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The Night Before Christmas

On the Biking Blog “Ride it like you stole it!” which is sadly no more by Dave Dragon, there was a poem “The Biker’s Night Before Christmas”.

I have posted this before but as this is my last post before Christmas I thought it was worth posting again.

 

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the pad,

There was nada happenin’, now that’s pretty bad.

The woodstove was hung up in that stocking routine,

In hopes that the Fat Boy would soon make the scene.

With our stomachs packed with tacos and beer,

My girl and I crashed on the couch for some cheer.

When out in the yard there arose such a racket,

I ran for the door and pulled on my jacket.

I saw a large bro’ on a ’56 Pan

Wearin’ black leathers, a cap, and boots (cool biker, man).

He hauled up the bars on that bikeful of sacks,

And that Pan hit the roof like it was running on tracks.

I couldn’t help gawking, the old guy had class.

But I had to go in — I was freezing my ass.

Down through the stovepipe he fell with a crash,

And out of the stove he came dragging his stash.

With a smile and some glee he passed out the loot,

A new jacket for her and some parts for my scoot.

He patted her fanny and shook my right hand,

Spun on his heel and up the stovepipe he ran.

From up on the roof came a great deal of thunder,

As that massive V-twin ripped the silence asunder.

With beard in the wind, he roared off in the night,

Shouting, “Have a cool Yule, and to all a good ride!”

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Enjoy the Christmas Holiday, we have a little more shopping to do and family and friends coming round over the following days so no more photography until the new year, but I need to find a few spare hours as I have some final post processing to do from my last studio session.

What ever your religion or even none, enjoy the holiday.

 

Bodhi Day

December 8th – On Bodhi day some Buddhists celebrate Gautama’s attainment of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, India.

Hanukkah

December 9th – Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights and marks the restoration of the temple by the Maccabees in 164 BCE. Hanukkah is celebrated at roughly the same time as Christmas, but there is no connection at all between the festivals.

Yule

December 21st – Yule is the time of the winter solstice, when the sun child is reborn, an image of the return of all new life born through the love of the Gods. Within the Northern Tradition Yule is regarded as the New Year.

Christmas

December 25th – The day when Western Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Oshogatsu

January 1st – Shinto New Year, one of the most popular occasions for shrine visits.

Guru Gobind Singh

January 5th – Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) was the tenth and last of the Sikh Gurus. He instituted the Five Ks and established the Order of the Khalsa.

Orthodox Christmas

January 7th – Most Orthodox churches use the Julian rather than the Gregorian version of the Western calendar. As a result, they celebrate Christmas 13 days later than other Christian churches.

Makar Sankranti

January 14th – Makar Sankranti is one of the most important festivals of the Hindu calendar and celebrates the sun’s journey into the northern hemisphere.

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DxOMark results are in for the M10

Leica M8 sample – Fantasy Figure

A lot of people set great store by the DxOMark results but to be honest most camera sensors do a pretty good job now  a days and we are really spitting hairs.

The results also do not really provide a guide to image quality, and can give some odd results, like scoring medium format sensors quite low, giving sensors that use aggressive noise reduction that looses detail in images a better score then those that do not.

As expected the M10 scores well but is not up there with the best of the Canon, Nikon and Sony results, but we do have access to some of the best glass in the world that works better on a M then any other camera.

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The Holidays are Coming! Gardening and DIY

The Christmas holidays are fast approaching; were working the Christmas week so this week is our holiday. The main jobs are tidying the garden, cutting down some of the more overgrown shrubs and starting the clear the bottom corner where we are planning on having our bees.

In the house we have decorated for Christmas and also done a little DIY. The house is flood wired for phone, but we do not use it as we have wireless phones at home. The wiring is old and causes interference, so I have been doing a little rewiring, so only the alarm system is still connected and the rest of the phone sockets can now all be removed when we decorate the house finally.

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Shooting into the Light

When your learning about photography, you get the basic rules.

Rule of thirds, 80/20, shoot with the sun behind you, f/8 and be there. subjects should lead from left to right etc.

The quick snap above which I took on a walk with Timmy the Greyhound across the fields, breaks a few of these.  The most obvious one is that this is shot directly into the sun.

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Adobe Lightroom Classic update

Adobe issued a slight update to Lightroom this week and one of the things they have tweaked is the auto button in the develop settings.

Once you have tried the old auto, you never use it again, it treated all photographs the same and was never worth using; but now Adobe have updated it to use their new AI routines and I have to admit it does and OK job and can make a useful starting point.

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Mobile Work Flow and file name change

I took a few snaps in the coffee shop and decided to take a note of the file names.

As you can see above, the Leica iOS app can see the photographs on the camera and its seeing the correct file name. I downloaded the files to my phone and these were saved to the camera roll app.

I then launched Adobe Lightroom Mobile and imported the images, both jpeg and RAW as I shoot both.

As you can see while the meta data is correct but the file name has changed.  So its not the Adobe app changing the name but likely something forced on the Leica app by iOS when it saves out to the camera roll app.

 

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Leica Strong Growth – Leica Jealousy

Leica M8  – Sea voyage

I find it interesting how some brands attract hatred and jealously.

Apple are certainly one in the computing field and Leica are such a company in the photography business.

This month Leica posted strong revenue growth, with the Leica M, SL and Q doing extremely well.  They managed to grow there market by 6% in a year where the average loss was 10%.

So a company doing well.

The forums were full of hatred, people saying the figures were cooked, that they have never seen a photographer use a Leica or that us Leica’s are all just rich dentists.

Well I helped Leica in there growth this year by purchasing my first new Leica product, the M10, up to now all my Leica gear has been second hand and I have had to save up for many years before I could afford my first new Leica.

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Alternatives to Lightroom

If you have a big investment into Adobe Lightroom, its catalogue and backend database then moving is a difficult thing.

For image editing Lightroom and Capture One are now the big two, with a couple of others coming up quickly.  I generally discount software from the camera companies, its at its best terrible and at its worse a crashing virus on your computer.

I keep reading good things about Capture One and as a PhaseOne medium format back owner I have a license, but I still just use Lightroom.  Fuji users in particular are always singing the praises of Capture One as it took Adobe a long time to come to grips with the X-Trans Sensor that is in the X series DX crop bodies of Fuji cameras.

But I read an interesting article the other day on Photography Life and he points out that Capture One does not support none Phase medium format cameras; something I had not noticed.  It certainly puts me of the product.

I am thinking hard at the moment about my future in 35mm full frame and large format, the Hasselblad may go back to just film use and I may trade in my 35mm Nikon gear and Phase One back for a more modern medium format solution that supports my studio and landscape needs.  With Capture One only supporting PhaseOne on medium format, I will not be making it limit my camera choice, so Adobe have me for a while longer.

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Consistant File Names

Lightroom reporting a different file name then the one on the memory card

If your like me or most professional photographers then you take a lot of pictures when shooting digital.

Being able to find photographs afterwards in your asset management system is important, and with modern meta data and database systems, the actual file name is becoming less important.

Sometimes though the file name is all you have to go on if your using more then one workflow.

With my desktop Lightroom catalogue, the new cloud based Lightroom CC on my laptop, iPhone and iPad, then keeping track of what I have imported and what I have not can get difficult.

At the weekend i’ll be shooting in the studio with several models and using several different cameras.  Afterwards my work flow will be fairly straight forward.

  1. Copy all the cards to the internal SSD of my Desktop Machine
    1. These then will get backed up by my automatic PC backup
  2. Import to Lightroom Classic
    1. This copies the files to my main external Thunderbolt Drive
    2. This also makes a backup copy to Dropbox
  3. Initial metadata and develop by preset
  4. Then sorting out selects and picks to do a final edit on

When I am shooting more informally then the work flow may be the above, but its more likely me just grabbing the card at the end of the day and then copying the files to Dropbox to sort another day.  Or using my iPad SD Card reader and pulling in the photographs to Lightroom Mobile, or even using the Leica Mobile iOS app to pull off the odd photography.

The problem with these other workflows is that sometimes the process, it the Leica App or the iOS operating system itself is changing the file names.  This then makes it difficult to keep track what photographs have been imported into my master library on the desktop machine and what are still to import.  If not careful you can either loose photographs or end up with duplicate shots in your library.