CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

With the weather forecast of a clear day with scattered clouds after recent heavy snowfalls had us heading into the Highlands of Scotland.  We arrived before dawn at Rannoch Moor with deep snow drifts and frozen lochs presenting us with a beautiful wintry scene to photograph. A quick recce to find the best, and safe, vantage point before setting the Fuji X-T1 on the Manfrotto 190 tripod in position facing west away from the sunrise towards the mountains.   While I waited for the sun to appear I captured the shot above on the 35mm f1.4 with a 20 second exposure of scene before the dawn. I then switched to the 10-24mm wide angle zoom to give me a little more flexibility and a Lee 0.6 (2 stop) ND grad in place in preparation for the sunrise.   I put the 56mm f1.2 on the X-Pro1 and then switched to the 55-200mm to give me some extra pulling power once the sun came up.  This allowed me to get some close up shots of the sunlight hitting the ridges of t...

Today was another photographic trip into the Highlands of Scotland visiting Rannoch Moor for sunrise, Glen Orchy, Loch Leven and Glen Coe for sunset.  We took over 700 shots which now have to be edited for tomorrow's blog but here is one shot that stood out on the Lightroom display. This was one of the final shots of the day at the sun set behind the mountains at the top of Glen Coe.  Standing ankle deep in freezing water (with proper waterproof boots on I hasten to add) I got this shot on the X-T1 and XF10-24mm f4 lens of the sunset behind Buachaille Etive Beag.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADVERTISERS ON THIS PAGE By clicking on the adverts you are helping support this blog - thank you. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALL IMAGES ARE ...

Last December I upgraded my Samsung Galaxy S3 mobile phone to the new Galaxy S5.  I have been an advocate of mobile phone cameras and have noticed how casual photographers have been shunning traditional compact cameras and other offerings at the low end of the camera market because the quality of the images from phone cameras have improved so much over the past few years. I have done some blogs on this subject (Galaxy S3 HERE and Apple iPhone 4S HERE ) and today I decided to try out the camera on the S5 during a walk on Tyninghame beach this afternoon.  I took along the Fujifilm X100 as a quality comparison. The camera on the S5 produces an image that is 5212 x 2988 pixels (16mp) in 16:9 format or 3984 x 2988 (12mp) in the more traditional 4:3 format.  This compares to the 16mp Fujifilm X-T1, with its much larger APS-C sensor, file size of 4896 x 3264 and the 12mp X100s (also APS-C sensor) 4288 x 2848. The Galaxy S5 has plenty of functions for the user to choose f...

One of the things we like about living in East Lothian are the sunsets and the 'big skies', they just seem to go on forever. This is a shot down at Belhaven Bay a few months ago.  

One of the pleasures of living by the sea is beach combing. We will go for walks on the beaches near our home in Dunbar and pick up interesting items such as driftwood, rocks, shells and sea glass.   If you don't know what sea glass is, they are pieces of glass that have been physically and chemically weathered by salt water and the action of the tides. These weathering processes produce natural frosted glass and the beaches of East Lothian are a great place to find excellent examples.  In fact one of the best beaches for collecting sea glass is less than one kilometre from our front door. Over the past year we have collected quite a few pieces of sea glass and I decided to set up a table top studio to photograph the colours, shapes and textures of some of the best bits. Using the glass from an old picture frame as a table which I raised up on some books so I could put a light underneath to shine through the pieces of sea glass I placed on the picture frame glass to...

The X-Pro1 received the AF-MF function during the Firmware upgrade last December. On December 18 2014 Fujifilm released a wave of updates for the X-T1 (firmware V3.0) that improved the camera in several key areas.  Some of the upgrades are very nice to have but hardly earth shattering and will probably be used by me on the odd occassion if at all during my ownership of the camera.   However there as some upgrades, like the electronic shutter (which I reviewed HERE ) that are very useful in my everyday use of the camera. While the X-T1 upgrades hit all the headlines, the older X-Pro1 also got a firmware upgrade (V3.4), a single update that seems to have been overlooked in all the X-T1 plaudits but, in my opinion, improves the operation of the camera immensely.  The upgrade I am talking about is the inclusion of manual focus override when using AF-S - this mode is AF+MF.  Now the X-T1 also got this upgrade and the functionality is also slightly better ...

I recently got involved in a conversation after a member of a Facebook group I belong to asked a question asking what was the largest size print he could obtain from the 16 megapixel X-Trans sensor.  This is a question I see quite a lot from photographers of all abilities.  I have been printed A2 images from 12mp sensor cameras since 2010 and still have several images the walls of my house taken on Nikon D90, D300S and Fujifilm X100.   All of these cameras have a 12mp sensor and the images I have printed range from A3 (42cm x 29.7cm), A2 (59.4cm x 42cm) up to 70cm x 50cm, all with no loss of quality when compared with the original image.  I also used a Nikon D800 and this camera boasts a massive 36mp sensor which certainly produces some impressive results but unless you print to billboard size you are not going to see any significant difference between the images produced by the D800 and the D300S, the main difference in quality is going to come from the lens...