Last time lockdown was all about macro photography – here’s a new project to get your teeth into
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Well, it’s been an unpredictable year hasn’t it and for many of us we’ve had to find creative ways to continue out passion for photography.
Back in April, as the first lookdown started you couldn’t buy a second hand macro lens for love nor money. And as I’d swapped systems from Canon to Micro 4/3 in 2019 that was a lens I hadn’t added to my arsenal. After a bit of hunting I was luck to find a mint condition one on mpb.com and these are a few of the images I captured on my kitchen table.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been running some virtual online meetups for photographers when we can’t actually get out with our cameras and we can’t get to our photography meetings. The other night I was talking about how I capture studio-quality portraits for clients in their own homes without a lot of expensive gear, and I just thought I would share that bit of that workshop for you.
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I’ve been running some online workshops each week for photographers who can’t get to their local camera clubs whilst we’ve got this COVID virus keeping us all at home. One of the questions that we’ve been asked is what’s the best lens for landscape photography? So the other night we did a session on landscapes and I got my brother, Adrian, who lives up in the lake district and does some great landscape photography to talk to us about what lenses he uses in what situations and what he finds best.
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At the moment, we’re in lockdown and we’re allowed to go out once a day for a piece of exercise. So, I went out on Tuesday, which was the first day we were under lockdown, for a walk. And, as ever, my camera goes with me everywhere. And my idea was to photograph empty streets, no people around, shuttered up shops, and that sort of thing.
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When I got home, I decided I wanted to post-process them to give them that sort of post apocalyptic look, that sort of grungy, dirty type of look that is appropriate for the present situation. And I thought I’d just share with you how I went about that.
So at the moment people are becoming housebound. They’re being told to work from home. If you’re in the at-risk group, you can’t go out. So this morning I held a virtual coffee morning online and it went down an absolute storm. People loved it, it was a chance to chat even if you can’t get out and about… So I thought I could do the same for us photographers.
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With many countries recommending social distancing or not going out, what can we do during this testing time to keep out photography fresh?
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Today, I was going to be talking to you about automating noise reduction in Lightroom, but then it occurred to me that maybe some of you aren’t fully familiar with Lightroom’s noise reduction tools. So I thought I’d make a video on how to do noise reduction, and then we’ll come back to the automation of that in another video. I’m going to show you in Lightroom, but it also works in Photoshop. It’s exactly the same process.
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I was only thinking the other day about what do you do when you’re just not feeling that creative? What are some of the ideas that I can give you to go out and try to get your creative juices flowing?
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We are of course talking about the new Fuji X100V which is being hailed as the ultimate street photography camera
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