 
Well, I went on my camera club's annual fall colors workshop. I didn't get to go to the full week-long workshop, but I did get to go for a few days and had a blast taking photos and fellowshipping with good photography friends. We stayed in a log cabin house that was very large and nice where the dozen of us stayed. We had an itinerary of places to go all week long rising up early in the morning and coming home late. These workshops are really "work," but they are fun also. Waterfalls and fall colors are our goal, but we try to do new things also. This year we did light painting with waterfalls which was a new adventure for us, but it turned out well. I always try new things while on the workshop and really decided to go fully to mirrorless and to a crop ASP-C sensor on one of these workshops. Every year I have failures and successes and really learn a lot from both. I had no real hard failures but had a couple of surprise successes.
The first was my lens arrangement that I was to take and use while there. My main lens, a Sony-Zeiss 16-70 f4 lens, didn't change. It was wonderful and I got some great shots with it. It had a polarizer on it most of the time because of shooting around water and we had some rain that would have produced a lot of glare. I probably used this lens 80-90% of the time, and it was sharp and quick. My long or telephoto lens was a 70-200mm f4 Canon L lens, a great lens, and it really worked well. I am using a Metabones adapter to fit it to my camera and it works well. Maybe not as fast as a native lens, but it works well for me and it's sharp. I brought a Sony 35mm f1.8 and I never took it out of the bag. Then it comes to my real dilemma, which wide angel to use. I originally intended to use only a Rokinon 12 mm f2 lens but then thought about the Sony 10-18mm f4. I went back and forth many times, packing one to go on the trip and then the other. I finally decided to take both since I was driving and storage space was not a priority. I did take both but only used one, the Sony 10-18 f4. It was sharp, fast, and made beautiful photographs. I was very pleased. This is a lens that I haven't used too much before and was actually thinking of selling it. But no more. It will be in my bag for a long time. It gave me some of my best photographs of the whole trip. The Rokinon is a great lens, and I will keep it for astro photography because of its wide aperture.
My next biggest experiment was to go without a laptop and only use an iPad. This was not the success that I thought it would be. I was using a 10.5 inch iPad Pro 2018 model. It worked well enough but wasn't the laptop that I enjoy using. I also like to use Luminar 3 photo editing software in conjunction with Lightroom, and I couldn't use it with my iPad. I was also using Lightroom or the mobile version of Adobe Lightroom Classic, which is not as strong of a program as the classic version. I joined the iPad with a WD Passport SSD Pro which is a Wifi enabled SSD hard drive that I could hook up the iPad with. The drive worked well. The only problem I had was operator error, but I learn quickly. The iPad did work okay, but I much prefer editing on a laptop. My travel laptop is a MacBook Air and, although not as powerful as a MacBook Pro, it does work well and is lighter. So on my next big outing the MacBook Air will be the computer of choice for my editing of images.
My next experiment was to use screw-on filters instead of the 100mm Lee filter system I have used in the past. These filters are a smaller and more compact choice and match up well with my Sony mirrorless system. The brand that I used was Breakthrough Photography Circular Polarizer and Neutral Density filters. I got one set of polarizer and a 3 stop Neutral Density at 72mm, the largest size of any lens I have, and use step-up rings to attach to different lenses. I only used this combination one time as it was cloudy or overcast, and I only needed my polarizer most of the time. It worked very well and will be my system of choice for my small mirrorless system.
My last experiment was letting my camera sync with my phone via bluetooth to get GPS information. This was the biggest success of all of my photo experiments. It worked flawlessly, and all of the photos that I took with my Sony A6500 I can go to the map section of Lightroom and see where I took them. This is a very useful tool to have in my toolbox. As a landscape photographer, I can easily forget where I took a photograph. But with the GPS info embedded into the metadata, I won't have this problem again.
The only thing that didn't work well was that I had to leave early and couldn't stay the whole week long. It was a sad day when I had to drive home the last day knowing all of my photo buddies were still there having a photo adventure. One of the best things I ever did was to join a photography club. If you ever have the chance, please do so. If you live in eastern NC, come visit GAPC (Goldsboro Area Photography Club). We meet once a month and have workshops and outings every month. We have one big trip per year (week long), and we participate in Help Portrait, a program where photographers give back to their community. Well, that's enough for now. Get out and shoot!
Wow! It's been a long time since my last posted blog. I've had a lot of family things going on and really haven't had the time or the motivation to do a blog. It's been kind of a ho-hum year, but I did just get back a couple of weeks ago from a trip to Washington DC where my wife and I spent the week. I took a little point and shoot with me, a Canon G7X Mark II, a 20 megapixel one-inch sensor camera that did well for most of my snapshots, and I only missed my Sony a couple of times. This coming weekend I'm going to the mountains with my camera club and am really looking forward to shooting again. Really the DC trip got me out of my funk and got me motivated to shoot again. I did add a camera to my photography kit, a Sony A6500 that I bought used from a club member that upgraded to the full sensor Sony. I have been shooting the Sony A6300 which has the same sensor as the A6500, but the newer camera has a couple of other features that I was looking for. The first was the in-body stabilization (IBS). I have been wanting this for a while. Also, it has a touch screen, but it's only used for moving
the focus point around. I got spoiled using the Canon point and shoot because the touch screen is very nice and versatile on it, unlike the Sony. It also has bluetooth, something I didn't know I wanted. Seems I can use this feature to pair to my phone and send the GPS coordinates to my camera so they can be recorded in the metadata of the photo. Very cool. The newer Sony can
also buffer more shots than the 6300 can that could be helpful. So anyway back to the trip to the mountains. Here are some of the things that I will be trying out while there.
The GPS function that I mentioned before I will try, and hopefully it will work seamlessly. On my test today it worked well. So I hope to have GPS on all of my photos in the future to help me figure out where I took that shot. My lens selection is a little strange this year. I'm taking four lenses, and all of them are by different manufactures. Here is a list of them, from smallest to largest focal length: The Rokinon 12mm - This is a very sharp lens with a 2.8 maximum aperture. It is an inexpensive lens but very sharp when in focus, and it is a manual-focus lens. The Sony 35mm - This is
the equivalent to a 50mm lens in full frame and is very sharp. I'll use this when I really need a wide aperture. The next is my favorite lens. The Sony-Zeiss 16-70mm lens with an 4.0 maximum aperture - Probably 80-90 percent of all of my photos fall in this 24-105mm full-frame range. This is a very sharp lens, small and compact. My longest lens is the Canon 70-200f4 L lens. This is the only Canon lens with the "L" markings that is not f2.8 or wider. This is an excellent lens and gives me a full-frame focal length of 100-300. I got this lens on a sale, but it's awesome. I use the Metabones adapter with this lens. It's not as fast as the Sony, but I don't shoot a lot at these longer focal lengths. Which brings me to the next thing. I'll have a true backup camera in the A6300 and may shoot both of them while out with a telephoto on one and my 16-70 on the other.
Another thing I'll be doing different this year is that I'm not going to take a laptop with me. That's right, no laptop on a photography trip. This year I'll be taking an iPad pro with Lightroom CC Mobile on it to make edits. I'll be using a Western Digital SSD drive that has WiFi to back up all of my photos from my SD cards. I can view them on my iPad and transfer and edit the ones I want in Lightroom CC for Instagram and such. Then when I get home I can Import all of the photos into my Lightroom Classic Catalog and go through them. This will be a big change for me this year and is still just a trial. I have a MacBook Air where I can do the same thing with Lightroom CC Mobile, but I wanted to try the iPad this year and see how it works.
Other than photography news, I have been doing some hiking and camping this year and have taken a couple of backpacking trips. I took a couple of solo trips, one with my dog Forrest to Raven Rock State Park and one to Uwharrie National Forest. I took a couple of other backpacking trips with my son Mark, one to South Mountain State Park and
one to Uwharrie National Forest. I have lost 30 pounds this year so far, and my knee has been doing well. I have been making a lot of our camping equipment like hammocks, bags, stuff sacks, and even made a tent for Forrest to sleep in, so I have been busy sewing. Yes, I know it sounds funny, a 50ish-year-old man sewing, but I'm pretty good at doing this kind of sewing. I have some more projects for this year. I plan on making a winter tarp for my hammock and maybe a hiking fanny pack. Yep, I said it, fanny pack. I had six trips planned and places reserved to take my little teardrop trailer camping, but we only got to take it on one trip to Cedar Point National Recreation Area down on the coast. All of our other trips either got rained out or something else got in the way of us going. I need to start planning for next year's trips.
Hey Everyone! I hope everyone's new year is starting out good. In this blog post I want to talk about the new Luminar 3 with Libraries and if it is an alternative to Lightroom. I have been using Lightroom from almost the beginning of the software and watched as it has turned into the main photo editing and digital asset manager for almost everyone. It is the true standard that all other softwares are compared to. When it started being a subscription service, many did not like the monthly payment scheme. I didn't mind too much because it was the price of a couple of Big Mac meals, and I remember the price of a full Photoshop or Lightroom for that matter. Photoshop was $600-$800, and Lightroom was $150. So the $120 a year was a small price to pay to get the most current versions of both. But others didn't like this at all. There were some other contenders at the time like Corral and Aperture, but they didn't have the power of Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom and Adobe have had a monopoly on the image editing software business. But new contenders are starting to come in, like Capture One and Luminar with DAM (digital asset managers) of their own, giving Lightroom a little cause for concern. I currently have used Capture One 12 on a trial basis and did like what I got with it. If I were a studio portrait shooter, it would be the perfect choice for me. Its tethering capabilities are unmatched as far as I'm concerned, and its RAW conversions are beautiful. You can see my last blog here Capture One 12 first look
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I purchased Luminar last year and have been experimenting with it as a kind of go-between of Lightroom and Photoshop. I use it as a plugin, and it works great with beautiful colors and tools that are not easily done with Lightroom or Photoshop. And I'm all about easy. But how does it work as a digital asset manager?
First, let me say that it is not as advanced as Lightroom as an asset manager. You can rate your photographs and use the star system. You can organize from within Luminar and from the outside of Luminar which can be confusing. You basically tell Luminar what folder you're going to put photographs in, and it will look there. It does keep a catalog with all of your changes much like Lightroom does, but not as robust as Lightroom, which can be good or bad. To me Lightroom has become a sluggish program over the years, and with the more features they put into it, the slower it becomes. But as many of you, I have been using Lightroom for so long that almost all of my photographs are in a Lightroom catalog, and to switch to a new system now isn't really where I want to go. But as a photo editor I think that Luminar is almost as good, and better at some things, as Lightroom is.
Who do I think that Luminar 3 is for? I think that Luminar 3 is for new photographers who are just getting started and don't have large Lightroom catalogs already established, for people who are still using Bridge or some Finder or Windows Explorer based program. I believe that in the future Luminar will make its digital asset manager better and better and at some point I will say now is the time to move, but now is not that time for me. I will still use it as a plugin to Lightroom and as a go-between of Lightroom and Photoshop. I recently went on a photo outing, and all of the photos I shot I brought into Lightroom, did my culling thing, and for the winners I did a quick edit and then sent them to Luminar to really make them look the way I wanted. It worked out great for me, and I'll bet it could for you too. On my travel laptop, a MacBook Air, I have taken Lightroom off of the computer and only use Luminar 3. When I travel I only want to process a few photos and then send them to Instagram or Facebook, and the rest I can upload into Lightroom when I get home. You can purchase it for $69, so it's fairly inexpensive. Give it a try. I believe after a while you will enjoy it as I do. Here is a link to a podcast from The Digital Story that talks about Luminar 3.
The Digital Story Luminar 3 with Libraries Podcast
Hey Everyone! This blog I'm going over my first thoughts on Capture One 12 as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom. First a disclaimer. I am no Capture One expert nor am I thinking of changing to Capture One, but I wanted to research the program to see what all the fuss was about. A lot of YouTube-famous people have switched from Lightroom to Capture One, and I am curious about it. So I downloaded the free one-month trial, which was painless. No credit card needed. I loaded it onto an older MacBook Pro, a 2011 model, to see what it could do. This machine has been upgraded to a SSD hard drive and 16 gig of memory. This is an okay machine but by no means top of the line. So that's where I've started. In bullet form, I'll list what I've found so far.
-Download and install was easy. I logged into Capture One and got the free 30-day trial. Thumbs up!
-After doing a lot of tutorial watching online, I imported my Lightroom Catalog from my DC trip into Capture One, over 2,000 photos, and it took about 40 minutes. This was the Lightroom catalog, and it had all of my edits that I had made in Lightroom. This catalog I had on an external drive with all of the photos that I had taken on the trip. It then made smart previews of all the images. This is a default in Capture One and makes the program snappy! You can edit your photos without having the photos present. Thumbs Up!
-The interface was all in one page. I didn't have to go to a different module to edit my photos. The interface is totally customizable. You can even arrange things so it almost looks like Lightroom. And, like I said before, everything is snappy! You can make it anything you like and then save the settings. So if you had more than one person working on the same computer, they could have their settings and you could have yours.
-Capture One 12 creates catalogs similar to Lightroom. You can have the catalog on one computer and copy and paste it onto another computer that has Capture One, and you can edit your photos there even without your photos because of the smart previews it created on import. Moving of folders and photos to and fro must be done within the Capture One catalog just as you do with Lightroom. Capture One also has Sessions. These are smaller shoots that have everything contained in the session. They are smaller than the Catalogs and can be copied and pasted onto another computer and worked on separately without bothering the Catalog database. When you're all through, you can import the session into the Capture One Catalog database.
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Tethering is where this program really shines. Tethering is simple. Just hook up your camera to your computer, open a session, and start shooting. The photos come in very quickly, and you can edit on the fly and apply all the edits to incoming photographs. For example, if you wanted to crop a certain way and make the photos black and white, you would just edit the first photo and tell the program that you wanted to make those edits to all incoming photos the same way and it will. You could lay layout templates on top of the photos coming in, like if you were shooting for a magazine and you could have the magazine cover layout put on top of the photos coming in to see how it will look as a final shot. We probably will never need this, but it's cool. You can also shoot live view and see the setup that you are making live before you take a photo, say for example a food shot. You could take your time and get it right before you ever take a shot and know what the composition will look like. Tethering is what this program was made for with Phase One Cameras, which are mainly studio cameras, and it shows.
These are just a few of my first thoughts. I think this would be a great program if you were only doing studio work. I'm not quite sold yet on all of the other things that it offers. But if you're only doing studio work, this would be the program for you. Luminar 3 is another program that I think is a good replacement for Lightroom. Formerly, Luminar 2018 had added a DAM (digital asset manager) to its program, and I will go through it in another blog soon.
Hey Everyone! The holidays are upon us and everyone is hustling and bustling to get things done before the family comes to visit or you go to someone else's house. And now that winter is here the weather isn't as photogenic as in the spring and fall. How do we keep our photographic edge when we don't go out as much to shoot? For me, it has become sort of a pattern that I've done the last couple of years, and it seems to help even though I don't get to shoot as much as I want. The trick is keeping your mind photography active. Thinking, learning something new, stepping out of your comfort zone.
This time of year I'm winding down from the biggest photo event of the year for me, which is my photo club's fall trip. This is usually a week full of photography-rich shooting situations, and the senses are alive with what to take next.
This year we went to Washington DC for our fall trip (DC Fall Trip Blog Link), so I started early in the year getting geared up and experimenting with different camera and gear combos trying to figure out what to take with me and also researching the DC area and what photos look like that have been taken there before. Last year it was a big change for me, because I'm mostly a landscape and travel photographer, and street photography in DC was a new and exciting thing to get ready for. So there were lots of things to keep my mind photography active. This time of year we also have our Help Portrait event that you can read about in my last blog. Help Portrait Blog Link This year I was helping a young lady with her lights, and it really got my portrait juices flowing again. I used to do lots of portraits, but I have slowly gotten away from that. I enjoy taking the photos, but it's all of the other stuff I don't enjoy, like dealing with people. LOL... But this year I really enjoyed it. I sold all of my studio lights over the last couple of years, and all I had left were some manual flashes. I've heard a lot about the Godox/Flashpoint line of flashes and strobes that you can control all of your lights from your controller on camera. Big plus! Since I've gotten my Sony I haven't really done any flash photography. So I purchased some of the lights so I could play and take some portraits of the family during the holidays and also expand my photography knowledge.
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Okay, I've wandered off subject a little. The point I was getting at is that you don't always have to be out taking photos to keep your edge. As long as your mind is actively thinking and learning about photography, you can keep from getting too rusty. So this time of the year I start preparing for next year and start learning new techniques. Yesterday, I downloaded the free trial version of Capture One editing software as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I've heard a lot about it, and I'm going to try to learn all I can about it and play with the program for my free month. Every day while I commute to work I listen to podcasts about photography and learn about all kinds of things that I would never even have thought about if it were not for the podcast. I have written a blog that you can go to to see what I listen to. Podcast Blog Link I also look at YouTube and watch lots of webinars and video tutorials about different things instead of watching regular TV. This is a great way to learn stuff, and it's free! You can also go to CreativeLive website. They have all kinds of tutorial programing, and if you watch it live it's free.
So this time of the year is the time to plan for next year. Set goals, learn something new, and get out of your comfort zone. Last year I wanted to do some astro photography, so I did all the research, got geared up, planned a trip, and got some shots of the Milky Way. I'm looking forward to new gear that will come out next year, especially camera gear that is supposed to come out. My camera is a couple of years old, and there are rumors that a new one will come out this coming year. So I'm looking to see if it will be worth upgrading to. The same can be said about new lenses coming out this year also. I don't know where the next fall workshop will be, so I haven't started planning yet. This is also the time to get my camping trips soft scheduled for next year that my wife and I will be taking that I look forward to. Maybe I'll sneak in a festival or two and a backpacking trip or two. But now is the time to plan. Because if you're like me and wait until the last minute, you won't go. You'll find some sort of reason not to.
I hope this holiday season brings you much joy and happiness with family and friends and please always be safe. Take lots of holiday portraits and document your family's history! Keep shooting!
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