Remez Ramblings

When I first got my hands on the Adobe Lightroom beta I was really disappointed. The tutorial videos looked great, but the performance (to be brutally honest) sucked, and I couldnt’ see it replacing Raw Shooter Premium as my RAW converter.As a Raw Shooter Premium user, I was sent a free upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 when it was released, and, again, I was disappointed with its performance. It has memory leaks, and I’ve seen memory usage over 700MB a number of times.

I’ve been playing with it more now though, and am starting to really like it. I can adjust exposure, contrast, b&w / split tone conversions, cropping, cloning, and all basic high level edits required in a workflow application (barring sharpening).

Lightroom also offers the facility of virtual copies, as it’s non-detructive editing, this is a fantastic feature, and I started to play. Initially I thought, great, now let’s stack the different versions of the same image, but then I found this article on why you should use collections with virtual copies, and not stacks.

I think with an extra Gigabyte of RAM, and a couple of patches from Adobe, this could be a fantastic application, as opposed to just a really good one.

I’m sure I’ll post more tips I learn about Lightroom, as I get to grips with it.

I love quick outdoor shoots like this one as in only a few minutes of shooting you can get a really good range of shots, and depending on the background give a really different feel to the shot.

It used to be really unusual for me to use flash (indoors or out), and only used it where absolutely necessary.

I’ve since found that it’s the exception when I don’t use the flash. There are few naturally ocurring conditions when a touch of fill (especially for catchlights) isn’t really helpful.

Using flash outdoors really helps lift the subject, and give a little more of that elusive ‘pop’ that is so oft quoted.

I find I knock down the flash exposure compensation a stop or two, and just use bare unbounced flash works a treat. The effect here is quite subtle, but compared to some very similar shots from the same shoot while the flash was recycling, makes a real difference.

As an inhabitant of various photography and camera gear communities, there is a lot of snobbishness about the cameras built into mobile phones. At the time I took this photo, I had my EOS 20D SLR with me, but I chose to shoot it on my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i).

Why?

Because I was busy, on my way, and just wanted to grab a quick shot to remember how blue the sky was, and how dramatic it looked. Sure it would have been nice with a decent lens, and a polarising filter to make the most of it, but I wasn’t interested in all the fine detail, it was the scene I wanted to remember.

The quality of the photos from the K800i are really quite astounding. Only 4 or 5 years ago they would have matched all but the most expensive digital compact cameras. I can see that in the next few years, the digital compact camera market will be massively eroded as people will not need to buy a separate camera.

The prosumer, and digital SLR market is flourishing, and I hope will continue to flourish, having phones which take such great photos will ultimately help, and drive the growth of the higher end kit, as it will encourage more and more people to take more photos, and spark their interest, and inspiration.

Every few years, there’s a new scourge on the streets of London out for your money.

I remember when there were gangs of beggers with babies which I found really quite disturbing - I’m sure there were some genuine ones amongst them all, but you couldn’t turn without seeing one.

Now, I’m a fan of the Big Issue, and buy it when I see vendors. (I became quite friendly with one at Euston Square for a year or so, and was really sad to hear from the next person on the pitch that he died leaving behind a young son). At one point there seemed to be vendors everywhere, and illegal ones as well (who didn’t have badges, or wandered round), and at one point, I wielded the latest issue as a beacon to show I didn’t want to buy another copy (didn’t actually work very well though).

Now we have chuggers (charity muggers) (as pictured here, shot on my Sony Ericsson K800i). Actually, we seem to have passed the peak of the chuggers, thankfully, as their numbers seem to be declining, although this could just be because they don’t like the cold weather, and will return in force in the summer.

If that’s the case, then everyone please stop creating greenhouse gasses, we can get rid of this hazard, by keeping the weather cold, and so we need to cut carbon emissions to stop global warming - otherwise, beware, we’ll have chuggers all year round!

It’s a quiet day, so here’s just another shot from the Comic Relief launch a couple of weeks ago.

During the main photocall, I was in amongst the crowd of photographers, and whilst I was at the front, I was off to one side, which made it very difficult to get many decent shots. Those shots that I did get (of which I still managed to get a reasonable number) they were all managed through myself, or the photographers either side of me yelling out “TURN TO YOUR RIGHT PLEASE!!”

Once the main photocall was over, the rest of the photographers went off to upload their shots to their picture desks, and the celebrities did live broadcast interviews. This gave me the opportunity to grab them between interviews, and grab shots, and in fact, those grabbed shots are my favourites from the day.

The thing I learnt that day, was that I definitely would not want to do that for a living. Once in a while is a lot of fun (if hard work), but having to do it day in and day out, would drive me mad.

For more shots, check out my Red Nose Day 2007 Gallery

I love daylight portraits - especially sidelit from a nice big window.

When David asked me to do a corporate portrait of him, I was glad to oblige, and delighted when he showed me this area with plenty of natural light.

I could have done with a reflector, or some fill flash, (and should have metered off both sides of his face, so I could see quite how large the dynamic range was!), but with very little effort rescued the detail from the bright side of his face.

Many people (David included) don’t like having their photo taken, believing that they are not photogenic, or that they are destined to have bad shots. In fact, all you need to do is help the person relax - if you have 15 minutes, it’s better to spend 10 minutes talking to the person, helping them relax, and then have 5 minutes of great shots, rather than spending only a couple of minutes talking, and then trying to shoot for nearly 15 minutes, during which time they will get more and more stressed, uptight and uncomfortable.

Well, Bob originally got this for Jack, who (unsurprisingly) has now grown out of it.

I was really chuffed when it fitted Sonny, who is having a blast in it.

Sadly he doesn’t seem to have the same penchant for metal that Jack did at that age - System of A Down and AC/DC just don’t cut it for this little man. Actually, I’m not sure that any music holds that much fascination for him, when he has such an exciting older brother to crawl after!

Jack loves watching airplanes, so whilst the baby was asleep, I was happy to oblige him on Sunday, and we went to the local airfield (not leaving the baby by himself, but at home with mummy!).

Whilst trying to stop him falling forwards into the chicken wire fence, and backwards onto the car we were standing in front of, I noticed the GTI badge.

It was just too tempting to take a shot and photochop it. I’m sure the driver of this one is a gentleman (or lady), but there are just too many GTI drivers who should definitely change the badges on their cars to this!

Chris Moyles was raving about the new digital-only radio studio he now has, to Gordon Ramsay.I was fortunate enough to be asked to go and shoot one of these new studios (in the newly refurbished Broadcasting House).

They really are quite impressive - computers, and touch screens all over the place, though it’s nice to see a mixing desk with actual physical sliders, though I can see in future they’ll become touch screens.

I got to shoot Mark Thompson - Director General of the BBC, this afternon.

The BBC is going to have to make 3% year on year savings / cuts following a lower than expected license fee settlement (though still have to help fund the analog switch-off, and moving a load of staff to Manchester. . . )

This is at a lighter point (when recalling the ‘Guy Kewney incident‘)

Oh yes, and it snowed this morning, but I couldn’t get a decent shot of the snow, so you’ll have to make to with Mark Thompson instead!