Published...again!

You wait ages to be published and then two come along at once.
The January edition of the excellent UK magazine Outdoor Photography has an article by yours truly on Thorpe Bay.

This is the image used in the article.

Published!

This months Essex life magazine features a cover photo by myself and a double page spread of my snowy scenes:

A few people have asked me about the images used in the feature, so here are some links to them:

• Cover Image - Snow at the Gate
• Snow and Gate
• Gone Sledging
• Cold Walk Home
  

Can you dig it ?

Saturday morning I spent a pleasant time, covering people attempting to break the world record for tree planting. It was a lot of fun, though I am glad I was only taking pictures and not actually doing the digging as that looked like hard work.


The team did really well to plant over 20,000 trees in sixty minutes. Unfortunately all though that broke the World Record their total was beaten by the other two teams involved in the day.


Although they didn't beat the record, they have created the beginnings of a new wood. Hopefully all the volunteers will be able to wander through that wood in twenty years time and enjoy the results of their hard work.

Jane Goodall is photographer of the month for December

I recently came across the work of Cambridge based photographer, Jane Goodall. I was blown away by many of the images on her site . So I thought I would share them with my friends.

Dune
(by Jane Goodall)

---

Previous Photographers of the Month

Painters With Light Exhibition opens in Loughton

Sorry for not updating the blog for a few weeks. It has been a hellishly busy few weeks with tearing one exhibition down & delivering all the pictures sold and then preparing another new exhibition.

This exhibition "Landscape" features work from The Painting With Light Society with guest photographer Kevin Goodchild. It is an exhibition of Landscape images from across the British Isles and beyond. The exhibition runs until Christmas Eve and even if I say so myself it is well worth a visit:

Landscape - an exhibition by The Painting With Light Society featuring Kevin Goodchild
Loughton Library

Traps Hill
Loughton
Essex IG10 1HD

Telephone: 020 8502 0181

Opening Times:
Monday: 9.00 - 7.00
Tuesday: 9.00 - 7.00
Wednesday: 9.00 - 7.00
Thursday: 9.00 - 7.00
Friday: 9.00 - 7.00
Saturday: 9.30 - 5.30
Sunday: 11.00 - 3.00

If that is too far away The Painting With Light Society also have another exhibition "Images of East Anglia" running at

The Virgina Court Hotel
Cliff Avenue
Cromer
Norfolk
NR27 0AN

If you are in the area of either of our exhibitions, please pop in and why not post your reaction here.

Tim Parkin is photographer of the month for November

I've been really enjoying the Large Format work of Tim Parkin, so I thought - lets make nim my Tog of the month and more people can enjoy it.

Floaty Branch
(by Tim Parkin)

---

Previous Photographers of the Month

Lightroom Archive format - TIFF or PSD ?

Having established that it would be a good idea to save the result of any editing I do in Lightroom in to an archival format, an email flooded in asking why I chose tiff format rather than psd.

Well my gut feel is that tiff is a well understood format supported by lots of vendors, whereas psd seems to be a bit more tied into Photoshop. But my guts and their feelings are not of interest to most right thinking people. So I can do no better than quote this post by Jeff Schewe:

.PSD is now a bastardized file format that is NOT a good idea to use. Even the Photoshop engineers will tell you that PSD is no longer the Photoshop "native" file format. It has no advantages and many disadvantages over TIFF.

TIFF is publicly documented, PSD is not. That makes TIFF a preferred file format for the long term conservation of digital files.

TIFF uses ZIP compression for max compression, PSD uses RLE which if you save without the Max compatibility will be a bit smaller, but at the risk of not being able to be used by apps, like Lightroom.

TIFF can save EVERYTHING a PSD can save including layers, paths, channels, transparency, annotations and can go up to 4 GIGS in file size. TIFF can save all the color spaces PSD can. The ONLY thing I can think of that PSD can save that currently TIFF can't save is if you Save out of Camera Raw a cropped PSD, you can uncrop the PSD in Photoshop CS, CS2 or 3. That's one tiny obscure thing that PSD can do that TIFF currently doesn't. How many people even knew that let alone use it?

PSD used to be the preferred file format back before Adobe bastardized it for the Creative Suite. The moment that happened, PSD ceased to be a Photoshop "native" file format. PSB is the new Photoshop "native" file format for images beyond 30,000 pixels. And , at the moment, only Photoshop can open a PSB.

Getting back to the fist point, Adobe can do anything including stopping support for PSD because it's a proprietary file format. TIFF is public, even if it's owned by Adobe (by virtue of the Aldus purchase). Even if Adobe went belly up tomorrow, TIFF would continue.

And, let me be blunt, anybody who thinks PSD is "better" than TIFF is ignorant of the facts. If Adobe would let them, the Photoshop engineers would tell you to quit using PSD. Lightroom for the first beta did NOT support PSD and Hamburg fought tooth and nail to prevent having to accept PSD. He blinked, but you still can't import a PSD without Max compat enabled-which basically makes it a TIFF with a PSD extension.

Look, I'll make it REAL simple...

TIFF = Good
PSD = Bad

Ok?

If only Jeff wouldn't sit on the fence so much, we would know what he really felt about the matter!