Ka 942 crossing the Kowai River

I set out today to get a picture of a steam train set against the snow-covered Southern Alps. Unfortunately the weather has been so good the last few days that pretty much all of the snow has melted. There will be a couple more opportunities next month should the weather turn bad again. Today, however, I had to settle for a picture of the train crossing the Kowai River bridge pulled by Ka 942.

Ka 942, a 4-8-4, was built in 1940 as a coal burner but was converted to oil in 1948. It can carry 5,000 gallons of water and 1,600 gallons of fuel oil.

Lightroom 5

I'm loving Lightroom 5. Each new release adds new features that increase Lightroom's ability as a stand alone product. This time around we got a properly functional healing brush which, for smaller items, saves a trip to a separate editor. But perhaps the best addition is the new radial filter. The radial filter adds all the controls of the gradient filer but in a circular or elliptical shape - this is so flexible and substitutes for the sluggardly Adjustment Brush in many situations.

The Adjustment Brush aside, there have been all round performance improvements in LR5 which are very welcome. The Adjustment Brush however, is still capable of bringing a quad core processor to its knees. Here's a tip - if you have to make extensive use of the adjustment brush then, once you have finished, export the picture to a TIF file and reimport it to Lightroom, then you can carry on working on the TIF file without all the brush history steps bogging the system down.

This picture uses the new Radial filter to darken everything except the flower and underside of the stem. All processing done in Lightroom 5:

No more clouds

For the last month I have been investigating cloud backup solutions. For a few years I have used Carbonite to create an off-site backup of critical business files. But what about my image files, where was their off-site protection? So I went looking for a solution.

Carbonite was not a contender; I was already paying US$60 a year for unlimited data, but that plan wouldn't backup data on an external hard drive (where my image library sits). To get that facility would cost US$100 a year and was still limited to one machine; what about my laptop? I looked for other cloud solutions some of which appeared to be free (but weren't if you wanted the best speed and service - go read the reviews) and others like Carbonite which were more robust but costly. But, in addition to cost, there was the issue of speed; to upload 1TB of data over DSL was going to take many days. Though, admittedly, once it was there, updates would be much quicker.

Finally I abandoned the idea of cloud storage and decided on a local solution, purchasing two 2TB Seagate external drives at a total cost of US$200. Each drive has more than enough capacity to backup both my workstation and laptop data and still be under 50% capacity. So now I backup daily to disk1 and then at the end of the week disk2 replaces disk1 and disk1 is taken off-site for storage. Next week disk1 and disc2 swap places again. So I always have a local backup that is no more than 1 day old and an off-site backup that is no more than a week old. The two drives are warranted for 3 years so, assuming that is all they will last for, I have saved US$400 over the comparable Carbonite costs for two PCs for three years.

With the costs of storage continuing to fall, cloud storage vendors are going to need to sharpen their act a lot more if they want to remain competitive. And that includes those who claim that their service is 'free'.

It's that fractal time of year

It's that time of year when out-door photography sometimes has to take a back seat. With all the rain, snow and bitterly cold temperatures, staying indoors close to the fire seems like the sensible thing to do. Creating fractal images is, to my way of thinking, a nice compliment to photography; the technical skills for creating the pictures are totally different, but the compositional components are very similar - use of light and dark tones, framing, leading lines and so forth. Creating a fractal image also shares some of the same software tools as used in photography - Lightroom, Photoshop,Topaz; so there are lots of synergies.

I've called this one, "In the beginning" and it's designed to be a 600mm x 300mm printed image with lots of fine detail (which, unfortunately, won't show up at web size).

Lady with whip

Not sure how this will work out but I'm experimenting with this photo by uploading at HD (1080px high). "Lady with whip" was captured at the Oxford A&P show in March. I posted a B&W version on G+ but this is the original colour. Usually I tend to think that a particular photo should be either colour or black and white as dictated by the subject matter and the capture but, in this case, I really can't decide between the two:

D600 1/320 sec @ f5.6 and ISO 200. 210mm on a Nikkor 28-300. Processed in Lightroom and PhotoLine using Topaz filters.

More pictures here!

Shovels and clarity

This weekend I've been testing a new Topaz filter, "Clarity". It's not yet released (perhaps 2-4 weeks away) but it looks very promising and a worthy addition to the Topaz toolbox. I used it on this picture (in addition to other filters) to restore what was a rather flat 6,400 ISO RAW file, to what I remembered seeing:

Nikon D600, 1/5 sec (hand-held) @ f11 and ISO 6,400 28-300 Nikkor lens @ 62mm. Processed in Lightroom and Photoline using a variety of Topaz filters.

Autumn leaves

Annette brought home these beautiful autumn leaves from the hospital where her Mother is recuperating after a heart operation. So, under the camera they went.

Nikon D600, 6 seconds, f22. ISO 100. 300mm on a Nikkor 28-300 - natural light.

Primary colours

I usually go for more muted colours, or even black and white, but this one was crying out for its colours to remain intact:

It was a bright day and as I was insisting on a slow-ish shutter speed, the camera chose f32! - oh the dust spots!

Nikon D600, 1/15sec @ f32 and ISO 100. 70mm on a Nikkor 28-300 lens.

Show the show jumper

A couple of posts ago I included the 'straight out of Lightroom' version of this picture (as I usually do on this blog). However, after blogging, the better pictures then go into my 'to be processed' folder from where they are given a fresh and more careful development in Lightroom and a fairly intensive going over with other software tools (in this case Photoline, Topaz and OnOne). The best of these pictures then go on (hopefully) to be sold. This is one of those pictures.

A superficial glance at the before and after versions may possibly show only minor changes, but print them big and the improvements in clarity, detail and depth are quite amazing. I just wish I could show that at web sizes but you'll just have to take my word for it :-)

D600, 1/1250 sec, f5.6, 116mm on a Nikon 28-300 lens.

Shear skill

Watching the shearers at work is fascinating; a real display of speed, strength and skill. The D600 did a fantastic job under challenging lighting conditions, Lightroom brought out the shadow detail and Topaz dealt with the introduced noise (I keep trying other tools but these are the ones I come back to).  1/2500 sec @ f5.6 and 300mm on a Nikon 28-300 lens. Good job everyone; you too sheep.