Instagram

Now, I'm not one for social networking, I don't do Facebook or Twitter, as I don't think my life is interesting enough for anyone else to want to know about it, just as I'm not interested in anyone I might know just having eaten a Kit-Kat.
However my brother recently pointed me towards Instagram, I'm sure most of you know what this is, but I'd not heard of it before and thought it looked like a bit of fun, especially as I've got an iPhone 4S on the way with its decent 8Mp camera.
So I've put some photos on Instagram, the usual dark moody stuff I take.
The first ones were taken with my iPhone 3GS and don't look too bad actually.

More recent ones were taken using the iPhone 4S, on Instagram there is not a whole lot of difference visible between the two but downloaded the better camera in the 4S shows up.
Incidentally to download your photos from Instagram, if you have Mac and you are using iCloud, your iPhone photos will sync with iPhoto and you can simply drag your Instagram image into Photoshop.
Even the 3GS images looked fine at 100% and would easily print at A4.

See the site here:
http://instagram.com/stereodesign

Three of the images from the iPhone 4s

Old door detail New Street Aberystwyth Ceredigion

Aberaeron sea front on a cloudy April day

Nationalist graffiti painted on a wall in memory of a Gwynedd village, flooded to provide water for Liverpool in 1965

Photoshop CS6 nudes processed with Layer blending methods

I recently moved from Windows to Mac.

When you buy Lightroom it comes as both the Windows and Mac version so I no need to purchase it again.
Photoshop, however only comes as either Windows or Mac, so I had to buy it again. I qualify for the educational price on adobe software so its not as bad as it sounds. Curiously when I bought PS CS6 for the Mac the windows version came with it!

Anyway, I'm starting tot get to into CS6. for almost all of my photography Lightroom is all that I need I only really use PS for more graphic ideas I occasionally have.

My workflow was to process the image in LR using DSLR Guru presets, from  LR open the image in PS, add the effects then save then back to LR and export to jpg.

Originally shot on film with a Contax and Zeiss 50mm

A more recent image shot on an Olympus 3040Z

Digital image from Olympus 3040Z

Another Olympus 3040Z image processed in Ps Cs6 using layer blending methods

Canon 20mm f2.8 lens, 5D2 and Welsh ruin

I was recently in North Wales for the weekend.
My brother was there with his Canon D1 and his latest lens, a 20mm EF f2.8.
Even though the weather was pretty poor I took it out for a quick go on my 5D2.

I went back to the ruined cottage which is a short walk from our house.
The results have been processed in Lightroom as usual.

Polaroid images in Photoshop

I've been playing about in PS CS6 with some Polaroid frames from fuzzimo.com and some nudes I took in 2004.
I like the lo-fi look this kind of manipulation brings.

Heslington East Sunrise

I was up for the sunrise after some recent snow on the Heslington East University of York campus.

I had with me my first DSLR an Olympus E330. I chose this because I have a Sigma 55-150mm zoom, which with the 4/3 crop fact is the equivalent of 110 - 300mm on a full frame, and I wanted that large zoom.
I'd not used the E330 for quite a while and really enjoyed using it, it is so small and light compared to my usual Canon 5D2 with 24 - 70mm f2.8. 
The image quality is not too bad either, I used the camera preset for sunrise/sunset.
These images have had very little adjustment in Lightroom other than the Auto button, which I always use.

Photo-montage Ken Burns effect Sony Vegas Pro 12

I've been playing around with Sony Vegas Pro 12 and the /Crop/Pan settings. I used to used a program by Canopus called Imaginate to do this kind of work but Canopus killed it when they became Grass Valley and introduced the functions into Edius. I was an Edius user for many years and found it very stable and fast but with version 6.0 GV dropped support for the NX hardware cards which I used, with no word on when or even if drivers would arrive for the NX hardware I moved over to Sony Vegas Pro. Why Sony Vegas Pro? Well I'd used Sony Soundforge for a good while and Vegas integrated with it and the learning curve was relatively shallow.

Vegas runs nicely on my Intel i7 editing PC but also very well on my AMD Phenom II laptop, on which I edited the montage below and increasingly find myself doing more and more work. Vegas copes with canon 5D2 video natively as it does most formats.

Photos taken on Canon 5D2 and Leica M8, music An Ending by Brian Eno.

Nudes revisited 2

Some more nudes from 2004 revisited in Lightroom.
Taken on Olympus 3040.