Nikon D200 SLR
Nikor 12-24mm F/4
14mm, 1 Sec at f/11, ISO100
Processed in Adobe Lightroom V3.4.1
On a Mac MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.6.7
RBPhotographic Shop Coming Soon
You can now see some new links at the top of the page. The most exciting is our new Shop.
The shop is not live yet, were still in the process of setting up, but I hope to go live on 1st July 2011 for USA sales and a few months later for Europe.
Here I will be offering limit edition prints, fine art prints, and free ecards. Have a look and tell me what you think and feel free to try out the free ecards now (not available on all images).
Visit www.rbphotographic.co.uk and the new shop, have a good look round, first ten people to email enquiries with a comment on the new shop will receive a free coupon entitling you to a 50% discount from the shop.
Discounts valid from the launch of the shop for 3 months.
Baby Coots and other Birds
A fairly quiet week photographically but I managed to get all my studio shoots for June all booked up. If your after a portrait session for July feel free to drop me an email
Today I spent the morning with Chris Bennett photographing the local birds round the lake at a local park.
As usual when you plan these things, the light conspired against us but we got a few nice shots.
What was nice to see is that the Coots that were building a nest on the far side of the lake now had young.
Lightroom 3.4.1
Update released for Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Camera RAW.
“Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4.1
The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3.4.1 update includes these enhancements:
• Additional camera support for several new camera models including the Canon Rebel T3i, Nikon D5100 and Fuji FinePix X100
• Corrections for issues introduced in previous versions of Lightroom 3
• The Lightroom 3.4.1 update includes an important correction for a bug introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 release”
HDR in Practical Use
HDR. Usually used when the dynamic range of the view extends beyond the range that your sensor or film can capture.
Its also of use when you want to give a real boost to an image. If you look at the image above, it has a lot of potential but the light is not right. This is where HDR can be used to really give your picture a boost.
That boost that can give an unearthly feel to an image, or a cartoony feel to an image, depending on how you process the files.
When I saw this view I knew that the unearthly feel that HDR can give would give a fantastic looking image.
For my HDR work I use a product called Photomatix2. I make basic adjustments in Lightroom first then, export the files into Photomatix to combine them and produce the HDR file. It is then imported back into Lightroom.
Photomatix has a number of presets such as Normal, Smooth Skies, Painterly and Gunge. For this I picked Grunge, the most over the top option.
The downside of this option is that while it is capable of fantastic and dramatic images, it really makes the greens go completely outrageous.
After giving the image a few tweaks to make the best out of it I then saved it and took it back into Lightroom to fix the Greens and apply a couple of grad filters to darken the sky and the bottom of the picture. All in all just a few minutes work to produce and image that reflects more closely the emotion of what my eyes saw and not what the original capture produced.
Photographic Studio Bookings – a Jigsaw
Sometimes arranging a photographic shoot seems like one big complicated jigsaw.
My availability, the Studios availability, and the models availability; getting it all sorted can sometimes take days. Lets not forget, prop’s that have to be sourced, and sometimes a hairdresser and makeup artist.
One my photographic shoots that I am arranging currently feels just like that complicated Jigsaw.
Luckily I am dealing with a very professional model who understands these things.
Sometimes I think I should just take a pretty girl into a meadow and just shoot with natural light, but then you get weather issues.
99% of photography is nothing to do with taking the actual pictures!
Lightroom plugin for WordPress
Need to get images out of Lightroom and into your WordPress blog?
Terry White might just have found the answer!
Lightroom bug for JPG Shooters
The Adobe Lightroom team issued an important announcement concerning a bug that can affect jpg users.
“The Lightroom and Camera Raw team would like to inform you of a potentially severe bug that was introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 update. Please note that this bug only impacts customers who are saving metadata to JPEG files with a rare characteristic.(JPEG files must have an unusually large block of private camera data included in the file to be susceptible to the bug*) This scenario is so rare that we do not believe that it is necessary for customers who have already upgraded to revert to the previous version of Lightroom or Camera Raw. However, the bug could cause image corruption which falls within our highest severity category of bugs. The team believes it’s very important to notify you of the risk and provide an estimate of when we will be able to deliver a correction in the form of Lightroom 3.4.1 and Camera Raw 6.4.1. We intend to have these updates available by Friday, May 27th.”
Horse Riding on the Beach
Now if you knew me you would know that I am the last person you are likely to see on a horse but our photographic trip to the Outer Hebrides and the chance to ride in the surf on the beach was too good an opportunity to miss.
Caroline being the experienced horse woman was ready to jump straight on a horse and ride on out.
I needed a few lessons round the training circuit before I headed on out.
Caroline took the opportunity to snap a few photographs of me going round the training ring.
This is one of few photographs you will ever see of me on a horse!
Hebridean Wildlife
The purpose of this last photography trip was primary for the wonderful landscape opportunities but I also had a go at Wildlife photography.
Now I am not very good at wildlife photography but I do enjoy it. I did get a few images that I am quite proud but there certainly not good enough to show.
But I know your all dying to see them so I thought I would post just a few, please don’t judge my people and landscape photography by these!
