For years I’ve read about this mythical software called DxO and its magical ability to create superbly detailed, best-in-class photos from your camera raw files. Like most people I know, I’m a happy Lightroom user and love its workflow, and have an intimate knowledge of what every slider does, so was never looking for something to replace it.

The Problem(s) With Lightroom

I may be accused of heresy here, but sometimes I despair at what Lightroom sharpening does when I want to pull detail out of shadow areas (and sometimes even in those bright areas).

Also, the noise reduction can get a little bit mushy, so in a shadow region, if you apply my Luminosity noise reduction, all the detail disappears and you get a block of pastel colour – rather than detail in those pixels.

I’ve used most raw editors and never really found a workflow that would fit into my Lightroom world…. But now with dxo maybe, just maybe, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

What a lightroom add-on would do – in a perfect world

What I want is something to take care of the noise reduction, lens optic corrections and sharpening, so I can switch those off in Lightroom. That is exactly what the DXO have created. PureRAW and photolab can both create enhanced raw files from your cameras raw file.

So what?

Well, it means you can import those into Lightroom as raw files and edit them in any way you can tweak a normal raw file but the best-in-class noise reduction and sharpening has already been applied so you can switch those off in Lightroom.

Here is a very short video where I talk about it and show an example

I’ll do a future video showing my new workflow

Save it for “best” photos only

I will add that although this is a fantastic way to pull out detail, there are two things that mean that I won’t be using it for absolutely everything

Processing Time

First is is the time it takes to generate these files. I do have a pretty powerful computer and each 5D Mark 4 file takes around a minute to process. This is not such a big issue if you are editing maybe 10 photos from a landscape day, but I unknowingly started a batch going from an event I photographed with 700 photos in and it took all day to chew through them! That is with its best noise reduction setting I will hasten to add – lower settings are far quicker.

File size

Secondly, the enhancer of files are significantly bigger – 3 times bigger in my experience, so the same size as a TIFF file of the same photo. You can pretty quickly fill your hard drive with duplicate raw files if you decide to.run absolutely everything through this program. So be selective

If you’re in the business of manufacturing, chances are you’re looking for new ways to show off your processes. Whether it’s for internal or external use, seeing your process in action can be an effective way to communicate what makes your company tick. There are some basic things you can do before getting started to ensure that you know what you’re shooting and why. We’ve put together a few tips for anyone who wants to take pictures of industrial processes.

A few tips

Rotherham’s “Owen Springs” have been creating Leaf Springs for road vehicles and trains for over 30 years, the photos in this article are all of their amazingly skilled team, processes and hot bits of metal.

1. Why take pictures?

Photographs uniquely show the viewer your processes instantly and can be used both online and in print.

2. Before you shoot

First, think about what you are going to use the images for and who the audience is. That should guide you towards what kind of images are needed.

Maybe you need lots of wide shots to show off the buildings in an editorial piece, or it could be the close-ups of your processes, testing rig and team in action.

You know best what is important to show, so it’s a step well worth doing.

3. The basics of industrial photography

At McFade, the basics are to tell stories with our images. We document your processes as we see them, take your guidance on what’s important as you describe them on shoot day, and add in a bit of light and lens magic to bring it all to life.

4. Taking the perfect picture

We always bring our lighting, a huge range of lenses and even a drone to give us as many options as possible. We’ll try whatever is safe and legal to get that shot for you.

5. Editing your photos so they pop!

Industrial processes can be incredibly photogenic and striking, our post-processing is designed to maximize the Visual Impact so so you stand out above the crowd in any Google search or Social Media platform.

6. Sharing your photos with the world

Once we have delivered the photographs, make sure you have a content marketing plan in place ready to unleash all your new images on the world. We would recommend drip-feeding images slowly Over The Long Haul rather than posting 50 in one go though!!!

In Conclusion

Industrial photography can help you communicate a lot about your business quickly and effectively, but it can be a little tricky to get right without experience – I hope these tips for taking great pictures of your industrial processes is helpful

Fitness Photography in the Pennines

We helped an amazing local brand who create sustainable, limited edition fitness clothing with their lifestyle photography – the owners, Clare and Rick, started Stretch and Burn in the lockdown.

Sustainability is at the heart of what we do, limited edition pieces designed for real people, not mass produced and focused on longevity so we don’t add to the clothing mountain. earth. limited edition

Read more on the Stretch and Burn Website

Creating images to get you noticed

The biggest challenge for any product, service, or business is getting noticed. With so much information out there, consumers are overwhelmed. You need to understand that your customers experience your brand in the same way you experience your favourite brands.

The Pennines are some of the most incredible natural landscapes in the UK, and the perfect setting for a fitness photography shoot. The region’s terrain is both challenging and thrilling — so it’s no surprise that many runners and cyclists have been inspired to train here, particularly on a route known as Holme Moss – which featured in the Tour de France.

Armed with a few photoshoot essentials, a team of assistants (Rick and the kids!) and 4 amazing models, we spent our day shooting in the gorgeous scenery.

Saltaire Bradford – A World Heritage Site

A World Heritage Site in Bradford, Saltaire is is the creation of of a Victorian entrepreneur sir Titus Salt. It’s a small village built to house and serve the people who worked in his gigantic Mill on the Leeds Liverpool canal. He built facilities in Saltaire like the victoria Hall for functions, a Methodist chapel, a hospital and a school so everything the workers could need, was to hand and readily available.

UNESCO designated Saltaire Bradford a World Heritage site and have guaranteed it’s preservation as a memorial, orbea a living memorial, to the Victorian era of will working.

DJI MINI 2

So armed with my DJI mini to I visit a few weeks ago and found a few quiet places where I could send it up and capture some photos of Saltaire. Whilst the little quadcopter was my I would occasionally grab a 360-degree photosphere, something it does as an automatic setting.

Accidental Photo Tour!

Little did I know a few weeks later whilst investigating how to to show 360-degree photos on Facebook and the like, that I would land upon some software which was able to create virtual tours in a fairly rapid and enjoyable way.

So I hope you enjoy having a little look around the area and do click upon the flashing dots because they take you to the next photos. You will notice that most of the images are from three spots which I’ve found that very few people around. Although the mini allows you to to fly near people it’s always a politeness to keep your distance because not everybody knows the rules and some may get a little upset.

I am a huge fan of experimentation when learning something and photography is the perfect subject to get out into the field and just try things to see what happens.

Most of us end up taking the same photograph over and over again…

This is great in the field, but very boring when you get back to the computer and have to look at the same thing over and over again. Plus you only get 1 possible photo, even if you’ve taken 50 shots.

So my tip is ridiculously simple.

Take a photo and then move the camera somehow to recompose a new shot, before you take your next photo. Even if it is just rotating the camera slightly or zooming in – these little movements allow you to keep on experimenting and learning, but also give you you variety and potentially many useful photos – instead of one photo repeated over and over.

There’s a lot of new building going on in Leeds, so on a rare sunny February day I decided to take the 5D Mark IV and the 24mm tilt Shift lens out and going capture some of the new and classic architectural delights.

 I decided to start at the new Wellington Place developments which is immediately west of the train station.  This is a new village-style development of interestingly shaped office blocks with tall vertical windows. I managed to catch a lot of images from the outside pavements but when when I went into the complex itself, I found that you needed permission to take photographs on site,  so I decided to move onto somewhere a little more positive towards photographers.

From here I went up to the riverbank to the station, via this really tall new building which was beautifully lit. Past the new Channel 4 HQ at The Majestic and into City Square. Nothing particularly new here but some nice buildings including the 1 with a tent on top. I think it’s called one City Square.

After the I’d spotted a lot of new student accommodation being built near to the arena,  so headed up that direction how to find my old workplace, Fairfax House. , and you things being put up next to the Merrion Centre.

By this time the light was getting nice and low creating a lot of shadow on the street and beautifully lit buildings, 

And then the inevitable happened,  the sun dropped behind a cloud leaving all the buildings in  Shadows. a typical grey Leeds day. so I decided to get a couple of shots of the town hall and Civic Hall before heading home

Here are a few more shots from the day

What do you do on a wet day in Sheffield?

Well if you’re Clare Jane Garret, you get a dancer called Sarah Hobson and paint her green, then get a milliner called Hannah Gray to create a fantastic headpiece and create a real-life Medusa!

This was all done in a dance studio near the university – the walls were white paint or mirrors – we’d hoped to go outside but it really was pouring down,  not just a little bit of rain but proper torrential like we’ve seen this last week with the 2020 storms. 

When I arrived, it was one huge wow factor seeing Sarah painted head-to-toe in these amazing colours and designs. It’s the first time seen one of Claire’s Creations in the flesh, literally, and it’s staggering the amount of detail time and effort goes into it. 

Whilst the team finished off, I went to a large dance rehearsal studio to set up some light, brought my big softboxes, which are 1.5 and 1.8 m respectively – so big that they very rarely get an outing. It was pretty obvious from the start that we were not going to both light the model and keep the background dark, the mirrors and white walls just bounced light around like a ricocheting bullet. Without anything to help, we’d have all kinds of crap in the background!. 

What we did find was a crash mat, one of those you used to have in in the school gym when you were vaulting. We managed to put this on its end and lean it against the wall, though it was not black we got a very dark, usable blue instead. 

The only other issue was that we couldn’t really do wide arm photos, where Sarah puts her arms out left and right, because the mat was tall and thin, the arms just went off the edge and would have been a pain to edit in post. 

The amazing thing about working with dancers they have spent years learning how to do amazing things with their legs, arms and bodies, You really don’t need to direct all do anything other than photograph what they do. We had about five little sessions with the end one being everybody’s favourites. 

For this one, I’d move the lights closer, more dramatic angles and turned the power right down so the background went black and the light was very soft – yet created quite a lot of Shadow. 

After we’d finished, I’m not sure what happened to all the paint…. I got a lift with kit downstairs from Medusa herself – I told her to go shopping in ASDA and see what the local thoughts but I bet it didn’t happen!

Here are a few of the shots – all edited differently for the hell of it, but you get the idea.

We love working with creatives – one day after a fashion shoot in Leeds we discussed what we could do for our next project. I wanted to do it over in Liverpool for a change and to help Denise with travel, and it grew from there into a wedding.

So the team on the day were:-

• Me – photographer, lighting, gofer and taxi driver
• Andy – Groom and gofer
• Andi – Vicar, lighting and gofer
• Denise – bride and gofer
• Rick – film maker and yes gofer!

(gofer – someone who carries stuff around on a shoot/stage)

Lighting Kit Used

It was windy as hell, so we couldn’t use any diffusers – so the flashes just had reflectors on them.

• Godox AD600BM * 2
• Godox AD200 * 1

So most of the images use 3-point lighting, 2 behind ar roughly 45 degrees, and one at the front usually at 30 degrees to Denise’s face.

We had the AD600’s in bags with cables to the flash head so they didn’t smash if they blew over – and 5KG weights as well! Can’t be too careful

Camera Kit Used

With it being wet, sandy, windy and pretty cold, I wanted to keep the lens changes to a minimum, so in the bag had :-

• Canon 5D mark 4
• Canon 70-200 F2.8L IS
• Canon 16-35 F4L IS
• Canon 24-70 F4L IS

The vast majority of the shots were with the 16-35 so I could put the flashes close to the models (it was a brightish day) to get a lot of flash without needing full flash power.

There was a 3-Stop ND Grad filter on most of the wide shots – no grad on the long shots.

Rick was there shooting away on his massive film camera, so hopefully get some moving footage to share as well

So here’s a gallery of the shots!

HDR used to be painful in LIGHTROOM

If you’d shot 300 shots of a house, you’d need to merge them down to 100 photos – that’d have you anchored to the computer manually selecting and merging photos for AGES. In fact, if I’d done more than 10 shots, I’d use something like PHOTOMATIX to blend instead, it was just too ineffieient in Lightoom to do when time is money.

My Wish Came TRUE!

This has all changed with the latest release of CC- something they just snook in without any fanfare, as I bet most users don’t even do HDR.

You can now stack and merge photos, on mass, like Batch processing in many other programs – it’s changed my life completely! I hope you see the benefit of this.

So to share my joy, I’ve done a little video to show you exactly how to do it.

Love to hear what you think

1 Shot from 2 parts

This is one of the many beautiful waterfalls in Iceland – not often seen as it’s on a 4×4 route and well-hidden. It’s called Fagrifoss – they’re all fosses!

In this tutorial I show you how I took the shot with the 24mm TSe lens, taking 2 photos ready to blend

This is the top half

This is the bottom half

These are the 2 merged and edited

In the video I show the following:-

How to use

• Panoramic merge and its options
• Dehaze
• Clarity
• Basic settings – highlights, shadows etc.
• Black and white clipping
• Square cropping
• Colour temperature (White balance)
• Sharpening
• Vignetting

It’s really just a workflow video I hope you find useful 🙂

Imposter syndrome, self doubt, feelings of doom, am I doing the right thing… everyone who has taken the plunge to leave employment and go it alone will have had all of these in varying degrees. 

In 2010 when I finally got my redundancy from “the job” I hated, I just started telling everyone I was a photographer, no longer a software engineer. Nothing actually changed other than my job title in the first few weeks. That’s when you have all those doubts about whether you’re doing the right thing. I didn’t really have sleepless nights, rather LONG days of nothing – literally nothing to do, unless you invent things to do. During those long days, you look at others doing your thing and wonder whether your good enough – and then often conclude that you’re not. 

This is the time when you really do need a lot of help and encouragement. Help in working out what to fill your time with to get things moving. Encouragement to avoid falling into a whirlpool of self doubt and introspection. 

I was lucky to meet some great people early on, especially people running their own businesses and going through the same thing. I’m still friends with most of them now.

One very random phone call just stands out though, and I was reminded of it today when I read some sad news on Facebook. 

I’d known Kris Dutson on a website called EPhotozine for many years – just a happy looking hairy guy with a wicked sense of humour. Great landscape photos and some lovely product shots. He was doing pretty much what I would go on to do – make a living doing a mix of photography “stuff”. 

The phone rang and I’d no idea who it was, so answered and got this south western accent saying “Hello Ade”. 

“Hello…. ?” I replied. 

“It’s Kris off Ephotozine – remember me?” 

We’d never met, spoken or really done anything other than enjoy banter on internet forums (remember those?) – so was really weird to actually hear his voice. 

Not to go into too much detail, he told me how pleased he was that I’d taken the plunge and gave me lots of tips and encouragement – right at the time I needed it most. You’re never really sure if you’re getting it right, so to randomly hear from someone you look up to, from 300 miles away was amazing – and to hear that what I was doing all looked good was even better.

I think we must have chatted about life, photography, business, Ephotozine and stuff for a good hour before we bid each other farewell. I’m sure you’ve all had those calls where you feel amazing after and it puts you right back on track; this was one of those. 

Whenever I’ve seen him on Facebook I always remembered that chat with great fondness and thought what a top, thoughtful bloke he was. 

So to hear he’s lost his battle with cancer today is incredibly sad. I never met him but I’ll never forget him. 

Sleep well Kris. 

Abi In The Woods

Abi’s a talented dancer from west yorkshire and got her dream to pursue dance at ballet school this summer

We took her and family to some woods near Bingley to get some photos next to a folly – then to end we used this long woodland track as a background.

Thanks go to Ben Gwynne for organising the day and Abi for going “on point” in some ridiculous woodland conditions!

APOGII’s MD – Mike Munt

This is MD of design and illustration agency Apogii – Mike Munt.

He came on our 3th Share the Shoot day – which was early 2019. Watch the live action and some of the great photos we created for Mike.

The whole creative process should be fun and it’s all down to the dynamic of the group in our “Share the shoot” sessions

In 2018 we had out 7th trip to Austria and got images on all 5 days of the trip – this video contains some of my favourite moments from the holiday.

It’s well worth a look if you’re pondering coming

Do you recognise this ford?

Here’s the ford you see the old car go through at the start of All Creatures Great and small, a BBC TV show through out my childhood.

It was compulsive viewing in my village as a child, with everyone either being a farmer or working on them. this is a little sketch of the place I took with the Mavic Air drone whilst I was up there on a very quiet day.

Ever since I started photographing the dales in 2003, I had wondered where this ford was, I’d seen a few but this was at the bottom of a big “dip”.

So here it is, my little ode to the road between Langthwaite and Low Row

A new look without a new site

Websites can be a stressful thing to create, write and update – you’ve got to think of all that functionality, the copy and layout – it’s usually the first victim of procrastination!

So how do you give your existing site a brand new look, with minimum impact to your life?

It’s pretty easy really – replace your old photos

Your website will have lots of images which can be swapped in or out pretty quickly and easily, either by you or your web developer. All you need to do is get a photographer around for a few hours to create you a new set of marketing images, then when you get the shots, just chop them to the right size and swap them out. A trivial task in WordPress websites, and probably easy in most.

If you can’t afford a photographer to come around then you can ask them for some of their stock images – most of us have thousands of images we take in our spare time, my library is jammed full of the Dales, Leeds, The Lakes, Rome, Prague… you name it!

We are always more than happy to licence images for you to use – it may only cost you a few tens or hundreds of pounds to totally transform how your website looks if you go down this route. We have an image library with a taste of what you can liscence here:-

http://www.mcfade.co.uk/stockphotos/

Either way – getting us in for a few hours or getting some of our library images will transform your old website’s appearance for a fraction of the cost of a new site.

As spring begons we say good bye to another winter, and what a fantastic winter is was for workshops at McFade photography.

We had a series of weekend workshops, places like Liverpool, the Yorkshire coast and lots of bits in-between. Then we had some night workshops which took us around famous landmarks in the dark, then we lit them with torches.

Here we have a 5 minute video taking you through the workshops in chronological order

We’re planning the Summer now, so go over to our workshop site and see what’s coming up – it’s

www.photographycourses.eu