Category: Photography

November 13, 2016

Spots at f/22

It might be time to clean the sensor of my camera again. The circles in the photo above are the spots I removed in Lightroom. They’re caused by little specks of dirt or dust on the camera sensor.

Thankfully they’re really only visible when shooting with a closed down aperture like f/22. At f/8 I see nothing! The aperture of a lens describes how big the hole in the lens is that lets light in to the camera sensor or film. Paradoxically, small f numbers are big holes, so f/1.8 lets in lots of light, while f/22 creates a tiny hole and not a lot of light gets through.

Even if you never take the lens off your camera, you might still get spots on your sensor. A zoom lens has bits that go in and out. Air goes in and out and there’s a (tiny) chance that dust will get sucked in. Dust in the lens itself is nothing to worry about as it’ll never show in photos but if you shoot a lot at small apertures like f/22 you can clean your sensor.

It’s actually not that hard to clean the sensor. Last year I wrote a blog post on how to clean your camera sensor including a video and step by step instructions. I’ll probably get around to that this week again. Go have a look if you see spots, or go see a doctor if you’re not looking at a photo at the time …

October 3, 2016September 29, 2016

MacOS Sierra and Lightroom 5

If you updated your Mac to MacOS Sierra and you use an old version of Lightroom you may get a shock when you try to import anything.

The destination and rename panels are missing from the sidebar! Luckily there’s an easy way to fix it, at least temporarily, thanks to The Lightroom Queen who figured out how. Right click on one of the panel headers and you can enable the missing panels again in the menu that appears!

Unfortunately the change doesn’t stick and the next time you import photos you’ll have to enable those panels again if you want to check those settings.

I can’t imagine Adobe will update LR5. I didn’t think Lightroom would start to break down so quickly after an OS upgrade as the app isn’t that old but I guess we’ll all have to jump on the Creative Cloud bandwagon sooner or later.

September 17, 2016September 18, 2016

Automattic in 2016

This is (most of) Automattic. We’re in the town of Whistler, Canada for the annual Grand Meetup. The company is growing every year, from tiny origins when a small group of us hacked away on a couple of servers to almost 500 now!

In the old days the company portrait was easy. The first one was us seated around a large table. I remember well the one in Breckinridge, Colorado. The whole company fit on the stairs leading up to one of the houses we had rented.

In recent years it’s been a challenge. This year Rose Goldman Simon and I scouted the town of Whistler for suitable locations. Rose had already been around and picked out several so I helped to narrow it down. We’d need:

Somewhere high up for the photographer to stand so as many people as possible could be seen.
Tuesday, the day this was made, was a lovely bright day, but that would play havoc with the photo. We needed a large shaded area.
It needed to be close to where we’re staying. The further away we had to walk the more complicated it would become.

We narrowed it down to two locations. One in front of a local store where there’s a nice courtyard and this location above. This won out despite the fact that sunlight would be shining on the camera lens but a large whiteboard helped keep the sun off. Ironically as people dispersed after the shoot, the shadows crept up past where the camera was which would have simplified things!

Final development of the photo was in Lightroom and Affinity Photo.

You’ll also find the photo on Matt’s blog, and shared by many of my colleagues elsewhere. I’ve also uploaded the full resolution image on Cloudup.com for your viewing pleasure.

July 24, 2016

A Photography Lesson With John Free

“The brain doesn’t want you to be a photographer, it wants you to be the schmuck walking down the street.”

And here’s a “behind the scenes” video:

July 10, 2016

Eric Kim’s Critique by Constantine Manos at Magnum Workshop

It can be hard to hear criticism of your work but I liked this critique of Eric Kim’s work by Constantine Manos at a Magnum workshop. It was constructive and helpful. If I took anything from it, it would be “take photos that look hard to take”. That’s difficult to do in street photography but I sometimes manage it.
I was going to say I manage it through pure luck or accident but when I’m out with my camera I’ll always be looking for the next shot. So, I’m prepared for that lucky break. On the street anything can happen.

I found the video above on this thread about street photography. Lots of good advice and discussion there too.

May 17, 2016

Where has the Stars Wars Plane been?

G-POWD, the Boeing 767 has been around Europe in the last few days. I’d like to think they were collecting the crew of the new Star Wars movie, like an international flying tour bus, but it’s probably just the normal flying patterns of a private company flying their Jumbo around the continent.