Richard & Caroline's Blog

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.

As I am sure you are all aware, Nikon today announced the D800.

In many ways a great camera, but it’s not a D700 replacement, but more of a cheaper smaller D3X. In many ways it is ahead of the D3X.

At 36MP it’s in medium format quality range. For people who cannot justify the cost of Medium Format is a very cheap alternative.

Its no speed freak, at 4 frames per second but then it is not really targeted at the photo journalist or sports photographer. This is more a studio or landscape camera.

One of the things that makes this camera of interest to me, is that it comes in two version. The standard D800 and the D800E.

As I have mentioned before in a previous post https://brown-family.org.uk/?p=3568, there is a filter covering the sensor on most digital cameras that actually reduces the resolution of the image. Nikon have taken the brave move of releasing a version of the D800 without this filter, this is the D800E. I love studio work but cannot afford or justify yet digital medium format, this could be a viable alternative.

Theres a few more details on Chris Bennet’s Blog.

I keep reading about people who do 365 projects, and I have certainly been impressed with the standard and dedication.  I had a go a couple of years a go and managed about two weeks.  In case your wondering a 365 project is where you take a photograph a day for an entire year.  Many people take self portraits for a whole year, but I feel that would be too unkind for my poor readers.

Last year I tried a small week long project and just managed to pull it off.

This time I thought I would really go for it.  I doubt i’ll pull of the year but I have managed the first month, so here it is, one picture a day for a whole month.  Most of them are not pretty but at least I have managed to put something up.

You can check them all out here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbphotographic/sets/72157629125590377/

Below are the better ones.