Andrew Macpherson

I’ve been trying out LightRoom Beta 3 (now 3.2) and been slightly frustrated by the fact that it has a dependancy on Camera Raw 5.7, which seems to be the CS5 release version.   I had been cynically assuming that it would not be released for PhotoShop CS4 users, but last night Adobe came through and Updater popped up to offer me the download. — Thanks!

The features have been fairly well covered in the CS5 pre-publicity, see the videos on the PhotoShopUser website, and I was eager to try the noise reduction on some marginal shots taken back in the 1990s on a Minolta DimageV (640×480 pixels) and I have to say the handling of colour noise is spectacular (continue reading…)

The Club Chairman’s evening was a great reminder not to ignore your pre-digital photography.  It was a great show based on old scanned negatives from his trip through South America, the Galapagos and Easter Island — A sort of “in the footsteps of Heyerdahl”  section of his round the world trip.  I though that some of his photographs from Easter Island were much better than those of the same subjects on show at the Kon Tiki  museum in Oslo.

It was also a great reminder of how in many ways it is much easier it is now to capture an image.  Being able to swing the sensor’s ISO between extremes makes photography much easier, but the older technology did not have us keeping careful track of white-balance to the same extent.

It’s also interesting as one works through the family photographic archive scanning old slides, and later negatives  with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 to see how photographic habits have changed.  One’s parents/grandparents were content with 6 exposures as guests at  wedding — how many did you take last time you went to one?  Or perhaps consider a whole holiday on 2 rolls of film. It brings into focus the reasoning behind Adobe’s early decision to leave light box functionality out of  LightRoom.

On Friday evening I went to an eye-opening evening at Hertford Camera Club who had invited Kevin Herbert, a judge of 35 years experience, to give an insight into the judge’s view of a competition.

He added to the theory I had spent days researching about depth of field and the viewing distances which reduce a circle of confusion to a single point in human perception, with a remark about a British standard for how close to inspect a print.

The answer was a fairly surprising requirement to view from a distance of twice the diagonal, and not more than four times the diagonal, which he qualified with the comment that one can then look closer to analyse defects seen from that range.

That was the technical bit.  Most important was the initial overview in which the judge has to assess the author’s intent, or at least the effect of the author’s work and presentation, putting firmly aside personal likes and dislikes of subject matter.  How to deal with the technically excellent presentation of the boring or revolting, the technically poor but original presentation?  All good thought provoking stuff and an evening well spent.  I hope we’ll have Kevin along to the local club in the near future, as I’m sure others would enjoy his talk, and come away with entirely different highlights.