Abandoned
Harbour Dusk
Mona Vale
Antarctic Night
Neko Harbour
More than 350k photographers downloaded the free public beta 1 of Lightroom 3. Now there are more improvements, based on the feedback Adobe received from the first beta.
Be sure to download your free copy here.
For a very good video on the changes in beta 2, check out this video.
You can find all the details on the blog of the product developer of Lightroom here.
April 12 is the date you want to mark in your calendar. Don’t miss the launch of Adobe Photoshop CS5. Click here to sign up for the launch.
When I was talking to Thomas Knoll (the creator to of Photoshop) in Antarctica, I got a sneak peak of some of the CS5 features.
I was asked not to say anything to the outside world so I kept my mouth shut. Until today!
One of the amazing features I saw was content aware filling. For me as a landscape and panorama photographer this tool is going to be very very helpful.
Just check out the below video for what it can do. It’s almost like magic.
It was about time I got around to processing the following shot. It’s been in my database for several months and on my mind for just as long, so one quiet evening I got to work. Layer-blending 13 different exposures takes time. Esp. when you only use little details from every image.
The whole shoot took about 2 hours, just to take one single image. It’s not like taking pictures on mobile phones where you can do it over and over again. If you don’t like the composition, that’s too bad because there is only one chance. Once you have decided on a location, angle, lens,… there is no changing. No going back. It’s what it is.
Every lighting technique you see in this image has been captured in a separate exposure with the help of either Brent or Gavin.
The image is called ghost. The ghost (being me) to the right of the image – trapped in some psychedelic prison made of light.
Hope you like it!
It has been a while, but I just never got around to processing the actual shot of the model shooting in the old train shed. I posted the video about it here while back. Here it is again in case you missed it:
Thanks to Brent Pearson who put this video together.
A bit of background information about this shoot. We were almost a dozen photographers crammed camera to camera (with tripods intermingled) in a small side room of a large derelict train shed here in Sydney. It is quite interesting to walk around and admire all the graffiti. Here is a shot I took about a year ago at the same place:
Anyway our makeup artist-turned-model Mandy was showing a lot of talent for modelling and she was happy to pose for us.
Brent came up with the idea of a girl wandering home after a horrible party just to find herself not being able to walk anymore and taking a rest at this very place, high heels off, clothes and hair messed up, smeared make-up…you get the picture.
The lighting was simple, yet tricky. We had a large softbox at the top and right of the frame. Triggered with two hot-shoe flahes via pocket wizards (we had 10 of them thanks to Oat from hangingpixels.com). Btw. be sure to check out his lighting workshops, they are fantastic.
The walls were light-painted with torches after Mandy had packed up. My resulting image is a combination of 9 exposures, pretty much one for every part of the image as well as a base image with Mandy in it.
The floor has been lit with very low, horizontal torch light, which gives it the grunchy feel and makes the dust look more prominent.
It’s been lots of fun to shoot with so many skilled and experienced portrait and fashion photographers… even though my passion remains landscapes 
