Adobe Lightroom 4 (Beta)

Adobe have just released version 4 of Lightroom for beta testing. Quoting directly from the Adobe download site, the key new features are:

Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

Looking down this list the major improvement for me is likely to be the ability to soft proof. I’ve been waiting years for this!

The other items I’m not so sure about. One of the key concerns I have about software products is “bloat”. ie the tendency for software companies to add more and more features, often extending the scope of the original product’s vision. On the plus side this means you get more features for your money, but it also has its downsides. As software products get more features they often:

are more complex for the product supplier to support
have more defects
more complex to use (eg lots of ways of doing the same thing)
require more computer resource

With a background in IT, I have personal experience of suffering from the above. In my view keeping products small, simple and focused is a much better way of allowing them to excel in their field. On that basis I would remove the video capabilities and stick to stills. But hey, if companies followed my lead then it would be very difficult to entice people to upgrade or buy new. After all, adding video capability gives Adobe a whole new market for Lightroom.

By the way, I suspect my views about bloatware will not stop me upgrading!

Are DSLRs a Dying Breed?

Trey Ratcliff recently posted his view that the future of high end digital photography doesn’t lie with DSLR cameras, but rather with the new breed of mirror-less cameras that many of the major manufacturers are starting to produce. If you haven’t do so already, his post is well worth reading.

I agree with the general thrust of his argument. Namely that the mechanical nature and form of modern DSLRs owes more to their film heritage than the manufacturers’ desire to make the most of the digital medium.

To be quite frank I don’t need a mirror in a camera. If you follow my blog you’ll know the problem I’ve had with a DSLR mirror and my views about what I wanted from the next Canon Pro camera. What I need is a digital camera that gives me the image quality and control I need for my work. At the moment that really means a DSLR, and a Canon one at that. Not because I think Canon are necessarily better than Nikon or the other major players, but rather because I’m heavily invested in lenses and other Canon related paraphernalia. To switch formats for me is more expensive than just buying a new camera.

Where do I believe the future is though? I believe its in mirrorless cameras. Excellent sensors, optics and electronic viewfinders/screens combined with masses of CPU power will create a camera revolution over the next 5, 10 and 20 years. It’s happened in consumer electronics and computers, and as cameras are a combination of both now I see it as inevitable.

So, the question is, will my 5D Mk II, be the last digital SLR that I buy? The simple answer is I don’t know. I’d like it to be the last, but that is only going to happen if a viable alternative is released. Canon make enormous amounts of money from their high-end DSLRs and more possibly importantly, their lenses. I can’t see them wanting to let go of this just yet. But, they and Nikon are not calling the shots anymore. If they don’t embrace this electronic future and do it quickly they’ll be left behind by the the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Fuji etc. They know this better then me, so I fully expect to have an alternative ready in a couple of years – just when I’ll be looking to switch!

Kodak about to go under?

Reuters mentioned yesterday that Kodak are preparing to file for bankruptcy. Leaving aside their long history in photography, they are also credited with “inventing” the digital camera. Reuters quote:

“Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 when one of its engineers developed a prototype that was as big as a toaster and captured black and white images. But it failed to capitalize on that innovation, and it was only when Kodak’s film business began to decline a decade ago that it tried to catch up with rivals by launching a mass-market line of digital cameras.”

It’s not over yet for them though, so hopefully they can find a way of restructuring and continuing.

Calculating Your Long Exposure Values

LongTime Exposure Calculator By HPR-Solutions

Kim has a great article on long exposure photography and calculating exposure values. At the end of her article is a quick table on some common values for a 10 stop filter.

While you can note these down and take them on location with you there are many gadget options. One I like is a small free app for your iPhone called LongTime Exposure Calculator By HPR-Solutions. You dial-in the filter’s number of stops, choose the shutter speed indicated by your camera (before attaching the filter) and the app tells you the new shutter speed with the filter attached.

There isn’t a countdown timer, audible signal or the option to use aperture instead of shutter speed. Nor will it operate the iPhone’s camera. I’ve seen these criticisms elsewhere, but to me the app is simple and does its job well; exactly what I need.

First Trip To Kimmeridge Bay

Kimmeridge Bay is a small bay on the UK’s Dorset coast. This Google Maps link shows the location. Kim and I spent a few hours there on this New Year’s Eve afternoon. As you can see from my iPhone shot on arrival the weather wasn’t being particularly kind to us.

Arrival At Kimmeridge Bay

So as any keen photographers would do we headed back into Kimmeridge itself and had coffee and cakes! I can recommend the home made cakes at Clavell’s Café and Farm Shop. We then headed back down to the bay to see what we could make of the conditions. By the way, if you go to Kimmeridge during peak season you have to pay a toll to get to the beach car park. At the time of writing it’s £5 per car.

There were a few other people in the bay, but they were mostly fossil hunters (Kimmeridge Bay is on the Jurassic Coast), so we didn’t have any problems finding some quiet spots. The bay itself is also a popular photo destination with plenty of rocks and rocky platforms. It’s also infested with flies, so expect to be dive bombed by them as you walk along the beach! We setup on the western arc of the bay.

The first couple of locations I tried didn’t work for me, so no shots from them. But, I managed to fumble about at one location and drop my Lee hard grad in a rock pool, via a rock. Fortunately it only cracked one of the corners. If it’d been a glass filter (can you still get these?) I doubt I’d have been so fortunate.

The first image is a 480 second/f22 exposure at 24mm. A Lee Big Stopper and a Lee hard grad were also used. There were 3 kite surfers directly in the centre of this frame, but the long exposure hid them well.

Kimmeridge Location 1

The next image is 60 seconds/f8 at 24mm, but with a couple of degrees down sift applied to increase the depth of field. Focusing was done using Canon’s EOS Utility on a netbook that was tethered to my 5D Mk II. Again, a Lee Big Stopper and a Lee hard grad were also used. I’ve also changed the white balance slightly on this one to be a little more realistic.

Kimmeridge Location 2

The next image was taken with the Big Stopper swapped for a 3 stop filter. It’s 6 seconds at f22 on the 24mm to try and get more texture in the water.

Kimmeridge Location 3

The four and final image in this set is a composite of two photos. One was taken focused in the foreground and the other at the end of the rock ridge. They were then image stacked in Photoshop to increase the depth of field. Both images were captured at 180 seconds/f20.