1. Find an image you want to tweet

2. Choose File > Export

3. Select a preset that is similar to what you want to use. If you haven’t already created export presets, then start with the jpeg one

4. Set your export location to some kind of temporary folder (or set it to choose later). You don’t need to keep your images, so you can set ti to overwrite existing without warning.

5. Set the desired Jpeg and Size options and if you want add a watermark. I would also suggest you add a little bit of output sharpening. I have mine set to “Low”

6. This is the important bit. Under the Post Processing Heading, from the After Export popup menu, choose “Open in Other Application”

7. Select your Twitter Application. In my case I’m using Tweetbot

Here are my settings

8. Press the Add button at the bottom left of the window to save this as a preset – call it something like “Tweet Photo”

9. Click Export. This should export the photo and open up Tweetbot with a new tweet sheet and the photo attached.

10. The next time you want to tweet a photo, you only need to choose File > Export with Preset > Tweet Photo

There you have it. Simple and effective. Speaking of twitter, if you’re not already following me I’m on twitter as @fxgeek. And I’m on  Google Plus and Facebook too!

Adobe has released the much talked about and somewhat controversial Creative Cloud upgrades to its software suite. The applications are available now to current subscribers. To upgrade just launch Adobe’s application manager, which starts the process by updating itself. The new application manager is really nice. It sits in your menu bar and is much nicer that the old Air derived one.

Once you re-sign in you can go ahead and download the new apps. It should be noted that the upgraded Photoshop,Illustrator and so on are brand new applications, not updates, so you will need to download and install the full new versions. This also means that your old versions will stick around until you remove them.

There’s lots of new stuff in the Applications, but I’m most curious to see how some of the new features in Photoshop CC work, in particular the new camera shake reduction, and the ability to run camera raw as a filter on any layer. I’ll have a detailed report on these once I’ve had a chance to play with them.

For more details of what’s in this release head on over to Adobe’s creative Cloud Website.

With the New York City Bikes project being in the news a lot lately, I’ve been thinking about how successful our own Dublin Bikes project has been. This in turn got me thinking about something else I’ve noticed a lot: There are lots of other interesting looking bikes to see around the city when you pay attention. For some reason I’ve been snapping shots of bicycles every time I pass one that is interesting in some way, whether it’s a nice colour, or a garish combination of colours, or an interesting basket or saddle. Over time I’ve developed quite a collection. There really are a lot of wacky bikes in Dublin city. Many people seem to like using bikes as advertising as well. I’ve seen many old style bicycles with placards or banners advertising a restaurant or a shop.

So here is a collection of just a few of this larger project. I hope to keep collecting these shots in order to do a large scale exhibition or even a book at some point. For now, here’s a few of the ones that have caught my eye from my current compendium. It kind of makes all those shiny official bikes kind of boring looking!

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Lomography Konstruktor

Those krafty devils at Lomograpy have been at it again. This is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s a really cool gimmick. Basically it’s a plastic camera, but unlike their other ones, this comes disassembled on a plastic spur and you have to break out the parts and build it yourself. Pretty clever idea, and a great gift for camera nerds (and hipsters) everywhere. Here’s a little video from Lomo on the camera.

Introducing The Konstruktor – The World’s First Build-It-Yourself 35mm SLR Camera from Lomography on Vimeo.

VScO Cam 2.0 is Released

The excellent VScO cam for iPhone has been upgraded to version 2.0 and is now in the App store. VSCO cam is one of my favourite iPhone camera Apps and the new version is even better. If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s from the same people who created the great film set of presets for Aperture and Lightroom, and VSCO Cam brings these same looks to the iPhone. It’s actually not technically an upgrade, as t’s a whole new app and you have to download it separately. I’ve been playing with it for a few days and I really like it so far. It’s much faster than the devious version. I’ll have a full review next week (hopefully). They have some great examples of it in use on their website and it’s really impressive. You would never think that these were taken with an iPhone.

14 Year old Photographer creates Gorgeous Self Portraits

YOu have to check out this amazing work by 14 year old Massachusetts photographer Zev. It’s such an amazing combination of skilled photography and photoshop that you just have to be impressed that it’s coming from someone so young. Check out the story on demilked  and also visit Zev’s own website.

Camera Noir

On the subject of iPhone photography, another camera App launched this short while ago that has people taking. Called, Camera Noir, it takes pictures using a high contrast black and white look, much like the long abandoned (and much missed) gotham filter for instagram. I haven’t had a chance to try this one out myself yet, but I’m hoping to have a chance to put it through it’s paces this weekend.

* * *

While I’m at it, here’s a little self promotion! Check out my new (well, not re-booted) Designtography Tumblr. It’s a collection of photography and design related tie bits of interest that I come across.

If you are not from Ireland, you may have never heard of the Ha’penny bridge. It is one of the most recognisable landmarks in Dublin city, and in many ways it has become a symbol of the capital. It is a beautiful cast iron bridge that was originally built in 1816. Strangely enough though, “the Ha’penny Bridge” is not it’s official name. It was originally called “The Wellington Bridge” but it’s name was later changed to the Liffey Bridge, and that remain’s it’s official title to this day.

You’re probably wondering then why it’s called the ha’penny bridge?Before the Ha’penny Bridge was built, crossing at this point was done by ferry. The ferry service of the time was operated by one William Walsh. The ferries were in such a bad condition that Walsh was told to either fix them or build a bridge. He chose the latter option and was granted the right to extract a ha’penny toll from anyone crossing it for 100 years. Even though the toll was long since dropped, it still has the nickname and in fact most people are probably unaware that “the Ha’penny Bridge” is not the actual name of the bridge.

Over the years I’ve taken dozens if not hundreds of photos of this bridge. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Recently, I’ve been going through my archives and it struck me as to how many different shots of the bridge that I actually had. So, here is a short selection of the Dublin icon over the last few years, through, winters, summer spring, and autumn!

After a relatively short beta period, Adobe has released the final version of Lightroom 5. Lightroom 5 is another milestone in the photo workflow software from Adobe and it has lots of nice new features. If you’re a Lightroom user you are probably already familiar with what’s new, as the beta has been around for a little while now, but here’s a quick recap, with some of my thoughts on the new features.

Healing Brush
What was previously the spot healing tool, now works more like Photoshop’s healing tool (and Aperture’s retouch brush) in that you can now brush it on instead of just applying it in spots. This is a great enhancement. The old version was only really useful for cloning out dust spots. This makes it easier to remove larger objects should you need to.

Radial Gradient
This is my favourite of all the new tools. It allows you to apply a circular mask instead of the previous linear only gradient. It’s useful for vignettes where you need the effect to be off-centre, but I’ve also found it very useful for brightening faces or other small areas that need a quick fix. I learned most of my colour correction skills working with colour grading software for video and film production, and the gradient filter mimics the kind of vignette mask that I would commonly use in this kind of work. It’s a great enhancement, although expect to see it overused for a while!

Upright
This is a pretty impressive enhancement to the lens correction section of Lightroom. Upright is basically an automatic perspective correction tool. It automatically corrects skewed vertical and horizontal lines and can even automatically straighten your image. It’s useful if you are shooting buildings for example, and want to keep your verticals, vertical, as it were. It can simulate the use of an expensive tilt shift lens (the traditional use of a tilt shift, before making everything appear as a miniature became popular) It’s pretty good, and works as expected most of the time, but sometimes your image may be just too distorted. It can also crop a good deal of your image, so if you’re going to shoot with this in mind be prepared to leave a little extra room in your shots.

Smart Previews
Smart previews is one of Lightroom 5′s most interesting new features. It creates a compressed, reduced resolution DNG version of your image on import to use as a preview. This means that if your main raw file goes offline you can still edit your images. It will also be used in Adobe’s forthcoming iPad tool which they demonstrated to Skott Kelby a while ago. This has great potential, and will make working offline on a laptop a reality.

Video in Slideshows
Your slideshows can now contain video as well as just pictures and music. I would’t use this feature personally because Lightroom drops resolution when playing back video.

Improved Book Creation

You can now edit templates and save custom templates.

Proper Full Screen Mode
No more multiple key presses to see your images in fullscreen. Now you just press the F key. Nice.

That’s just a few of the key features. There are lots of subtle enhancements too, such as PNG support, improved performance, LAB colour support (apparently – I haven’t tested this yet)

My overall impressions of the beta was that it was nice to see some of the improvements, but for me there were serious performance issues. Importing would grind my whole computer to a halt, but luckily these issues seem to have all been fixed in the final version. In fact the final version, so far seems to be quite snappy.

What’s still missing

While it is great that Adobe is continuing to develop Lightroom quite aggressively, there are still a few features that I wish they would improve or implement. The biggest for me is the metadata handling. In my opinion, it is still pretty weak compared to other software. there is no way to customise the metadata views, except with the use of a somewhat clunky third party tool, and the metadata entry area is somewhat of a pain to use shoved down in the lower right hand corner of the screen. Hopefully this area of the software will see some love in a future version. I would love to see a dedicated metadata module, which would mimic the functionality of a dedicated tool like photo mechanic.

There also still issues with speed and rendering of images. Importing is still quite slow compared to other software, and there’s still a lag when moving from image to image in the develop module, as it drops from a high quality preview to a low resolution version and back to full quality again.

Conclusion

Overall Lightroom 5 is a solid release. There are some great new features and Adobe has kept moving the software forward. The radial gradient and the upright tool are my favourite additions, and the proper fullscreen mode is an “About time” feature that I’m really glad they added. There are still some disappointments though. I would have liked to see some improvements in the organising side of the software, and that annoying bug/feature that was introduced when they added retina support is still there. Overall, if I were to give it a rating I would give it 4 out of 5. (because there’s always room for improvement )

If you are a creative cloud subscriber you can download it now by going to your applications page on the creative cloud website. A trial version as well and upgrades and standalone licences are available now.

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I caught this great shot this morning completely by accident. I was trying to get the shot of the bee on the flower, but it wasn’t till I got back to my computer and looked at the image properly did I notice the pollen flying everywhere. The only thing that would have made this perfect is if the bee had been sharper (and maybe a bit softer lighting..and…and… ). I think it was a combination of motion blur (although the shutter speed was 2000ths of a second) and it being just this side of the focal plane. It all happened so fast. Still, I love that you can see the pollen flying about.

Here’s a closer crop of the action !

Shot on a Sony Nex-7 and 50mm f/1.8 Lens

I arrived at the Liffey and crossed by the Millennium bridge. It was still a beautiful day, although a few clouds were beginning to form. The Liffey itself was a weird colour, even for the Liffey. You can’t really tell from the above photo, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute. From one angle it looked like a beautiful shade of bright blue…

… but that wasn’t really the case. It was more of a green. I was going to head into the north side of the city, but I decided to stay around the river instead. It was such a lovely day, it would be a crime not to walk down the boardwalk which was full of tourists.

It was at this point that I began to notice a commotion around O’Connell bridge. There were lots of people gathering at the banks. At first I thought that maybe there was a canoe race or something going on, but it turned out that there were people preparing for a “Liffey Fun Swim”. I can’t imagine swimming in the Liffey is in any way fun, but any way.

See what I mean about the green?

I hung around for a little while, but things didn’t show any sign of progressing so I continued on my journey. I headed back up towards College Green and Grafton Street. Along the way, more fun little observations were to be had. Like this sticker someone had put on a pole. I’m not entirely sure what the message is supposed to be, but I thought it was funny:

Then there was this little gem on a parked bicycle. I think I  laughed out loud when I saw this one…

I was so tempted to leave a note in the basket with “Down with that sort of thing” written on it. (for those of you not from Ireland google “Father Ted Careful Now”)

And then there was the obligatory ice cream truck. I remember that the last time I was in New York I was amazed how every time it rained, street vendors would appear as if from nowhere selling rain coats and umbrellas. In Ireland we have the ice cream trucks doing the same thing every time it’s sunny.

My favourite sight of all had to be “Jesus on a stick”

So much symbolism.

Anyway…..

I headed up Grafton Street and back towards the Luas stop to head home. My feet were pretty sore at this point. On the way there was the usual buskers…

These guys play here quite often and are actually pretty good. Something sad about the facade of HMV becoming the ideal spot for bands, but anyway.

That was pretty much it. It’s always nice to get out across the city on a sunny day, because you never know what you’re going to see. The sun seems to bring out the characters! I hope you enjoyed this little photo essay. Stay tuned for a brief behind the scenes!

A Brief Behind the Scenes !

Here’s a few quick notes on how I got these shots, and how I processed them, for those of you interested in such geeky things. I was using my Sony Nex-7 which for me, is the ideal camera (at least of my collection) for shooting street photography. Why? Well, the pop up screen allows you to shoot from the hip and be relatively unobtrusive. I started off the journey with the 30mm attached, but I ended up changing it for the 50mm early on. This gives an interesting perspective when shooting from waist level.

I know lost of people have different philosophies when it comes to shooting Street photography, but for me, I prefer the candid approach. I like to be a silent documentarian. I think that a sort of hiesenberg principle applies here, that if you’re too obtrusive in your observation you’ll influence the scene around you. Such sentiments can cause heated debates, so I’ll leave it at that. Either way, with the screen flipped up and the tiny Nex-7 hanging around your waist, no one really pays much attention to you. The autofocus is pretty fast too, so you can get some nice shallow depth of field too without having to zone focus and shoot everything stopped down (Ok, now I’m just committing street photography blasphemy )

Anyway….

The files were processed in Lightroom. I have my own look that I’ve been working on for some time called “steely blue” (don’t ask – it made sense at the time) which I used for a few, and others were graded using VScO’s Film 1, in particular the Porta 160 setting.

 
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When it comes to street photography sometimes you set out to take photos with a theme, or a project in mind. Other times it’s best to just see where the winds of inspiration will take you. Last week, on a sunny Saturday afternoon I decided to embrace the latter option. I headed into the city and set my point of origin at Harcourt Street, and just started walking. Saturday is a good time to take photos in the Georgian quarter of Dublin because it’s usually pretty quiet, but not so quiet that it’s boring. If you want completely deserted, go for a Sunday morning! Anyway, I started my journey at the Luas stop on Harcourt street and and began walking towards Leeson street and down onto Bagott Street, keeping an eye out for anything wacky or interesting along the way. Dublin never fails to provide the wacky and interesting. You just need to keep your eyes open.

Rounding the corner onto Leeson Street there was this interesting bike. Someone is a fan of either Bob Marley, or hemp related products. Or Sandwiches. I just liked it for the colurs!

On Bagott Street there is this gorgeous little old antiques shop. I used to pass it every day when I worked in the area and the window is a treasure trove of curiosities. I snapped these two little statues proudly defending a Guinness sign!

Moving on I headed across and into Stephen’s Green. Here the summer sunshine had caused the Daisy population to explode. It was quite pretty in the dappled sunshine so I stopped to try and get some shots from low down.

The light was probably a little harsh, but anyway. When in the green, you have to take a shot of the band stand. I have dozens if not hundreds of shots of this. Between the constantly changing light and the fact that they are always changing the flowers around it, it always looks different. I could probably do a whole exhibition of bandstand photos.

Moving on I headed down the back streets towards the river. I wanted to avoid Grafton Street because it was busy and it was also getting a bit monotonous, as I had been shooting street photography a lot there recently, and it’s a bit too easy. Mind you, I ended going back that way anyway.

These folks were getting very excited by something outside the Clarendon.

I ended up crossing Dame street and heading down to Temple Bar. The city was a hive of activity that day, and there were lots of tourists milling about. This hapless group seemed perplexed by the options around them…

Temple bar was the usual hive of activity. The main square has become a regular market place for books and other knick knacks and it’s always full of interesting characters.

The main point of interest on a Saturday in temple bar though has to be the farmers market in the Meeting House Square. Farmers markets are always great photo opportunities, especially if you like colour and texture.

I saw a few other another quirky things in Temple bar too while I was there…

I thought this sign was quite clever.

I love this little advertisement for the shop behind it too. I’ve passed this loads of times and it’s a great combination of worn weathered textures and beautiful bold colours. (I was on a colour and texture kick that day – just in case that wasn’t obvious by now!)

From here I left temple bar and headed down to the Liffey, but more on that in part two tomorrow!

If you are wondering, these were all shot using a Sony Nex-7 and a combination of the Sigma 30mm and the Sony 50mm 1.8. I’ll have some more on the technical details in Tomorrows post!
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I’ve been doing some testing over the last little while, and I wanted to share some of my findings.  First of all, I realise that the term “dirty” is probably not the most appropriate word to use when talking about food, but that’s the best way to describe what I wanted to do. I have been conducting some tests for an upcoming project. I wanted to be able to find a way to take good quality food shots, but not have the process of photography interfere with the actual process of cooking. I needed it to be as simple as possible, but still give high quality results. There are lots of problems to this project that need to be solved, but the first was choosing the right camera. I could go full on with my D700 and big lenses, but that kind of defeats the “fly on the wall” approach that the project needs, so I decided to see if my XE1 could do as a stand in.

The one thing I didn’t want to have to do was use a lot of lights. In fact, I didn’t want to have to use any lights. The XE1 is pretty good in low light, and while It’s not quite as clean as my D700, for this it worked perfectly well. I was using the 35mm prime 1.4 lens which helped in the low light situation. Where I’m currently shooting has lots of light, but even within that you need to account for shadows and dark corners. Again, the purpose of the test was to see how well I could do with minimum equipment and minimum set up.

The first test was a soup recipe. I took shots throughout the cooking process in the kitchen, without stopping to do any elaborate setups. The little fuji worked great. for most of the shots, it performed admirably. I did resort to my D700 for one set of shots (which I haven’t posted here – these are all from the XE1), but that was mainly because I wanted to get some macro shots, and I don’t have the 60mm for my XE1. I couldn’t really get any closer either without burning myself or the camera. Being able to frame with the LCD really makes a big difference too. I know you could use live view on a DSLR but it’s just not the same in terms of flexibility.

Here are some of the photographs taken during the cooking process. I started with a prep shot of all the ingredients. The idea is that these will eventually be part of an instructional set of images to go with recipes:

I’m pretty happy with how these came out. They are only tests, and I know they’re not as good as a professional studio shoot would be, but still, for quick and dirty I think they turned out pretty well. I processed the files in Aperture, and I have to say, I really like the look of how Aperture renders the images. These haven’t really been processed much either. Aperture’s default conversion gives really nice punchy colours. I’ve tweaked a few shots, and mostly it was just to add a bit of contrast, but for the most part these are straight out of the camera.

Here’s a few shots of the finished product. I wasn’t really focussing on the background as these are only tests, so I know it’s a bit busy.

And here’s another food shot from a different session, again using the XE-1, and again, pretty much straight out of the camera:

I hope you enjoyed this quick taster (pardon the pun!) More on this project as at progresses so stay tuned!