So you may have noticed I’ve been fairly very quiet on the social media front lately. Well, simply put: I didn’t want to waste our time (mine for writing and your’s for reading) just for the sake of it. I’m officially only posting when I have something interesting I want to share with you – mainly pictures and the odd idea/workflow/business thought. So, here’s 5 images I made today with some friends in sunny Swindon. This little collection just came from nowhere. Amy was bored and sat down, I saw the shot, set up the gear and everyone had a wee laugh while we got our photographs taken (some more reluctantly that others). I even took the opportunity to get some ‘in front of the camera’ time myself…hope you like ‘em!
Whether you love Aperture and detest Lightroom, or even vice-versa, you should still download the Lightroom 4 beta release while it’s available. It should give us an insight into Aperture 4 for a start, and it might even prove to be a viable competitor.
So login to Adobe Labs and download the 400MB file sooner rather than later.
Some of the specs:
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.
Picture grabbed from the web over on Uncrate.com – epic site!
Y’all gear-heads knew this was coming; you just didn’t know when exactly. A quick wikipedia search for Nikon would reveal a sexy little chart of their equipment timeline. The D4 has been on the way for a few weeks and now it is in our presence. And you’d be surprised at how little the D4 has changed from the D3s I wield. I’m think about that last sentence while looking at the specs…hmmm, ok so you’re right: a Hell of a lot has changed and the D4 is a beast!
So rather that me rabble on like I normally do about technology and all that jazz, here’s a picture, a link to Nikon’s wiki page and some specs.
I’d normally say “enjoy” at this stage, but there is no point. I mean, what else could you do? Oh yeah, you could hatch a plan to acquire one of these beauties…I tried…Amazon sold out in under 1 hour. Boom.
The Specs…
16.2 effective megapixel FX (full frame) sensor
10fps shooting (11fps max) & 24fps 2.5MP stills
1080p HD video at 30fps
91,000 pixel sensor for metering, white balance, flash exposure, face detection and active d-lighting
ISO range 100-12,800 (extendable from 50 – 204,800)
MultiCAM 3500FX Autofocus sensor works in lower light and with smaller apertures
New EN-EL18 battery (21.6Wh capacity, CIPA-rated at 2600 shots) – the D3s battery shoots 4500 roughly…hmm.
Twin card slots – one Compact Flash and one XQD (Sony have developed an ultrafast card that is smaller than CF and will eventually reach 1Tb of storage experts suggest)
Keeping in touch with my inner child magically (in true Disney fashion) led me on a path to shooting Disney on Ice in Dublin’s City West Convention Centre at Christmas. The old adage: “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know” couldn’t be more useful right now. You may remember I was in Paris recently with a good pal, Louis, walking the streets and eating far too much food (scroll down to late November if this doesn’t sound familiar). One of the evenings I grabbed my Nikon D3s, slipped into running clothes and Vibram Five Finger running shoes and hit the streets equipped with only the Nikkor 85mm ƒ1.4 G lens. What followed was a blur of sweat, Parisian lights and images. It was on the final stop of my journey (down the Champs de Mars at the Eiffel Tower) that I met two interesting ladies: Liz Parsons & Kylie Papp…figure skaters for Disney on Ice! What are the chances!? So we got talking and before I know it there are access tickets to the show. About a thousand frames later I’m leaving the performance smiling from ear-to-ear.
Here’s a quick selection of some of the photographs I captured that day. The link to the full gallery on Fbook is at the bottom.
So I’ve been travelling around the UK/Ireland a bit recently and hooked up with a ancient buddy of mine: Mr. Dwaine Smyth for a commercial shoot. Dead animals, sharp knives and gorgeous men! Sounds great! Enough talking Gary…here’s the pics below…
2011 has been absolutely crazy for the world (Japan, Bin Laden, Financial Crisis) and pretty bonkers in places for me too (Asia, Grandad, Photoshoots). Talk about change…phew! I’ll be taking January easy and getting into a few new routines for 2012. In keeping in line with my new chill-out plans I’m just going to say have a great 2012 to everyone and upload this image. It’s from wordle.netand they’re so easy to make. This one looked at every post on my blog and made an image out of the most popular words. The super-popular ones are the biggest. Enjoy!
If your work doesn’t flow then you need to focus on your workflow. Sounds obvious right? But how many of you out there have actually spent a while figuring out the best way to get something done? I’ll bet if money came into the question then you’d figure it out pretty quickly. The guy who oversees the production of Reebok training shoes doesn’t hire too many people, nor too little – he or she looked a lot of factors and worked out the best number of people. Money saving and getting the job done.
Well what if I told you that you only had about 80 years on Earth? Money comes and goes, but time does not. Period. Time is your most valuable commodity. By spending 30 minutes or so studying your workflow (best way to manage your business, wash the dishes, clean the car, edit that photoshoot, arrange meetings – whatever) you will save time.
It’s like the old Al Pacino speech from Any Given Sunday: “The inches we need are all around us. On this team we fight and die for those inches. Because we know, that when we add up all those inches, that’s what makes the difference between winning or losing.” – Or words to that effect, that was from memory, which is an indicator to how much I agree with the author of those words.
The point is…don’t just do it that way because that’s how you were taught or that’s the way you’ve been doing it forever. Using that logic is nonsensical. Do it the most efficient way; save time; enjoy that time having coffee with a friend or whatever your crush is. Don’t be afraid to change, without change…well, we wouldn’t have clothes, iPhones, the Internet, McDonalds…come to think of it, without change we wouldn’t have most things. What do you think?
As many of you know, I was shooting a wedding for a good buddy of mine, Mr. Mark Ramsay. He got married to the wonderfully smiley ‘Tish’ and I thought I’d give you an insight to the gear I used to make the shoot happen. Check it out!
It’s 04:30am and you’ve just finished your project. Then you realise, there’s a lot more projects waiting in line to be finished. “For f&%k sake!” you say. Or you might say, “Where’s my iPad/iPhone?”
We all know what the right thing to say is…both!
I’m in this position at the moment. Lots of work coming in and a steady trickle going out – sure, social media is falling behind day-by-day but clients come first and the social media will go boom when it all comes together in mid-December. Sounds ideal, right? Yeah, it is, but even I get lost in the fog of priorities and I consider myself a fairly well organised person. So I’m going to let you in on my dirty little secret.
If you think your life would benefit from being a bit more organised then get yourself over to the Action Method website and download these iOS apps or buy a notepad. Your productivity will go through the roof. I easily get twice as much done when I use the Action Method iOS apps to manage my projects/life.
Where to start? Hmmm…ok, so, Canon (makes cameras, printers etc) released the Canon 1D-X a few days ago. Two words: “Holy smokes!” It’s a beast! An absolute beast! There are no other words to describe this camera! 18 megapixels, 14 JPEGs per second or 12 RAW images per second, extensible ISO of 200,000 and 61 point metering system! To top it all off it has not 1, but 2 x DIGIC 5+ image processors!
This thing can kick it! If there was a character more exclamatory than an exclamation mark – I’d be using it!
Now, as all of you know: I’m a Nikon guy. Mainly because Nikon’s ergonomics team has got the monopoly on comfortable design and their lens mount is universal to all Nikkor lenses. When the D3s came out it had the edge over every other dSLR in a few key aspects that made it ideal for lifestyle/sports/reportage photography. The 1DX takes this ground breaking system another step further, but with rumours of the Nikon D4 on every photo-gear blog in the world I wonder what secret weapons Nikon have up their sleeve?
With rumours that the Expeed 3 will do 24fps at 24 megapixels, it’s hard to figure it out. I’d expect at least:
18 megapixels
16 fps
200,000 ISO
1080p at 30fps & 720p at 60fps
Longer video record time (currently a 5 minute limit per clip)
Hell, they might even throw in a Thunderbolt connection for beyond UDMA data transfer speeds! Imagine that!
If you think your life would benefit from being a bit more organised then get yourself over to the Action Method 
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