The Creative Cloud is a subscription model where you pay a monthly fee – US$49.99 (or a little more if you’re in the UK) – which entitles you to download and use any Adobe product so long as your subscription remains active. With the normal cost of the retail versions being far (far) higher, this does lower the entry bar for those wanting to use Adobe tools. But if you’ve already got a product or suite and want to upgrade your options are not as clear.

Adobe moved a couple of years ago to an annual upgrade cycle. They release a main product upgrade (CS5, CS6) every two years and an interim release, containing bug fixes and minor new functionality, in the intervening year. So if you want to keep current and upgrade every year the Creative Cloud might be a better option. However if you wait for the major release, buying the retail version might make more sense.

That said, I’ve noticed a quick switch Adobe have made! I own the CS5 Web Premium suite. However there isn’t a CS6 Web Premium option. They have combined the design and web suites for CS6 and as a result the cost to upgrade is far more ( around £714). However if you’re quick and upgrade to CS5.5 before May 6th you will get the CS6 upgrade for free. This means I could upgrade to the CS5.5 Web Premium suite for £330 and get the CS6 Design & Web Premium upgrade for free (effectively saving me £380).

So things seem to be a little more complicated this time. I haven’t made the decision yet about what upgrade path I’m going to take. I’m doing a little more video now – timelapse, etc – and access to Premiere and After Effects would be useful, in which case it would make sense to purchase the Creative Cloud subscription. However if like me you own an Adobe product or suite I would recommend you to carefully examine your upgrade options as soon as possible as purchasing the upgrade to CS5.5 before May 6th may work in your favour.

The latest book from the Craft & Vision stable – “Shoot & Share: Getting your photographs out into the world” by Stuart Sipahigil – addresses this topic. It covers everything from asking why you want to share your photos in the first place, through to deciding what to share and developing a strategy for how to share your work. Finally it wraps up with information on the options of where to share your images.

Starting with the “why”, Stuart prompts you to think about your motivations for sharing. Is it to get feedback? Do you want to make an impact or communicate something? Do you want to sell your work? Until you’ve decided why you want to share your work, you can’t start on a strategy around how to share it. Once you have decided why you want to share your photographs, it will enable you to define your audience and this will drive the method of sharing you use.

Of course picking what to share is not easy either. Publishing everything might be overkill, but picking work you consider your best might not resonate with your target audience. Again, the book goes into detail around how to edit down your shots and how to get help picking the ones to share. Finally Stuart wraps up by covering the places you can share your work. Everything from social media sites and online photo sharing sites, to prints, photo books and public display.

This isn’t necessarily a book that is going to help you improve your photography in terms of capturing the image. But if you’re still taking a scattershot approach to sharing your work there are ideas and exercises here that will help you refine your strategy and create a more cohesive method of distributing your images.

As usual with Craft & Vision books you can get a discount on “Shoot & Share” for the first five days. Use the promotional code SHARE4 when you checkout to get the PDF version for only $4 OR use the code SHARE20 to get 20% off when you buy 5+ PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm (PST) April 28, 2012 (check your timezone here).

You can already download the beta for Photoshop CS6 from the Adobe Labs site. However if you’re not a fan of installing beta/pre-release software then the Digital Photography School site has added a collection of video highlighting some of the key new features.

I must admit it seems CS6 is not a massive game changing release but it does seem to include some structural and interface changes. As for the features shown in the videos, some seem a little gimmicky – such as the new tilt-shift filter – but others do seem to add power (check out the field blur filter in the final video!).

Are you looking forward to CS6? Will you be upgrading? Why not let me know in the comments.

Things got so bad that discussions on the issue took place in parliament and the head of the Metropolitan Police issued (several) guidelines to frontline officers explaining the law with regards to photography. Namely taking photos of anything or anyone from public land was pretty much okay.

One organisation that set up to make sure photographic freedoms – both professional and amateur – were not lost was I’m a Photographer Not A Terrorist. They’ve lobbied MPs and organised several meet-ups to highlight the issues facing photographers today.

They recently posted the video below on their site. In it, six photographers were assigned different areas of the City of London to photograph. All were instructed to keep to public land and photograph the area as they would on a normal day. A videographer accompanied each to record what happened. The idea was to see if attitudes have changed.

I’m happy to say they certainly seem to have changed within the Police. Whilst all the photographers had problems with local building security guards, when the Police were called they knew the law, knew the photographers weren’t doing anything wrong, and basically told the security guards they were wrong. It seems that whilst the Police have now been educated around photography law, there is still some work to do with the Security Guards!

When David duChemin first started writing eBooks (before Craft & Vision came into being) he produced a couple that included ten tips – going into detail on a small number of easily digestible points to improve your skills. With this latest publication – “Forget Mugshots: 10 Steps to Better Portraits” – David has gone back to form and produced a book containing ten tips to help improve your portrait photography. For each tip he goes into detail, explaining what to do and providing real world examples from the various trips he’s undertaken.

The ten tips he provides information on include:

• Waiting for the right moment
• Using the “right” lens
• Watching the eyes
• Playing with the light
• Controlling the background
• Plus more…

At the end of some sections there is either a creative exercise for you to try the approach just outlined yourself or some background on a particular shot he took.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post I’m not great at people shots. However I’m heading to South America in a couple of months for a trek through Chile, Bolivia and Peru (a figurative trek not a proper walking trek god forbid!) so I’ll be committing the information in this book to memory and seeing if I can return from my travels with some better portraits of the locals I encounter. I’ll let you know how I get on!

As usual with Craft & Vision books you can get a discount on “Forget Mugshots: 10 Steps to Better Portraits” for the first five days. Use the promotional code MUGSHOTS4 when you checkout to get the PDF version for only $4 OR use the code MUGSHOTS20 to get 20% off when you buy 5+ PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm (PST) March 17, 2012 (check your timezone here).

Spirit is an annual street theatre performance held in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire each winter. I was wowed when I first attended two years ago and saw Spanish performers Sarruga and their fire-breathing Dragons, chased around the town centre by brave Knights. Although I missed last years’ performance, I managed to attend again this year with friends Rick and Julie.

After a year off, Sarruga were back again this year with a performance called “Peixos”, a water-themed spectacle featuring magical shoals of fish, jellyfish and a shark chasing them. The video above, taken on my camera, shows part of the main procession. As with the Knights and Dragons two years ago, after completing a circuit of the town the show ended with a thrilling climax outside the town hall as the fish faced off with the rather menacing shark. It’s a great event and well worth noting in your diary for next year if you live locally.

After explaining why Exposure matters Michael then progresses to cover aperture, ISO and shutter speed in a bit more detail along with metering and exposure modes available of most cameras today. Finally he wraps up the introduction with a discussion about the histogram, which if you don’t really use at the moment is one thing I would strongly recommend. Then its straight into some real world case studies (ten in total).

The case studies are what I like about this eBook. In each one Michael explains, via images he’s taken and the challenges around exposure they created, how to get the best shot from the scene in front of you. As well as covering the “how”, each case study includes images to illustrate the principles he is talking about. To wrap up each case study you’re set a small exercise based on the topics covered in that section so you can put what you’ve just learnt to practice.

For the next five days only, use the promotional code EXPOSURE4 on the Craft & Vision site when checking out and get the PDF version of Exposure For Outdoor Photography for only $4 or use the code EXPOSURE20 to get 20% off when you buy five or more PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST February 20, 2012 (check your timezone here).

There’s always a debate raging about whether or not post-processing in something like Photoshop is cheating or not. As someone that used to develop film I know that many of the things you can do in Photoshop, such as burning in, dodging, spot removal and even, if you’re technical minded enough, manipulation of the image itself are all possible when printing a negative. As such I’m firmly on the side that its not cheating.

Based on the DPS article, and the before/after examples Neil shows, I thought I’d present below a before/after of one of my shots from my recent trip to Lebanon.

As you can see there’s quite a different between the before and after shot. Although in reality all I’ve done is to amend the white balance slightly to warm the image, burnt in on the sky (ideally I would have used a graduation ND filter but didn’t have it with me that day) and boosted the colours slightly. All things that are perfectly achievable in the darkroom.

And like Neil it does help me fine tune my craft. In this case remembering to bring my ND Grad filter, but also perhaps to watch the exposure a little (that said I always tend to expose to the right a little, as should you!). However ultimately it comes down to my own personal vision I had for the shot and if tweaking the image as I did above gets me closer to what I originally intended then I see no problem with this.

What do you think? Cheating or useful?

I mention this as Craft & Vision have a new book out: “Making the Print – Printing Techniques for the Digital Photographer” by Martin Bailey. Although I’ve printed and display several of my shots around my home (in the UK I use the excellent Print Space to output them) I’m no expert on print. Martin’s book however covers almost everything you need to know from buying a printer through to colour profiles and paper choices.

To begin with Martin talks about the different options available for printers and what to look for with regards to number of colours used to produce your print. He then progresses to preparing your image for printing and whether or not to let the printer or the software you are using manage the colour. After all that he covers techniques on some simple edits, such as adding borders, to improve your prints.

The second half of the book gets a little more technical and covers such things as screen calibration, to ensure what you see on the screen matches what will get printed, printer calibration and finally even camera calibration to ensure you have a fully colour-managed digital workflow.

To wrap up he covers the major types of paper you can print on and provides a great how-to on making your own canvas prints. Finally Martin provides useful advice for printing images for exhibition (if you’re lucky enough to have one!).

As usual with Craft & Vision books if you use the promotional code PRINT4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of Making the Print for only $4 or you can use the code PRINT20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST January 21, 2012 (check your timezone here).

I’m happy to report my photos from Lebanon are finally now live.

You can view the gallery over on importedlight.com.

I’ve also booked my next two trips. The first to Chile, Bolivia and Peru (where I’m in the high Atacama and need to be careful of altitude sickness) and the second to Iceland to see the Northern Lights (hopefully).