This weekend I spent some time on the streets of Edinburgh. On my Nikon D200, I had what I believe is the perfect walk-around lens, the Nikon 18-200mm VR f3.5-5.6. So I was all set, or so I thought.

I don’t do a lot of candid photography. Most of my images are taken at a much slower pace. I’ll setup and compose the image, usually on a tripod and I’ll take time to consider what camera settings I need for depth of field etc.

Well the setup I used this weekend had two wonderful pieces of technology that conspired against me.

Firstly Auto-ISO. This is one of my favourite features on the D200. Basically you fire in  a maximum ISO setting that you are comfortable with, and then a minimum shutter speed.  The camera will then automatically raise the ISO settings whenever it needs to, based on available light. It’s a great time saver, ensuring you are always using the lowest ISO possible at any given time.

Secondly VR - Vibration Reduction. The VR on my 18-200 is stunning - I’ve got sharp handheld shots at a 1/5th of a second. At 1/30th even on the 200mm telephoto end of the lens, images are nice and sharp. 1/60th is almost guaranteed.

So I was all set - switch on the Auto-ISO to max out at 800 ISO, set the minimum speed to 1/60th and leave the camera on Aperture priority so I could set my depth of field dependent on the situation. I was sorted. Or so I thought.

Candid street photography is fast - or rather the subject is fast - it tends to be moving. However, even the greatest Vibration Reduction system in the world won’t give you a sharp image of someone walking at a brisk pace down the street.  Of the 100 or so shots I took, I had to immediately bin at least 30% for that very reason. How stupid was I. I let the technology sucker me in, make me lazy, and I forgot one of the the basic fundamentals of photography and why shutter speed is so important.

Fortunately I did manage to get some keepers that I ended up being happy with. Including the one above which I’ve titled “Eating Out”.

Here is one from the School of Incredibly Stupid Ideas - By now most fans of Flickr will have spotted that the site now supports the upload of 90 second video clips.  Woop de effing do.

In my mind Flickr is Digital Photography 2.0 - it has helped revolutionise the whole industry and given the photography market, and particularly the DSLR market, a huge boost. It wasn’t that long ago that (film) SLR had almost been completely removed from high street shelves as the joe public preferred 35mm compacts.

With the birth of digital one might have assumed that the trend for smaller form factors would continue - and it did for a while. However, once affordable digital SLR’s like the Canon Digital Rebel and the Nikon D50 came along, things changed as people started to see the huge difference in quality these DSLR’s offered over their compact cousins. Flickr helped that revolution by showcasing photographers and clearly showing what cameras they were shooting on.

Now I’ve already seen some videos appearing in my Contacts photostreams - I am guessing this might break the link I have on my Apple TV.

On the first 10 of the 500 “photos” on the daily explore page, 2 of them were videos.

If this had happened a couple of month after Microsoft completed their proposed acquisition of Yahoo, I wouldn’t have been surprised. To see that it has happened even before Microsucks got their paws on it just exemplifies the sorry state that Yahoo seem to have got themselves in.

My Gran used to say to “always stick to your knitting” - what she meant by that was stick to what you are good at. Flickr should have stuck to photography and leave video to the likes of YouTube et al.

I predict a huge backlash from the photography community here - I hope I am right and that Flickr has a re-think. Please.

A couple of weeks back I posted an article about getting some of my photographs professionally printed and ready for entry into my local Camera Club’s Annual Print Competition.

I just joined the club this year and this was my first real experience of entering competitions.

Well my efforts were rewarded - as luck would have it I ended up winning 1st prize for my image “Suitcase 1519″. The competition was judged by Roy Robertson FRPS.

To say I was well chuffed was an understatement

With Photoshop World running in Orlando this week, Adobe have released a free public beta of Lightroom 2.0.

Key things that are new in version 2:-

• New Library layout
• Collections updated and new Smart Collections options
• New filter bar
• Improved keywording
• Multiple monitors (that will please a lot of people)
• Improved Photoshop integration - no need for PSD or TIFF conversion first - plus you can now open as Smart Objects (Scott Kelby’s 7 step workflow can now be fully utilised)
• Improved Export functionality
• Localised Corrections - correct only specific areas of a picture
• Vignetting now works on cropped images as well - Hallelujah
• Improved printing and print sharpening

The beta can be downloaded from Adobe Labs. Full release notes here.

Note that the beta will not convert or interfere with your live setup or your catalog - the beta cannot convert an existing catalog either. Adobe are obviously playing safe this time after the little hooha over the 1.4 release.

After sitting quiet with Aperture for months, Apple have been pushing updates out in quick succession these past few weeks.

Having made the switch from Aperture over to Lightroom just a few weeks ago myself, I can’t help but look at these updates without a slight hint of concern that I may have perhaps jumped too soon.

The latest 2.1 update has certainly pushed Aperture firmly back into the game with the addition of their new plug-in architecture which I tried out for the first time last night.

My initial thoughts when I read Apple’s press release were FAIL. This just creates a new TIFF file and loads up another image editor on top. It’s no different than the existing round-trip “Edit in Photoshop” capability. Any subsequent edits simply create more versions of the file in TIFF format causing the library to bloat big-style.

Well my assumptions (which I think many share) were wrong.

Apple have solved this round-trip bloatware problem not only for the plug-in architecture - but also for the Photoshop integration. This is superb.

What seems to happen is that any edits in Aperture are handled as if in three distinct, but separate editing groups.

Group 1 - RAW Edits in Aperture

First is the non-destructive RAW editing phase which Aperture handles as per normal. If you then edit via a plug-in OR Photoshop - Aperture then converts this RAW file to a TIFF and burns in the RAW edits up to that point.

For all intents and purposes once you decide to edit externally or via a plug-in Group 1 edits are now locked-off from further editing. (N.B. It creates a new “version” of your file at this point so your RAW file is still available if you wanted to go back.)

Group 2 - Plug-in or External Editing

Aperture 2.1. includes a new Dodge and Burn plug-in which is nice and easy to use. Additional plug-ins are promised from a number of vendors and no doubt we will hear about these in the coming weeks.

So for group 2 editing (which is now on the TIFF file) I do some dodging and burning in the new plug in or do some work in Photoshop.

Group 3 - further edits in Aperture

Lastly, if I so wish, I can still do further edits in Aperture - although the RAW controls have of course now disappeared as I am now working on a TIFF file.

Group 2 and 3 are separate edit “slices”

Now here is where it gets interesting. In the past if I made further edits in Aperture and had to go back to my Photoshop edit, Aperture would create yet another TIFF and open that new file. Not now. Aperture will resume working on the single TIFF file you created at the Group 2 stage.

Even better, Group 2 edits are kept separate. For example, suppose you had done some editing in the group 3 stage on Aperture - perhaps altering the cropping or converting to monochrome - and then realised you wanted to revisit the Group 2 edits. Let’s say I realised I should have ran a gradient filter across the image when I was in Photoshop at Group 2. So I select edit in Photoshop again (or any of the forthcoming plug-ins) and I am back at my original TIFF and it’s exactly how I had left it in Photoshop - i.e. in this case without the crop and still in colour (i.e. no monochrome conversion). That’s cool. It’s as if the Group 2 edit has been pulled back out of the file as a slice - exactly as it was when I last edited it.

So I add my gradient filter and return to Aperture - voila Aperture then re-applies the Group 3 edits and my crop and monochrome conversion to the Tiff are applied again. i.e. it puts my group 2 slice back into the file with the Group 3 edits sitting on top.

It’s excellent. No more having to worry too much about ensuring any Aperture edits are completed before round-tripping to Photoshop or any other plug-in.

I’m not sure of what the limitations of this are - perhaps new plug-ins may have problems working together on this - or perhaps the Photoshop side of things might break it as well. Who knows, it would need more testing. But its a great improvement on how round-tripping worked previously.

Well done Apple.

PS. I’m still sticking with Lightroom though I can’t wait to see what Adobe have up their sleeve now that Apple have raised the bar a bit higher again.

Richard’s site also acts as a fantastic resource for keeping track of all the free Lightroom presets that are out in the wild.

There is also the artistic side of Lightroom presets. A number of vendors and fellow enthusiasts have found some “secret sauce” settings to save as presets which give some really nice effects.

But what do you do if you purchase or download a free preset that doesn’t quite give you the effect you require?

For instance, I am a user of Gavin Seim’s Power Workflow Presets for Lightroom. I really like one particular effect but would like to reduce the Black level that is applied. Perhaps in your case you find a preset adds too much saturation, too little vibrancy, or it does an auto white balance which you don’t like. Well surely it’s easy to fix? - you simply fine tune the develop settings and save it as a new preset. Well you could but how do you know what actual settings are contained within that preset?

An example

To illustrate what I mean, open up an image in Lightroom, create a new virtual copy, switch to Develop mode and apply the built-in “Creative-Sepia” preset. Now, what if you decide you prefer a darker sepia tone? Ok, now go to the Split Toning section of the develop module and move the Highlights Saturation slider up to 60.

Let’s assume that this is the level of sepia tone you prefer and you now want to save that as your own version of the preset. So go over to the Presets list on the left hand side of your screen and click the “+” sign to add a new preset. Give it a name of “My Sepia Tone”, set the folder to User Presets or any other preset folder you prefer - but wait. What “Settings” options do you tick? Well that’s easy isn’t it, we changed a Split Toning parameter so we’ll just tick that. So make sure that is the only “settings” option that is ticked, then click “Create”. A new Preset option will appear in your list of presets in the folder you saved it to.

Now let’s test our preset - go back to your original image (i.e. before you created a new virtual copy) - now create a new virtual copy and apply your new “My Sepia” preset. Not quite what you expected is it. This is where fine tuning presets can get a bit frustrating. Now some of you may be saying that the answer to this is to check all Settings options when creating a preset or adapting an existing one. Well sure that will work, but in the process you may be carrying over settings that you don’t want applied and weren’t in the original preset.

So how do I know what a preset actually contains?

Well this is where you have to delve below the surface of Lightroom and into the file system where Lightroom stores its presets.

Let’s take that original “Creative-Sepia” preset and generate a new copy of it. To do this, right-click on the Preset and select the “Export” option. This will save the preset to a new file. In this case let’s save it to our Desktop. You should now have a file on your desktop called “Creative-Sepia.lrtemplate”. If you now open this file with either Notepad in Windows or TextEdit on the Mac you will suddenly expose the internals of the preset.

The preset template file should look something similar to this:-

s = {
internalName = “Creative - Sepia”,
title = “Creative - Sepia”,
type = “Develop”,
value = {
settings = {
AutoBrightness = false,
AutoContrast = false,
AutoExposure = false,
AutoGrayscaleMix = false,
AutoShadows = false,
AutoTone = false,
BlueHue = 0,
BlueSaturation = 0,
Brightness = 50,
CameraProfile = “ACR 2.4″,
ChromaticAberrationB = 0,
ChromaticAberrationR = 0,
ColorNoiseReduction = 25,
Contrast = 25,
ConvertToGrayscale = true,
Exposure = 0,
FillLight = 26,
GrayMixerAqua = -10,
GrayMixerBlue = 20,
GrayMixerGreen = -17,
GrayMixerMagenta = 32,
GrayMixerOrange = 12,
GrayMixerPurple = 25,
GrayMixerRed = 39,
GrayMixerYellow = -9,
GreenHue = 0,
GreenSaturation = 0,
HighlightRecovery = 0,
HueAdjustmentAqua = 0,
HueAdjustmentBlue = 0,
HueAdjustmentGreen = 0,
HueAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
HueAdjustmentOrange = 0,
HueAdjustmentPurple = 0,
HueAdjustmentRed = 0,
HueAdjustmentYellow = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentAqua = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentBlue = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentGreen = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentOrange = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentPurple = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentRed = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentYellow = 0,
LuminanceSmoothing = 0,
ParametricDarks = -17,
ParametricHighlights = 0,
ParametricLights = 28,
ParametricShadows = 0,
RedHue = 0,
RedSaturation = 0,
Saturation = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentAqua = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentBlue = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentGreen = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentOrange = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentPurple = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentRed = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentYellow = 0,
ShadowTint = 0,
Shadows = 2,
Sharpness = 25,
SplitToningHighlightHue = 51,
SplitToningHighlightSaturation = 22,
SplitToningShadowHue = 37,
SplitToningShadowSaturation = 32,
Temperature = 5550,
Tint = -4,
ToneCurve = {
0,
0,
32,
22,
64,
56,
128,
128,
192,
196,
255,
255,
},
Vibrance = 0,
VignetteAmount = 0,
VignetteMidpoint = 50,
WhiteBalance = “Custom”,
},

},
version = 0,
}

We can now clearly see every specific parameter that is stored in that preset. Each line matches a slider or parameter on the Develop screen. Only those altered by the preset are included in this file. It is fairly easy to decode what setting refers to which slider. So I could print this out and gradually apply each step and see the effect building up and decode the “secret sauce”. If I then want to tweak any settings, I now know what settings within the develop module were actually used and what to save within any new preset.

Taking it a step further

If you are comfortable editing files you can even directly edit the numeric parameters within the file. For example to get the sepia tone I wanted, I would edit the line “SplitToningHighlightSaturation = 22″ and change the 22 to a 60. Then I could save the file (being careful to keep it a plain text file), and import it as a brand new preset with my own fine-tuning and all other original settings remaining intact.

So you can now decode and tweak your presets safe in the knowledge you are only applying the develop settings that are relevant.

As hinted at in my previous post, one of my favourite photoblogs can be found at Chromasia.com.

This multi-award winning site features the work of David and Libby Nightingale who are based in Blackpool, the well-known seaside town in the North West of England. David and Libby commonly feature various Blackpool landmarks in their daily photoblog and being in their area at the weekend

I was inspired to try and emulate one of my favourite images, and also to make an attempt at a “Chromasia-look” preset in Lightroom.

The image featured above is my starting image. As you can see it is taken from a similar viewpoint to the Chromasia original.

(I always struggle with the whole plagiarism thing and where we take photographs from. Clearly I would have never thought of this camera angle if I had never seen the original. But again, I’m trying to emulate the work of a couple of photographers I greatly admire, so it made sense to at least start with the same subject to see how close I can get to the Chromasia “look”. This exercise is not really about the image - I’m trying to teach myself some new techniques in Lightroom and Photoshop. So please excuse the lack of originality here.)

As an aside, Chromasia.com features a series of excellent Photoshop tutorials on their website at only £5 (GBP) per lesson - there is also a free sample tutorial to tryout as well. Their paid downloads also include sample images for you to work on.

This shot was taken on Saturday morning at around 9am - the tide was out, which was fortunate - so I was able to get underneath the North Pier and line up the shot. I took a series of portrait and landscape format images. I’ve chosen the portrait format for this one as I liked the foreground interest in the shot.

Sadly I was not blessed with a very interesting sky - it was very flat and very bright - even using a gradient filter I was still struggling to balance the exposure. I do have a set of 5 bracketed images however, so hopefully I can balance it up by blending a couple of the exposures or using HDR (as Chromasia did) to compress the overall exposure range.

So to take this image forward I’ll need to look at two techniques - firstly the whole concept of HDR, which thus far I have had little success using, and secondly trying to squeeze as many Photoshop tricks as I can into Lightroom to try and make a stab at a preset which would go some way to give me the gritty hard-edged look that I so admire in some of David and Libby’s images.

As I move this image forward I’ll post my results and the techniques used on it.

Update 27/03/08 : As mentioned if anyone wants the original set of 5 bracketed RAW images to have a go at a similar preset they can now be downloaded here (n.b. this is a 50MB download!)

I was camping down in Chromasia country (Blackpool and Fleetwood) this weekend and took an early morning trip out to see the Riverdance ferry/cargo ship which had ran aground on Cleveleys beach recently. It has been there since the 31st of January after being hit by a freak wave on its way back from Northern Ireland to Heysham near Morecambe.

There had been hopes that this ship could be refloated but just this weekend they announced that it would never sail again - primarily due to recent bad weather which has hampered salvage attempts and continued to damage the ship.

Being just a mile or so from the tourist mecca that is Blackpool, the ship has became quite a popular tourist attraction itself.  I was out there at around 7:30 in the morning and there was just the usual dog-walkers and a couple of fellow photographers on the beach. However I passed by the wreck the following day at around 3pm and there was a very large crowd of onlookers perched on the seafront try to get a good view.

I took a series of photographs, but the wind was almost gale force and bitingly cold. Needless to say even on a solid tripod, it was a struggle to get a sharp picture.  It was also difficult to get close to the wreck as Coastguard security were keeping onlookers quite a distance from the ship.