Why you should use a Circular Polariser

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Here’s another before/after example illustrating the obvious benefits of using a circular polariser in Landscape Photography..

Move the slider to the left to reveal the ‘before’ image..

If you’re looking to buy a polariser, in my opinion you can’t beat the ones made by B+W. I use their top-end ‘Kaesmann’ filter, which isn’t cheap but it really is the Rolls Royce of polarisers.

Here are a couple of recommendations for you, with Amazon Links:

 

 

Noir

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Arleta-4

Had a lovely day out today down in Clevedon with my friend Arleta. Took a few snaps while I was there and thought I’d do something a little more stylised for a change..

 

Lightroom 4 Preview..

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Very excited that Adobe have released the beta of Lightroom 4 into the wild today, with huge improvements..

Just a few of the new features (as described by Adobe Labs):

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For the development of this latest release, we’ve focused on further maximizing image quality and expanding output options. New tools let you extract more detail from highlights and shadows, make a wider range of targeted adjustments, and easily share your images and video clips on social media and photo sharing sites.

New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta

  • 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.

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What I’m particularly looking forward to:

I’m particularly looking forward to the enhanced adjustment brushes and the geolocation support. Should save me tediously tagging everything on flickr.  I can see the video stuff helping loads too as I want to do some training videos for my martial arts school this year too and being able to catalogue them in LR will be dead handy.
There’s a very tiny tweak in the print module which is going to make a huge difference. They’ve added a brightness adjustment directly into the print setup which will apply only to your printed output.  FANTASITIC!  No more making virtual copies and adjusting them all manually in the develop module. That’s going to make  such a difference when setting up for prints. Very, very happy about that :)
The book support is going to be really handy too given that I’ve just been looking at making up some portfolio books to show to potential clients.  Better still, it appears to be using blurb which is the service I was using anyway so I’m very happy about that :)  Blurb make excellent quality books and their existing software is excellent. To have that built directly into Lightroom is going to be incredible.
As always, “The Photoshop Guys” were involved in the launch, so head on over to their site as Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski have a bunch of videos to show off some of the new features. And if like me you can’t wait to get your hands on it, you can download the beta right now from Adobe Labs 

Time for a freshen up..

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I figured it was time I actually got around to sprucing the site up a bit, especially as this year I’m planning to develop the photography business further.

I really wasn’t happy with the way the galleries looked on my previous site, mainly as I always felt frustrated by the way the automatically generated thumbnails rarely showed a decent crop of the images, so I wanted to be able to have different sizes and shapes on the same page.  I’d seen several sites recently using the masonry style approach so I thought I’d give that a go and so far I’m pretty happy with the results.

Just the one test gallery up for now with a few of my portraits. Let me know what you think!