October wandering

Found images

Due to a government-wide strike, which resulted in the cancellation of a lot of work for me this month, I had a lot more time to make personal photos. Many of these photos are of the objet trouvé (found object) variety. Admittedly, I did seek out some very specific opportunities, particularly when a well-timed southeasterly storm arrived with decent light. 

Another opportunity presented itself while swimming in the ocean. The previous week, I noticed that the kelp was still hanging on where I often swim and I just needed a sunny day to make kelp photos. When that day arrived, I took my trusty X100F, inside of an underwater housing, out to the kelp and spent 20 minutes making photos. The arrival of a curious harbour seal was an added bonus. I will need to do this again next Summer, when the kelp is healthy and growing (lots).

Otherwise, most of the images this month were made while wandering around town with a camera in hand. Thanks for looking and I hope that you are enjoying all of the great autumn light.

A note about this image: As I mentioned above, the arrival of a strong southeasterly storm on a relatively sunny day, provided me with excellent conditions for making abstracted wave photos. I moved around the area, shooting from further away when the breaking waves threaten to cover the lens in spray and shooting from closer when the wind died down a bit. The processing that I chose for developing these images stems from my admiration of cyanotype printing. While I don’t have the ability to make actual cyanotype prints, I tried to mimic the process with these #digitalcyanotypes. This image and some of those below will be reproduced on cards and a calendar.

NB: All photos captured with a variety of Fujifilm cameras and lenses. As mentioned above, the underwater kelp photos were captured with an X100F.  The storm waves were captured with a GFX50S II and GF100-200 f5.6 lens. The bulk of the found photos were made with the GFX100RF.

NB2: I mentioned in an earlier post that I was transitioning from Adobe Lightroom Classic to DXO PhotoLab. The transition was going quite well, as I learned how to use the new software, and I really liked the results that I was getting from PhotoLab. However (did you know this was coming?), I ran into one problem with PhotoLab (well, actually two problems) that resulted in me keeping my Lightroom subscription for a while longer. 

The first and most serious problem arose when I needed to output and deliver final images for a client. The current version of PhotoLab (9) is so painfully slow at exporting final JPEGs, that I don’t feel that I can rely upon it for much of the work that I do. On one small job, exporting 162 images took over 23 minutes. The same process with LRC takes two to three minutes. I often need to deliver many more images very quickly and I can’t wait 30 minutes for PhotoLab to grind out the final JPEGs. So while I continue to do the type of work that I do, I will have to rely upon Lightroom Classic.

A second problem that I encountered with PhotoLab was printing to my Epson wide-format printer. I can’t be entirely certain that the problems aren’t due to my lack of experience with the software, but given my past success printing from Lightroom and Photoshop, among many other applications, I doubt it. In short, PhotoLab has fallen well below the level for printing that I am accustomed to in Lightroom. 

To finish these thoughts, I think that DXO PhotoLab is excellent software for processing images. However, it is better at processing and delivering single images or a small numbers of images. I hope that the DXO engineers can solve the problems listed above. Until they do, I will need to keep adding to Adobe’s bottom line.