Mostly Digital Photography

I seem to have rather a lot of projects going on at present! Apart from the daily photo projects (three of them!), I’m still working on a video about St Edmund’s church in Dudley, some stills of the church, the easter service there earlier today, DTP of a book for a friend, and various Priory Park projects! Perhaps it is fortunate that the BCLM has not asked me to do any photography there, though of course I still go there (and Dudley Zoo). I try to post these as seems appropriate, but I think that ST EDMUND’S in particular needs a separate section in the photo gallery – if you are looking for images from there (especially the easter ones), at present they are mostly on my Flickr site (see the link to more photos on Flickr in the right-hand column).

When Apple introduced Final Cut Pro X (FCP X) they received a LOT of adverse comment. I’m not a serious video editor, so perhaps my experience does not count, but here are a few personal observations.

Initially I found the move to FCP X quite difficult, as it adopts a distinctly different model from the video editors I had used before. However, I persevered, and I used video tutorials (notably at Lynda.com) to help me to understand it better. I’d used Final Cut Express, Vegas Studio, iMovie, Premiere Elements and other non-Pro video editing software before this. As I said before, I found the move quite difficult, but after using FCP X for a while, I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud, and got access to Premiere Pro. After playing around with this, I find FCP X is actually more convenient in many respects. Yes, I’m sure that really serious pro video people will find things in the Adobe products which they cannot achieve in FCP X, but currently I’m preferring to use FCP X, and although I’m a trivial user compared with the pros, I do want to do a ***LOT*** more than edit family and holiday video, and FCP X seems to do this very effectively for me (of course YMMV).

Or ‘You can’t teach an old dog to do new tricks’?

I know that almost everyone has praised the new Develop module of Lightroom, but I have really found it much more difficult to use than the old one, at least to give me the control I want over my images! Yes, the terminology on the old version was confusing at times, but the new system, and the standard order of making adjustments, just does not work as well for me. The thing I really wanted to see upgraded was how fill light worked, so that the transition could be altered – I always found that with the old version the effect was too broad, and when I only wanted to open up the darker shadows it would open up mid-tones and lighter tones as well. Of course curves are available, and offer lots of control, but I always thought that the fill light effect involved rather more than a simple one or two point curve adjustment.
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We have lost Dr Alex Moulton, Sir Patrick Moore, and Ravi Shankar so far this week. The death of anyone in their 90′s should not be a surprise, but to lose so many major achievers is painful. Dr Alex had the most effect on MY life (I’m an engineer), but they will all be greatly missed. If you want to read the obits, for AM (as many of us referred to Dr Moulton), personally I prefer the one on the Independent web site to the sometimes longer, but, I think, less accurate, ones elsewhere.

Since my last post I have had a week in Assynt in October and a week in the Lake District in November. Both were very enjoyable, but while the weather in Scotland was superb, in the Lake District we had one very good day, and the rest of the time it was mostly heavy rain.

During the Assynt holiday the group agreed to try to produce a book using everyone’s images after the event, and this has taken quite a lot of time, which is partly my excuse for not posting about this trip until now. Some of my own images from that holiday are now in the Landscape section of the Gallery, which you can access from the lists on the right of the screen. The collective, group, book and the associated slideshow have been made available to all who were on the workshop, but to avoid any possible issues of Copyright, image ownership etc, they won’t be made available to anyone else. Many thanks to Duncan McEwan for his wonderfully organised holiday, once again, and to the members of the group who all took part in the book project.

Although the weather for the November vsit to the Lake District was not at all good (heavy rain for most of every day but one), the day when we did have good weather did make up for this, and as always a holiday at LPH was enjoyable, and even if the weather is bad, the cooking is superb! Some images from that holiday are also in the Landscape section of the Gallery on the right of this screen – the fact that I was reduced to photographing one of their cats does indicate how bad the weather was, plus the fact that I got a chance to try out a Nikon 1 J2 that John Gravett received during the week to test. Many thanks to John and Gail once again for a most enjoyable week.

A quick note on cameras – since I was able to get one, the vast majority of the photographs I have taken this year have been produced using the Olympus E-M5. It isn’t perfect, but it is the camera which suits me best, and although I have quite a range of lenses to fit, most of the time the versatile 14-150mm (equivalent to 28-300mm full frame) is all I need, though some of the others (notably the 9-18mm and an older Olympus 4/3 50mm macro) have been used, and just occasionally one of the faster prime lenses.

I’ve been persevering with the Blipfoto project (taking one photograph every day and posting this on the Blip website), but I really have found it quite a chore – some days I get over 10 tolerable images, and the next day I lack inspiration, etc). I’ve also been making more use of Instagram of late (mfh44), though I find the square formt just does not suit many of my images, and actually I shoot many of my images on a conventional camera, rather than a phone, and then transfer them to the iPhone/iPad camera roll afterwards!

I don’t often use my Sony A900 (great camera, but for me it is too big and heavy, especially when you include the size and weight of the lens), and it is 24M pixels. I recently acquired another, rather more modestly sized, Sony which is also 24Mp. When processing these 24Mp images, I’m very conscious of just how much longer it takes to copy the images from the card to the computer (3 times for security), and how much slower the editing is, even with a reasonably fast Mac, barely 18 months old and with 8G of memory. A 16Mp image seems to me to be manageable in terms of speed etc on a computer like mine, but 24Mp brings the computer to its knees. Thank goodness I don’t have a 36Mp Nikon D800. Seriously, as well as these problems that very high res sensors like this create (and I haven’t mentioned the much larger disc storage requirements!), I’m far from convinced I really need more than 16-20Mp in terms of quality, at least the way I use my images.