Family, Photography and other misc news
I love going to the cinema but rarely find the time now. Its also far less enjoyable, our local major multiplex is soulless and very expensive.
The last film we went that we really enjoyed was Joss Whedon’s Much ado about Nothing which was played at a local college.
I would love to see the new Starwars movie so I am hunting down small local theatres in Lincolnshire that may be showing it.
I love music, and used to play the guitar and currently play the banjo and piano. I now have my Hifi setup in the end room which has been turned in a music/library/studio room.
I also have some decent powered speakers in my office linked to my MacPro and my iTunes library which mostly consists of ripped CD’s. Where we listen to the most music is in the kitchen which with our love of cooking and baking we both spend a lot our time.
For my birthday last year we have had a Sonos One in here, its pricey for what it is but does perform very well and needs little else to make it work. It came with one years free Deezer subscription which is now coming to an end, and so I was pleased to see that Apple music in beta has now arrived for the Sonos. Once my Deezer subscription expires i’ll give the Apple music a trial and see how that goes.
The think to remember with most of these streaming systems is you need to invest in the time and energy to let the service learn about your musical tastes. Of course once a service is setup how you like its hard to move and go through that again which is what most of them are hoping.
Fix lens compacts are becoming more common again. In the film days we had a wide choice of small 35mm full frame compacts, but it was Sony with its RX1 that re-introduced this format to the digital age.
Most of the short comings over the original Sony RX1 have now been overcome with the latest version and since the originals introduction we now also have the Leica Q in the game.
The Sony uses a 35mm lens and the Leica a 28mm, I have shot with both focal lengths and generally prefer the 35mm, but the 28mm is growing in popularity, driven by all those iPhone photographs that appear on Flicker and Instagram. The iPhone with its tiny sensor is 28mm equivalent so its a field of view were are getting used to.
When I manage to get my full frame digital Leica M, I may just get a 28mm, it can force you to get closer and try more interesting compositions.
The word cheap and Leica rangefinder don’t really belong together but there are ways to get into the system and it not cost an exorbitant amount.
The first way is what I have done and bought one of the original Leica M8.2’s. These at base ISO are still very good. Then over the last few years look out for secondhand bargains for lens.
The other way requires a high initial outlay. The camera above is a Leica special edition. It’s the latest M-P in green, a limited edition box set with a lens and it’s cheaper then an M with this lens bought separately.
This being a special edition is likely to keep its value much better and you can sell it to a collector when you come to upgrade.
If you want good contrast and soft light and shadow in your studio flash photographs the key is to get the light close to your model.
The light here is very close to the model, a very large soft box above the model giving strong directional light, but with very gentle soft shadows, this is caused by the light being so close to the model. The camera was a Nikon D200 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom shot at about 90mm. This shot is straight from camera with my Default Lightroom D200 People pre-set applied. This applies a little sharpening and a mask, a little contrast and some fill. As its stands its pretty good, but I wanted to clean up the skin a little so it needed a round trip to photoshop.
To make the Photoshop work a little easier I dropped the contrast and slightly brightened the image, then it was off to Photoshop.
This is an old image but I wanted to see what the latest version of Photoshop could do with it. With the skin cleaned up I whitened the eye and darkened the pupil a little, added a touch of blur to the skin to soften it then darkened the background.
Then back to Lightroom, for a final finish; add contrast, a make the image a touch darker and then crop.
All in all a quick edit and I have to admit Photoshop is getting faster at this kind of thing. Most of this I could have done in Lightroom but taking it to Photoshop and using layers just made it faster and easier.
So with the release of iOS 9.2 we finally got the ability to use the Camera Connection kit on our iPhones and I have to admit its about time Apple. While the iPad does make more sense for this kind of work, for those of us with iPhone 6Pluses it can be useful.
This afternoon I set about testing it out.
A quick walk around the wet streets of Lincoln soon gave me a small selection of images. Back at my desk the memory card came out of the camera in was plugged into the phone. Into the photo app to import the shots then into Lightroom Mobile for a bit of an edit. The top shot is the results.
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.