to, so with that in mind during the two week holiday we recently had, one of our tasks was to get them roadworthy again.

A bit of a strip down, degrease, grease then oil with a full clean, new lights, locks and mudguards, I have been gradually turing my old racer into more a sensible commuter.

We first did a quick five mile cycle round to the next village and back, just to make sure the bicycles were working well, then with a few tweaks, such as new mountain bike SPD peddles and cycling shoes we have been off.

Gradually working up to a gentle twenty five miles a week, usually with a quick ride on Monday and Friday nights, today with the Tour de France as our inspiration we went a little further a field and explored some of the further villages as well as the local Whisby Nature Park.

With my iPhone mount on the handlebars I had a cycling computer app installed tracking our route and facts about the journey.

A gentle afternoon cycling turned into a twenty one mile trip so with the fourteen miles done on Monday exploring a local disused railway line that has been turned into a cycle path leading to the city we managed thirty five miles this week.

Nothing compared to what the Tour de France guys did today and will do every day but a great start to getting us both fit again.

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Adobe Lightroom Shortcuts

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

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Range Finder Lens Choice – why two of each

Leica M with EVF and R Series Adapter
Leica M with EVF and R Series Adapter

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.

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Open Garden’s

Many of our local villages have open gardens events.

With our current garden, it is well designed and well established from all the hardwork of the previous owners but we are starting to put are own stamp on it.

The great thing about open garden events is you can borrow ideas and many of the owners are always keen to offer advice.

gardens-2 gardens-3 gardens

The local villages around here had a wide variety of gardens from more traditional lawns, wild areas, roomed gardens and even one had a wild meadow at the bottom.

After our walk round we finished off with tea and cake at the church.

 

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Nikon’s D810 Announcement

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.

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Adobe Photoshop Shortcuts

CompositI love command line shortcuts and most apps have keyboard shortcuts to speed up your work flow.

Most people know that Command-S ( Ctrl-S for Windows) saves a document and is much faster then taking your hands off the keyboard to reach for the mouse/trackpad.

Here are a few common ones I use when editing documents in Photoshop.

New…Command-N (for Command use Ctrl for Windows users)

Open…Command-O

Save…Command-S

Undo…Command-Z

Step Back…Shift-Command-Z

Copy…Command-C

Free Transform…Command-T

New Layer…Shift-Command-N

Layer via Copy…Command-J (feels like my most often used command)

Merge Visible to new Layer…Shift-Option-Commamd-E (Option is Alt in Windows)

Lasso Tool…L

Spot Healing Brush…J (Toggle to different heal brushes Shift-J)

Brush…B

 

Some of these options are also programmed into my Wacom Tablet and Pen to speed up my work flow.  The key is to just find a few things you do a lot and then learn the shortcut for them, its amazing how much time you can fine yourself saving.

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So why did Adobe install another copy of Photoshop on my Laptop

With the recent Adobe updates, I find I now have three copies of Photoshop on my laptop, which with its limited disk space, is an issue. You think you would get option to replace or keep both in case you have lots of plugins.

With Adobe CC we were promised regular updates instead of the traditional release cycle of eighteen to twenty four months, instead we seem to have had this big new version dumped on our machines.

A lot bloggers are commenting on this, some of the best comments I saw was from Scott Kelby on his blog.  It turns out we have had a lot of updates but there has not been much of a song and a dance about them.

Lightroom – So what did we get in Lightroom V5?

Heres the gist straight from Adobe’s release notes:

Release Notes

New Camera Support in Lightroom 5.5

  • Canon PowerShot G1 X Mark II
  • Fujifilm FinePix S1
  • Nikon 1 J4
  • Nikon 1 S2
  • Nikon 1 V3
  • Olympus OM-D E-M10
  • Panasonic DMC-GH4
  • Pentax 645Z
  • Samsung NX3000
  • Sony DSC-RX100 III
  • Sony A7S (ILCE-7S)
  • Sony Alpha SLT-A77 II (ILCA-77M2)

New Lens Profile Support in Lightroom 5.5

Mount Name
Canon   Sigma 50m F1.4 DG HSM A014
Canon   Sigma 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 DC MACRO OS HSM C014
Canon   Tamron 16-300mm F3.5-6.3 Dill VC PZD MACRO B0163
Fujifilm   Fujifilm Tele Conversion Lens TCL-X100
Nikon   Nikon 1 NIKKOR VR 10-30mm f3.5-5.6 PD-ZOOM
Nikon   Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-300mm f/3.5-6.3G ED VR
Nikon   Sigma 50mm F1.4 DG HSM A014
Nikon   Sigma 18-200 F3.5-6.3 DC MACRO OS HSM C014
Nikon   Tamron 16-300mm F3.5-6.3 Dill VC PZD MACRO B016N
Nikon   Tamron SP 150-600mm F5-6.3 Di VC USD A011N
Pentax   Sigma 30mm F.14 DC HSM A013
Sigma   Sigma 50mm F1.4 DG HSM A014
Sigma   Sigma 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 DC MACRO OS HSM C014
Sony Alpha   Sigma 30mm F1.4 DC HSM A013
Sony Alpha   Sony Alpha 28-75mm F2.8 SAM

Bugs Corrected in Lightroom5.5

  • Improved responsiveness in Develop module while Lightroom mobile sync is occurring.
  • Custom Develop module default settings were not syncing correctly to Lightroom mobile.
  • Initial rendition in Develop would sometimes appear posterized.
  • Undo function failed and applied a preset instead.
  • Scaling looked inaccurate when scaling to 200% in Windows.
  • Manual slideshows sometimes did not advance to the next slide as expected.
  • Aspect ratio changed when modifying the crop rectangle and when rotating the crop
  • Image flips between portrait and landscape after switching orientation while shooting tethered with Leica S cameras.
  • Fixed issue with Fujifilm X-T1 raw images appearing too bright at high ISO settings when using Dynamic Range 200% and 400%. Unfortunately, this fix may affect the appearance of existing images captured with this combination of settings. It is recommended that you (1) purge the Camera Raw cache via the Preferences dialog, and (2) review images shot at ISO settings higher than 1600 for unexpected brightness changes.
  • Fixed image quality issue (noisy result) when applying spot healing to floating-point (HDR) images.
  • Fixed issue with reading lossless compressed Nikon raw files (NEF files) from the camera models listed below. Previously, some images could be read but would appear as random noise, whereas attempting to open others would result in an error dialog. You will need to purge your Camera Raw cache via the Preferences dialog.
    • Nikon D1
    • Nikon D1H
    • Nikon D1X
    • Nikon D2H
    • Nikon D2Hs
    • Nikon D2X
    • Nikon D2Xs
    • Nikon D100
    • Nikon D200
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Adobe CC 2014 now released

Lightroom V5.5

Last week we had lots of Adobe updates and along with the updates CC2014 was announced, so I promptly downloaded the new Photoshop and gave it a quick test from a studio shoot I did a couple of weeks ago.

I only used the features I am used to so did not notice any major changes yet but i’ll be giving it a better test later.

We also had Adobe Lightroom V5.5 and updates to Lightroom Mobile with is now being available for iPhone users.

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Day Trip to Whitby

So what else have we been up to.  Well last week to have a break from all the work we had been doing at home we had a quick blast up the east coast and over the Humberbridge to Scarborough and Whitby.Whitby-2

It was a great day and despite the weather forecast for rain we managed to miss the bad weather, though we did have to ford across some flooded roads, but what better way then on a BMW GS motorcycle.

WhitbyI took the little Nikon V1 with me and grabbed the odd shot with the 30-110mm lens (90-300mm.