Overcoming GAS

Gear Acquisition syndrome that is, not the flatulent kind. I’m not really sure when the term GAS was first coined (possibly it was Eric Kim), but I suspect it’s been used for a long time and if not named has been around for as long as photographers have set their tripods up and peered down a brass encased lens. To this day I don't think I have met a photographer who doesn’t have some level of GAS. There are varying degrees of affliction admittedly, but we all have it. The worst is obviously the silver bullet chase…seeking out the piece the of gear that will make your photography better, will transcend everything you have used before, and turn you into a Cartier-Bresson overnight. Those with not quite as serious an illness will still spend hours poring over the minutia of the equipment that they are looking to invest in, deliberate for weeks, and then still wonder whether they have acquired the right kit once it is finally in their hands.

Four More Lightroom Tricks that Work to Speed Things Up

Last year I wrote a brief article suggesting some tips to spending up your workflow in Lightroom. To whit, these were to learn some shortcut keys, learn to copy and paste settings as well as use the ‘previous’ button and figure out how to create presets. These are still extremely important, but here are a couple more to digest and hopefully increase the speed with which you work through your images. 

Exploring the Island Continent - Madagascar Photographic Recce

Several years ago, sitting in the dry heat of Namibia sipping a beer, I asked Nick van de Wiel, my partner with Nature's Light, "What about Madagascar?"
I remember him laughing and saying something along the lines of, "Sure! You organize it, we do it", not for a second thinking that we would actually manage to put together a photographic trip on the odd land mass floating off the east coast of Africa. That conversation was on the tail end of our now annual Composing The Dunes workshop in Namibia. Typing this, I am sitting on a Airlink Avro plane with the ochre coloured rivers of Madagascar shimmering in the late afternoon sun far below us. Somehow we managed to put it together...

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Getting Negatives Digital

Recently I have been shooting a reasonable amount of film. This is both as part of a personal project that I started two years ago as well as for the fact that shooting film is fun. I started shooting film back in the early 90’s as a teenager so there is no problem with understanding how to use it. Back then though I had access to darkrooms where I could develop and print the images. At University I had an almost unlimited supply of film and chemicals as well as unhindered access to an excellent darkroom that gave me both black and white development as well as E6 development for transparency film. At that stage the best way to get your film onto a computer - if you needed it there in the first place - was to scan the film on a neg scanner or send it off to a lab where you could get a proper drum scan. A friend and I bought a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED together which I still have and which to this day is still considered the benchmark for desktop scanning (I still sell images through Getty Images of transparencies that were scanned using this scanner).