Here’s a situation where a simple manual focus lens can do something a modern zoom lens can’t. I’ve dug this dusty old Pentax SMC 50mm f/1.7 lens out of the garage to demonstrate it, but there are an increasing number of modern manual prime lenses which can do the same thing – setting the hyperfocal distance….
I was lucky enough to get a Fujifilm GFX 50S on loan for two weeks to review in Digital Camera and Professional Photography and I’m really impressed by the tonal range and subtlety it can capture. This became obvious when I started working on a set of shots from a drizzle-swept day on Exmoor. The sky…
The ‘Pluto’ update to Luminar brought a selection of new tools including a new Golden Hour filter. If you want to know more about it, you can download the Luminar trial version. This filter is designed to simulate the warmth of a late afternoon sun, something which is actually a lot more difficult to do digitally…
Apple Photos is central to both the Mac OS and iOS devices. It’s a great way to keep all your photos to handy on all your devices, and it practically looks after itself – you add a photo on one device, and very soon it’s on all of them. It’s also a pretty good image-editing…
Why would you use colour filters when you’re shooting in black and white? It’s so that you can control the way different colours translate into shades of grey. For example, if you shoot through a red filter, it blocks colours other than red, so that opposite colours, like blue skies, for example, come out much…
It’s very easy to lose extreme shadow or highlight detail when you’re shooting high-contrast scenes, and that’s one of the reasons for shooting raw files – they contain additional highlight detail, especially, that you may be able to bring out during processing. Shadow and highlight recovery is not always possible, but I usually reckon that…
The way that certain cameras feel and work and operate lends them to a certain kind of photography. And for me, the iPhone is perfect for high-contrast, graphic black and white images. True, the image quality is some way short of what you’d get from a ‘proper’ camera, but when I’m using it I see…
The Lightroom HDR tools built in are good in their way, but will only get you so far. Yes, you can boost the shadows, reduce the highlights, add some Clarity and Dehaze and maybe a graduated filter for the sky, but you can end up doing a lot of work only getting half way to the…
Modern cameras can reproduce the world with utter, clinical accuracy. The trouble is, it turns out that’s not what we wanted after all. A lot of the time, what we actually want is the faded, distressed, imperfect look of analog photography. So here are six top tips for getting that analog film effect ‘look’ with…
Maybe you wouldn’t normally think of Capture One Pro as an image-editor. It’s a superb RAW converter and general image enhancement tool, but most of the time you’d probably swap to a plug-in or an external editor for really detailed effects work – especially any that required localised adjustments. But I’ve been spending some time with Capture One…