Hi {name},

Welcome to Lenscraft in Focus for December 2020 (and January 2021).

I want to start this month’s newsletter by letting you know the December and January editions are combined. I’m planning to take some time off over the Christmas period as I haven’t stopped this year, often working 7 days a week.

I will still be around over the festive season/New Year answering urgent emails, but it may take me a little longer to reply. Also, as I mentioned last month, I can’t provide support with general software and computer issues. I can only answer questions relating to my books and courses.

Before we get to this month’s articles, I wanted to share an image which I recently shot using my new Panasonic G9.

It’s taken from and area called The Roaches in Staffordshire, UK. I’m positioned high on a rock edge looking down onto a clearing cloud inversion at dawn. I love the scene, but two things struck me as I looked at it closely:

1. The exceptional image quality using my old Panasonic 45-150 lens. I think I paid less than £150 in 2014 for this lens and you can still buy it new for around £175 today. This is a tiny, light, bargain lens for the micro 43 camera.
2. The other point was the quality of the High Resolution mode on the Panasonic G9. When photographing scenes like this, it’s well worth using. Initially I thought it was a gimmick, but I’ve revised my opinion. You can read more about this shortly.

I hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter.

New Lenscraft Content

Over the past month I’ve focused on publishing new tutorials and updating old ones. Here’s the list of what you can find on Lenscraft.

What I’m Reading

Many years ago, I read an excellent book by Peter Krogh titled “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for photographers”. I was so impressed that I immediately bought the second edition as soon as he released it.

Now I’ve just purchased “Digitizing your Photos with Your Camera and Lightroom” (http://thedambook.com/dyp/) and it appears an excellent resource.

As the title suggests, this book is all about digiting your photography (film and print) using a camera rather than a scanner, and then archiving these to make them easier to access and enjoy. I’ve been interested in using my camera to scan negatives/slides and preserve old family photos for some time but hadn’t done anything about it. Now I have the Panasonic G9 with the high resolution (80Mpixel) mode I thought that it would be the ideal tool for the job.

It’s early days and I’m only a few chapters into the book, but I’m enjoying it a lot and finding that it’s generating plenty of ideas for the project. What I also like about this book is the combination of media, as the PDF comes with around 9 hours of video on the subject.

Assuming I can find time to start my project I will share my learnings in future articles on Lenscraft.

From Around the Web

This month, I’ve discovered a few things that you might find interesting.

I Thought it Was a Painting

One painter (yes painter, not photographer) that I admire greatly is Edward Hopper. I think it’s the way that he seems to create light and the colour palette he chooses. Imagine then my surprise then when I saw the work of Arnaud Montagard. It was an image of an empty Coke bottle on a table initially that made me look. I thought it was a Hopper painting. Then when I saw more of his work, I realised this was photography.

https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/arnaud-montagards-photographs-of-an-american-road-trip-look-like-edward-hopper-paintings/

40 Epic Landscapes

I was browsing the National Geographic website the other day when I noticed the headline “40 Epic Landscapes”. Intrigued, I took a look and clicked the link for the slideshow. Now I should have been impressed, after all, this is National Geographic. Unfortunately, I found a lot of the image “nice” and that’s not really how you want to describe an “Epic Landscape”.

See what you think. The photography is good, but there was something missing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Photographers You May Not Know – Alexandre Deschaumes

I’m afraid that I can’t tell you much about Alexandre Deschaumes as my French is quite poor. That said I do know two things:

1.       He has visited and photographed some of my favourite locations (Patagonia, Iceland, and Oregon). Strangely I even recognise one of the trees in his photos (first image on the fourth row – I’ve photographed the same tree on the way to the Hall of Mosses).

2.       His photography is wonderful.

If you would like to see his work, you can find him on SmugMug at

 https://autumn-ethereal.smugmug.com/

Books & Course News

Latest book and course news.

Affinity How To

The new Affinity Photo book is nearing completion and it’s a lot longer than my initial target. But despite its length, I haven’t been able to tackle all the topics and questions people raised. I’ve therefore divided the topics into two groups that work well together. If this book proves popular, I will create a second volume to address more questions. I thought it was important to do this to ensure I thoroughly covered subjects, to help photographers at all skill levels.

My best estimate for releasing the first “Affinity Photo How To” book is January, and I will send out an email as soon as it’s available. I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who sent in suggestions and questions for the book.

As I mentioned at the start there won’t be a January newsletter. The next Newsletter will be February 2021.

If you celebrate Christmas and New Year, I hope you have a safe and wonderful time.

Robin Whalley

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