Palm Trees

Above taken with Fujifilm X-Pro 1 and 14mm lens, raw file converted to tiff using Silkypix and then Nik HDR Efex applied in Photoshop.

I love the X-Pro 1, which I traded my Nikon D7000 for, having switched both my other DSLR bodies to FX (full-frame) variants, and sold off most of my DX lenses, the otherwise excellent DX D7000 was a bit 'orphaned' in my kit bag. I would have hung onto it, but as Nikon continues to have a confused strategy for DX lenses, I've now bought into a parallel system, and I'm very glad that I did.

The X-Pro 1 is not exactly compact for a 'Compact System Camera', but is more so than a DSLR and is substantially lighter, despite it's tough build. All the lenses I've tried (14/18/35/60) are excellent, and there's already enough range there to satisfy me.

Nokia Lumia 1020 Review

Well, it's been a while. The obvious answer to not being able to keep one blog updated is to start another one. Introducing my Open College of the Arts blog here!

Anyway, onto the main subject of this post - smartphone cameras have been getting increasingly more competent, such that they are eating away at compact camera sales. After all, a compact, no matter how compact, is just another thing to carry, and why bother when you have a very competent camera in the thing you always carry with you: your mobile phone?

When it came to upgrading my phone at the end of my contract, having had a succession of Blackberrys, Android phones and an iPad, I decided to try something different. Now, Windows Mobile may not be everyone's first choice for a mobile operating system, but it was Nokia's, and the sweetener is the innovative cameras in their Lumia range of handsets.

First off, lets get that Windows OS covered. Long story short, I found it refreshingly different, but slick and intuitive. It took me no time at all to get the 1020 configured: adding Exchange and Outlook email you would expect to be easy, but Google mail was equally as slick. It all runs smoothly with no fuss.

The phone itself is nicely engineered, not perhaps as overtly 'premium' as offerings from Sony and Apple, but never the less solidly made with a polycarbonate body and a metal fascia to the protruding camera portion at the rear.

Ah, that camera, yes that 41 megapixel camera. Okay, lets not get too excited, these are tiny pixels so I won't be selling my Nikon D800 any time soon, but on the plus side the 1020 has a Zeiss lens and a 'proper' xenon flash, not a wimpy LED. A bonus on a particularly cold day in Birmingham (see image below), is that the touch screen can largely be operated with gloves on - I only say 'largely' as the smaller menus can be tricky, but selecting the focus point works quite well.

Nokia Lumia 1020 DNG file processed in ACR, HDR Efex 2

I had to apply a couple of updates to get the Nokia 'Black' software that gives the ability to shoot in RAW, after which you have the choice of 38MP 4:3 images stored as Adobe Digital Negatives (DNG), or the same at 34MP 16:9. The camera also saves a 5MP jpeg alongside these, convenient for sharing via social media. The jpegs can be automatically uploaded to Microsofts cloud storage Skydrive (7GB free when you setup a Microsoft account).

DNG files can be opened in Adobe Camera Raw and processed in Photoshop. So far, I'm pretty pleased with the results. One thing I did pretty quickly was to purchase the accessory camera grip. This is easy to fit and remove, and provides a much needed grip, and boosts the battery capacity by 50%. With very frequent use of the camera, I found the grip kept the main battery at 100% for about 5 hours, before giving up and letting the handsets' battery take over. There's also a tripod socket, which isn't very useful* and a big shutter button, which is. Like the dedicated shutter button on the handset, the latter can invoke the camera pretty quickly even when the phone is locked (although you can then shoot, you can't get into the 'settings' menu without unlocking it).

Downsides? Well, your choice of apps with Windows Mobile is quite limited compared to Android and Apple, but the upside to this is may be the quality is that bit higher, and you won't be as tempted to bloat your phone out with stuff you don't use, or doesn't work that well.

Also, there is no internal storage upgrade option, so you're stuck with 32GB (64GB is coming), so you might need to change your habits a little if you want to take lots of high resolution images - like streaming music rather than storing mp3's.

It would be nice to be able to control the aperture (you can adjust shutter in Nokia's Pro Camera app, but you can't see what the effect is on aperture), but then again we're never going to achieve mega-shallow depth-of-field effects with a sensor this small.

Overall though, a very competent camera with a smartphone attached. The quality of Nokia's engineering shines through (as it always has, even when saddled with the outdated Symbian OS), and so it makes a welcome addition to my photographic tool set.

For more samples, see here.

*If I'm going to bother carrying a tripod, I'm likely to bother taking a 'proper' camera.

Great Light

Why is it the Internet fora are full of photographers mainly discussing gear, but hardly ever discussing great light:

Nikon D3x, 55mm f/2.8 Ai-S macro

Graphics Cards for Photoshop CS6

Following on from my previous post, I know it can be difficult to identify a suitable graphics adapter for use with Photoshop, so I thought I would share this link.

I would have chosen an Asus nvidia GTX650 1GB card, which seems to be excellent value for money - it's performance in these tests was mostly just 5-10% off the performance of the top-performing adapters, yet it can be found for a shade over £100.

In the event, the heatsink and cooling tubes weren't a great fit in my Dell Precision 490, so I had to drop to a GT640, which is slightly smaller physically, and cheaper but came with 2GB of memory instead of 1GB. It wasn't around when the above test was run but ought to be fairly similar to the 650.

Adobe 'Cloud'

Adobes' recent changes to their pricing structure has caused quite a bit of a backlash from photographers, if the Internet fora can be used as a measure of this. Me, I take a more positive view, at least in the short term.

Basically Adobe is shifting away from selling boxed products, instead selling applications by subscription. Once you subscribe, for a monthly fee, you can then download the latest versions of the applications you are eligible for under the subscription plan you chose. As long as you keep paying the fee, you can carry on using the software. Once you cease your subscription, then at some point Adobe will block your use of that software, until or unless you re-subscribe. That 'at some point' is currently 90 days but this is due to increase to 180 in the near future.

Adobe use of the phrase 'Creative Cloud' (CC) has caused a bit of confusion. To be clear, the applications bought through CC are downloaded and installed on your computer, and run on it just as if you had installed from DVD/CD. The application then periodically checks with Adobe that your subscription is still valid. To get around the issue of users being away from an Internet connection, there's effectively a 90/180 day grace period. So, plenty of time to go on an 3 month assignment then (are you listening National Geographic?).

I use two Adobe Products, Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom will continue to be sold as a boxed product according to Adobe, but Photoshop is moving to CC. I thought I had foolishly missed the opportunity to upgrade from CS4 to CS6, but in hindsight this may have been a wise move, because for less than £9 a month, I have now not only been able to upgrade to CS6, but will also be able to move to the next version, Photoshop CC, when it becomes available later this year, for no additional cost.

Given that previous upgrade costs have been around £180, short term I'm quite happy with this. It remains to be seen what the cost will be in year two, as Adobe is currently giving introductory discounts to encourage users to subscribe to CC. For now though, I'm happy to be running the latest version for the next 12 to 18 months.