Pictures from the Mediterranean cruise

We shot over 600 photos on our cruise. Anyone who missed it on Facebook: we visited Savona (Italy), Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca (both Spain), Tunis (Tunisia), La Valletta (Malta), Cantania and Rom (both Italy). Anyway, here is a selection of some of the photos. Took me the better of the day to sort out which photos were worth while posting, and then post-processing them.

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Adobe Lightroom 3

I always shoot in RAW + JPEG. For normal point-and-shoot vacation stuff I’m generally satisfied with the JPEG the camera spits out. But I would never shoot only JPEG. The additional information of RAW shouldn’t be underestimated, and to be honest I often tweak around. It makes a difference if you are working on the original RAW data, or if you are working on the JPEG copy the camera has already processed.
Up till now I’ve been post-processing my images with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3. Since I was planning on post-processing a whole load of pictures I decided to see what software there is out there to streamline the work flow a bit (Bridge and CS3 do the job, and the raw converter in CS3 does offer a wide variety of options, but it is still tedious switching to be switching between both programs and working on multiple RAW images at the same time). While I was away, Adobe released Lightroom 3, so I checked out the reviews and it sounded good. I downloaded the 30 day trial version and to sum it up my experience so far … I’m impressed.
I haven’t worked with Lightroom previously, so I can’t say how much has changed in this version. But I really like the details that make life easier when handling collections of images. Being an Adobe product it also offers interfaces to various Photoshop functions (I only own CS3, I could imagine it offers more options if you have the current version CS5 installed). I could go on and on with things I like about it, but I’ll just sum it up and say: It really streamlines the work flow of post-processing photographs from import to print/upload/web/presentation and if you are shooting RAW it has a whole lot of fun stuff to play around with directly built in.
Since I shoot with a Nikon D80 that tends to produce a fair amount of image noise if I go past ISO 400 I liked the noise reduction features of Lightroom, both color and luminance noise can be reduced greatly with sliders for fine tuning.

It’s a good piece of software, and when the 30 day trial ends I’ll probably go buy it.

HDR / DRI pictures

I admin, I haven’t been updating my blog all to often lately. Mainly due to a) nothing special happening and b) getting stuff prepared for our wedding. So what have I been doing the last few weeks? Well, I finally installed and played GTA IV (which I bought many months ago ;))

Other than that I’ve been plaing around with my camera (and Photoshop CS3) a bit. Tried some light painting, played around with HDR a bit (bought myself a Photomatix license since it can handle my nikon raw format natively), added some of the stuff to my deviant art page d0py.deviantart.com

Happy New Year

My last few postings were all a bit technical, so this one is going to beĀ  a bit more “normal”. I hope every reading this had nice Christmas and New Years celebrations.

It is a cold as heck here, but still no snow. My guess is that it won’t snow here whis winter, just cold and windy weather.

I must admit I haven’t been climbing for about a month. I really need to get back to the gym and train more. I want to shoot some nice pictures during climbing outdoors this year (not just from the bottom or top, I want to shoot pictures while in the route). And to be able to do that, I really need more finger strength to be able to keep the pace when the holds start getting crimpy.

I haven’t been on my bike the last months either, but considering how cold it is out there … I guess that can be excused.

Without going into too much detail, I’m planing on buying 2 new lenses for my Nikon. They should give me a few new possibilities (which reminds me that I really need to clean up my picture gallery). And I should have a look at my helmet camera, the last thing I shot with that was an indoor climbing session.