Sometimes launching a service well after others makes it hard to get a share of the market. However if you’ve got the right resources it can be a good strategy as it allows you to fully understand what the market is after and step in with a better product. Strobox and Sylight being a good example. Here’s another…

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Last night I discovered an app by Olivier Lance, Pierre-Jean Quilleré and Mathieu Jouhet called Sylights. It enables lighting setups to be drawn on an iPhone or iPad.  As the sylights.com title says it’s “Lighting Diagrams made easy”.

Users of Strobox will be familiar with this sort of tool and be interested for a number of reasons..

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I’d just finished taking some head shots in the studio and was heading to the car when I spotted this lady with her partner, CALL MY AGENT splashed across her sweat top dress. I love fashion and this simple top with its message printed so big across the front made me laugh inside, smile and think “So who is your agent?”.

Loaded up with gear it took me a moment to catch up with the couple. After a bit of conferring in a language I didn’t understand I got a yes.
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If like me you’re running Lightroom on a Windows laptop quite often you might find where your images are located an issue. I have my RAID server image archive mapped to P: on the laptop. I’ll move folders in the Lightroom catalogue that I’m no longer working on to the server and off the local hard drive. Now and then I find myself wanting to edit some of those images. (read the rest of the post…)

It’s with a heavy heart that I’ve deleted all of my Pinterest boards. For some of the reasons why have a look at this post by photographer and lawer Kirsten Kowalski. Until all the copyright issues bubbling away in the USA settle down fully I’d rather not put myself at risk. Anyone I’ve invited to Pinterest should read the article and Pinterest T&C and make up their own mind to keep their boards or not.

In the long term Pinterest and sites like them could do a number of things to improve the situation: (read the rest of the post…)

I’ve seen a lot of “mirror shots” like the one on the left over the last few years, people wanting to start as a model and needing something they can upload to a profile site in the hope they can get a photographer to help them shoot something better. Many are shot in low light indoors in the evening, blurred and very noisy.  Everyone on this planet starts with nothing, so the fact they’ve taken some initiative is good, not everyone has the money to pay for shots and sign up with an agent day one.  Of course not everyone will make it, many will give up early leaving the determined, hard-working and persistent ones to continue on.

If you’re just about to start and using a phone with a reasonable camera here’s some tips that might help. (read the rest of the post…)

During one of my fashion and portrait shoots the person being photographed may use a number of different outfits and each may be shot in a number of different ways. When sorting through the images to select the best I find it helps to group like shots into subfolders in the Lightroom catalogue.

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It’s been quite a satisfying week; some new code I’m very pleased with written for an IT client, some new photography contacts and DIY at home giving our rooms a fresh new look. Amazing what you can do with a tin of paint or two. And the house wasn’t the only thing to get painted. This Sunday sees me return to the studio for another test shoot.

Instead of the silver bounce reflector I will be using a large beauty dish. One of the old Bowens bowls has been adapted with a home made diffuse reflector and flash mount.

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I’ve taken a few quick adhoc backups in the past, copying whole directories of image files onto the server with a view to “sorting out that lot later..“.  Having an almost full file system, new disc drives at a premium and being rationed, that time is now! (read the rest of the post…)

In case you missed the news Lightroom 4 public beta is out, it can be downloaded from here.

If you’d like to read a list of the new features have a look at Victoria “The Lightroom Queen” Bampton’s blog

There are some great additions that the community has been asking for. And a big change to some of the develop sliders that will take a bit of getting used to but already showing good results! A big plus for me is the Book support, a big thanks to Adobe for listening to our requests! <3  (Now if you guys could add the skin tone dropper I’d have everything ticked off my priority changes list )