We shot over 600 photos on our cruise. Anyone who missed it on Facebook: we visited Savona (Italy), Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca (both Spain), Tunis (Tunisia), La Valletta (Malta), Cantania and Rom (both Italy). Anyway, here is a selection of some of the photos. Took me the better of the day to sort out which photos were worth while posting, and then post-processing them.
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I always shoot in RAW + JPEG. For normal point-and-shoot vacation stuff I’m generally satisfied with the JPEG the camera spits out. But I would never shoot only JPEG. The additional information of RAW shouldn’t be underestimated, and to be honest I often tweak around. It makes a difference if you are working on the original RAW data, or if you are working on the JPEG copy the camera has already processed.
Up till now I’ve been post-processing my images with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3. Since I was planning on post-processing a whole load of pictures I decided to see what software there is out there to streamline the work flow a bit (Bridge and CS3 do the job, and the raw converter in CS3 does offer a wide variety of options, but it is still tedious switching to be switching between both programs and working on multiple RAW images at the same time). While I was away, Adobe released Lightroom 3, so I checked out the reviews and it sounded good. I downloaded the 30 day trial version and to sum it up my experience so far … I’m impressed.
I haven’t worked with Lightroom previously, so I can’t say how much has changed in this version. But I really like the details that make life easier when handling collections of images. Being an Adobe product it also offers interfaces to various Photoshop functions (I only own CS3, I could imagine it offers more options if you have the current version CS5 installed). I could go on and on with things I like about it, but I’ll just sum it up and say: It really streamlines the work flow of post-processing photographs from import to print/upload/web/presentation and if you are shooting RAW it has a whole lot of fun stuff to play around with directly built in.
Since I shoot with a Nikon D80 that tends to produce a fair amount of image noise if I go past ISO 400 I liked the noise reduction features of Lightroom, both color and luminance noise can be reduced greatly with sliders for fine tuning.
It’s a good piece of software, and when the 30 day trial ends I’ll probably go buy it.
I admin, I haven’t been updating my blog all to often lately. Mainly due to a) nothing special happening and b) getting stuff prepared for our wedding. So what have I been doing the last few weeks? Well, I finally installed and played GTA IV (which I bought many months ago ;))
Other than that I’ve been plaing around with my camera (and Photoshop CS3) a bit. Tried some light painting, played around with HDR a bit (bought myself a Photomatix license since it can handle my nikon raw format natively), added some of the stuff to my deviant art page d0py.deviantart.com
My last few postings were all a bit technical, so this one is going to beĀ a bit more “normal”. I hope every reading this had nice Christmas and New Years celebrations.
It is a cold as heck here, but still no snow. My guess is that it won’t snow here whis winter, just cold and windy weather.
I must admit I haven’t been climbing for about a month. I really need to get back to the gym and train more. I want to shoot some nice pictures during climbing outdoors this year (not just from the bottom or top, I want to shoot pictures while in the route). And to be able to do that, I really need more finger strength to be able to keep the pace when the holds start getting crimpy.
I haven’t been on my bike the last months either, but considering how cold it is out there … I guess that can be excused.
Without going into too much detail, I’m planing on buying 2 new lenses for my Nikon. They should give me a few new possibilities (which reminds me that I really need to clean up my picture gallery). And I should have a look at my helmet camera, the last thing I shot with that was an indoor climbing session.