Take The Red Pill

I saw the Blues Brothers and looked around to see if there was someone on the street that would tie in with their dress code and make an interesting photo. Nope, nobody on the street, but I was delighted when I looked in the shop and saw this guy. I waited 5 or 6 minutes for him to come out and was rewarded with this.

Was he attracted to the shop because of the similarity in his and The Blues Brothers headwear, or was it just coincidence? By the look on his face, you would think that he hadn't even noticed Mr Aykroid and Belushi until this moment when he's leaving the shop. You get these things in street photography a lot. How much stuff do we miss in day to day life? When you really switch your brain on, like you do shooting street, you start to see all these connections around you that happen a lot more than you'd expect. Grab your camera and head out on to the street. Take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes!

Lightroom & Photoshop Workflow Wizard

My ears prick up the minute I hear the word workflow. It's the one area of photography that can be a bit of a drag. The digital age has brought many great things, like being able to take lots of photos for free. The digital age has also brought us a few bad things though, like being able to take lots of photos for free (yeh you read that right). If you shoot weddings, you're taking photos for hours and they stack up fast. My editing sessions always start enthusiastically and then take a dive after the first three or four hours, so I'm always looking for ways to speed up my workflow and always curious about how other photographers work in post.

The Logitech G13 arrived at my door last Friday and I spent most of the day configuring it. It's set-up is very similar to a Wacom tablet and it doesn't take long to get the hang of it.  It's easy to set-up Photoshop and assign keys on the G13 to just about anything. Lightroom is a different story though, as it doesn't have keyboard short cuts assigned to the sliders. The answer to our dreams comes in the form of a fantastic plugin called Paddy which is available to download HERE for free. Paddy is a little time consuming to set-up, but is well worth it. It's best to use the computer F keys as they don't have any shortcuts assigned to them in Lightroom. You can map the F keys to any of the G13's 21 keys using the Logitech software. The keyboard can then be configured in Paddy to control the Lightroom Sliders.

Paddy handles Lightroom sliders by assigning keys to move sliders by a fixed amount. I set my keys up so that for example the F4 key is assigned to Exposure +5. Every time I hit the key on the G13 that's assigned to F4, it increases the exposure by 5. F3+Shift is set to increments of 1 and F3+Alt is set to increments of 10. This might sound a bit complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it's very easy.

I have only edited using the G13 for a couple of hours, but I can see a big jump in the speed of my workflow. The keys are marked G1 to G22 so you need to memorize which key does what, but the shape of the keyboard really helps your brain to take it in a lot faster. I find I'm already reaching for keys on the G13 rather than the computer keyboard. The G13 also detects when you switch programs and applies your presets automatically, again like the Wacom tablets. You can even have three pages of presets for each software program and have each page set to a different colour (screen and keys are lit) so you always know where you are. I use a page for the Library module (blue) and a page for the Develop module (orange) in Lightroom. The G13 is available from Amazon in the UK for £62 or in the US for $62.

FilterStorm:: The Best App For Photographers?

There's a lot of great photography apps out there, but most of them are geared toward one or two features. Some lean toward shooting and uploading straight toTwitter, Facebook etc, some do tilt/shift and some only do black & white. Thanks to Apples camera connection kit, I can now take the SD card from my Fujifilm X100 and import the photos straight onto the iPad 2. I needed an app that could then resize the files to my blog sizes. I tried PhotoResizer, which did the job, but was a little sluggish and again a one trick pony.

FilterStorm is what the Photoshop app should have been like. It does a huge amount of different things and it does them really well. Apart from Settings, Load Photo Star Rating and Automations, The app is split into 4 sections, which are in the form of tabs - Export, Metadata, Filters and Canvas. Export does what you would expect, like saving back to your photos folder of sending by email, Flickr, FTP or Dropbox. You can also choose size and quality options here too. The Metadata tab is set for viewing meta and renaming photos by default, but click on Settings and you get whopping great 31 switches that let you turn on features like Keywords, Captions, Subject, Category, Location, Copyright, Usage, Contact Details...etc. The meta section really is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Canvas is where you can crop, scale, rotate, flip,straighten, Scale and add borders. This is another huge section. Filters is the place where we pixel pushers all like to be. It has Brightnes/Contrast, Curves, Hue/Saturation, White Balance, Sharpening, Blur, Black & White, Clone, Tone Mapping, Text, Noice Reduction, Noise, Redeye Brush, Colour, Vignette, Posterize and Add Exposure. The great thing is that it does them all really well.

This is the best i photo editing app that I have ever used, and I've tried plenty. The thing is, I've just checked on the Apple App Store so I could wright the price (2.39 UK) and saw that there is a pro version (8.99 UK) with even more features. My one gripe would be that if you have already bought the standard version, you shouldn't have to pay the full price for the pro version. That goes for apps that are different on the iPhone & iPad, if you buy it on your iPhone and the iPad is a more expensive & more powerful app, then you should only have to pay the difference and not the full cost. But all that aside, Filterstorm is the best app for photographers I have came across to date. It was made with photojournalists in mind (although photojournalists shouldn't need a clone tool). I'm going to buy the Pro version now, as there are a few features that I quite fancy (batch editing being but one). Filtersorm (iPod, iPhone & iPad) & Filterstorm Pro (iPad only) are available on the App Store. The photo above is from the Pro version.