Every thursday I go to the Museum of Science and Technology in Manchester to volunteer as a demonstator on the SSEM replica, also known as the “Manchester Baby” – the world’s first stored program computer. In 1948 this machine has only 128 bytes of non-permanent storage. Soon after they added a hard drive that had about 10 kilobytes of storage, a useful amount in 1948. My current laptop, on which I’m writing this and which I use for all my photo processing and storage, has a

OnLandscape magazine has had a series on neutral density graduated filters, with one part on colour accuracy. Tim Parkin, editor and author, happens to mention that his very old Lee resin filters had changed colour over the years and now had a strong colour cast. I had suspected this myself with my own set of Lee resin filters. A quick test confirms this. Here are some shots I took, the captions tell the story. I took several shots of my landing, which is directly underneath

There is a geologic period called the Devonian. One characteristic of it was the formation of extensive forests, with ferns being one of the early forms of vegetation. If you wander round the woods of Exmoor on the north Devon coast you can imagine that time. This particular shot caught my eye partly because of the play of light and the slender zig-zagging sapling in the centre of the scene. However, I think it is only fully successful when you see it in a large reproduction.

These three shots are not new but I’ve revisited the processing for two of them. I wrote a few weeks ago about how I found how effective it can be to stretch the whites and blacks sliders in Lightroom. Since then it’s been part of my standard workflow. This has prompted me to take a fresh look at some older pictures and that’s what I’ve tried with the two left hand shots above. I’ve shown them with the shot on the right because I think they make a great triptych. To carry on

Visiting the northern Lake District I’d intended to walk round the bottom end of Derwentwater but the lake had other ideas. Heavy rain had raised the level and the paths and fields were now under water. So I tried the other way and walked to the top of the classic climbing crag of Shepherd’s Crag. There I found both fantastic views and beautifully photogenic birch trees. There is a famous beauty spot barely a mile away, known as Surprise View. This has good views over the lak

My style of photography is often wide-angle shots of big landscapes. I’ve found myself commonly using certain particular lightroom processing techniques with this type of scene based on zones of distance within the scene. The frame usually splits into either two or three distance zones. First, the close foreground, anywhere from about one to a hundred metres away. There might then be a middle ground (e.g. a dip or valley just beyond leading to some further hills) which will b

…you can apply a preset to all your shots when you import them into Lightroom, such as, oh, let’s say your favourite monochrome treatment which you don’t use very often as you’re mostly a colour photographer. Lightroom then remembers this and has it selected as default on your next import so your lovely sunset shots are all turned into black and white. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that the conversion to monochrome step isn’t a separate step in the develop history so you c

In the past I’ve struggled to get good results taking shots of fields of flowers. In Yorkshire, where I lived until recently, May and June are spectacular months with the pastures becoming carpets of yellow and the woods carpets of blue. I’ve never really taken a shot of this that I’ve been entirely happy with but I’ve been getting better thanks to Lightroom. Here’s a recent shot of wild flowers next to Derwentwater in the Lake District (part of a set I posted just the other