Hello! Welcome to my website. I’m Rick. I photograph buildings, nice places and buildings in nice places. And I write about photography on my blog.
I am a professionally qualified photographer based in Dorset. I specialise in architectural, commercial, landscape and travel photography. And that is all!
I am an all round nice chap. Please get in touch so we can create some great photos.
Waterfall, Whistler Olympic Park, British Columbia, Canada
The first photo from my recent trip to British Columbia is of this lovely waterfall.
This photo was taken using the camera in Lightroom Mobile on my iPhone and processed using Lightroom Mobile on my iPad.
Lulworth Cove by Rick McEvoy Dorset Photographer
As it’s Sunday I thought I would post this picture of Lulworth Cove, which I edited using Lightroom Mobile on my iPhone.
Tomorrow I will post the alternative edit using my PC and Lightroom and see what the difference is.
I suspected that this was the case. Add keywords in Lightroom Classic and they do not appear in the image in Lightroom Mobile.
This is a real pain to be honest, and I do not know why this happens.
The other metadata does
And all the image capture metadata?
So why not the keywords?
Check out this image, which is featured in my latest article on Improve Photography.
This is the Lightroom Classic image showing the Title, Capton, Copyright and filename.
But when I go to the keyword tab, just above the info tab in the bottom right hand corner, this is what I get in Lightroom Mobile.
Nothing.
Here is a screenshot of the same image in Lightroom Classic 7.3 taken from my PC.
So what is going on? Time to ask Adobe.
How to choose your best photos from a holiday or photography trip using Lightroom
I need to pick up on my Santorini photos.
As I explained the other day, I have realised that I am not able to dedicate two months to my photos of Santorini – the reality is that if I stuck to this I would never get anything else done.
I want to explain the point of these posts, which is to help people faced with a large number of images from a single trip. I have deliberately titled this post
“How to choose your best photos from a holiday or photography trip in Lightroom” to focus my writing to what will be helpful to the most people, me included. Ok I am writing this for me to hopefully spur me on to sorting all my photos from various trips.
In this first post I will write about the process I go through to narrow down over 2000 images quickly and efficiently to the ones I want to edit and use.
This is a change of emphasis on my photography blog – rather than just writing about me and what I have done I want to broaden out some of the posts to be of practical use to readers of my blog. This is the first post written specifically with this in mind.
This is the result of me thinking about what I am doing, and what I want to achieve with my photography blog.
I know – me thinking – dangerous!
What do I want from my photography blog? Of course, world domination of the photography blogging sector is aim number 1. And increased traffic to my blog and website – we all want that after all don’t we?
But I also want to produce information that is helpful to people, that people will find value in, and that people will comment on and share.
And I want to sort out all my photos from all my trips – that is the thing that you will find right at the end of this post.
I am sure there are many people out there just like me who have been away on holiday, come back, loaded the photos onto their computer and then not much more happens with them.
Seriously I have quite a few foreign holidays where all I have done is just that, and picked out a few nice photos and done quick edits.
So, the point of this post is to break that cycle, and come up with a plan to quickly select the best photos from a trip, which in this case is my photographic trip to Santorini, the lovely Greek island.
I am going to go through this in sections, with the first section being image selection.
At the end of this first post I will produce a step by step action list for you and I to use for other such trips.
Just the image selection bit – this is the hardest bit I find.
My aim before I embark on this image selection process is to narrow down the 2000 images to somewhere between 20 and 50 images for full editing.
Editing will be the next post, so I will restrict myself to image selection here.
The other point is what we all do with the photos we have taken – I have lots of thoughts and ideas about this, but this is all for another time.
How did I get on then? The bit above I wrote before I went through my photographs of Santorini. The next bit I wrote before, during and after the image sorting. Yes, this is not me just writing waffle about how I select images in Lightroom – this is what I actually did.
The starting point is this - I had already imported the images into Lightroom some time ago, and had many a browse of the images on my iPad Pro using Lightroom Mobile.
When I import images, I apply metadata, develop presets, Smart Previews and also create a duplicate copy set on a separate drive.
That is a lot to do on import, and this takes some time. In the case of this trip the photos were spread over 5 memory cards, one per day. I do this so if I lose a card, or if I have a problem with a card, it only affects that day’s images – the rest are safely stored in the safe.
When I import images onto my Dell PC I just let Lightroom them in the folder it chooses – I can sort this later.
The images are on my hard drive – ok? This is where I begin this post.
First thing I do after importing the images into Lightroom is check that the time of the image captures is correct – I have to do this as I normally forget to change the time on my camera when on a foreign trip.
There is an easy way to do this – I just check one of the photos taken on my iPhone 7 Plus, which is clever enough to know where I am always!
My next job is to sort the images into bracketed sets. I have to do this as I take a bracketed set of three images for merging into single HDR images later.
To do this I select all the images by clicking on one image then use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl A, which selects all the images. Next, I right click and the option Stacking appears. Hover over stacking and a sub-menu appears, at the bottom you will find Auto Stack by Capture Time.
I select this, and then click Stack, I leave the default time between stacks at 2 seconds, which works for me. You can change this to whatever works for you by moving the slider left and right.
OK – that is all the images into stacks.
Or is it?
I click on any image, select Control A again, right click and this time choose Stacking, and this time Collapse All Stacks. This does what it says, collapsing the stacks, so only the first image is visible.
This is crucial for me in image selection, reducing the number of images and letting me choose from just the correct exposure.
I check that all images are in stacks of three. There will be the odd single image which is fine – I leave them.
There will probably also be the odd set of three that are not in a stack, for whatever reason. All you need to do is select the three images, then click on the first image, and then use the keyboard shortcut Control G, which adds them to a stack. It is important that you click on the first image, which puts that image to the top of the stack.
OK – I have gone from a screen with 2261 images to a screen with 759 images, making the job of image selection obviously much easier.
If I am not going to be finishing the job there and then I will add this set of images to a Collection in Lightroom, which I can view on my iPhone and iPad.
The bad news is this – that is the easy, technical Lightroom stuff done.
Now for the hard bit – choosing the images.
I am not very good at this, I take too long doing this. I need to be more brutal.
I click on the first image, and get rid of all the things that are not the image, by clicking the keyboard shortcut E, which takes you to the Loupe view. If you hit F you get the image on the full screen, but I do not like this, and am happy with the Loupe View. Next, I press Shift Tab and the side panels disappear, followed by L twice which turns off the lights.
I have just compared Loupe View with full screen, and am not sure why I do not like the full screen option, but I don’t, and that is that! Sometimes I keep the film strip at the bottom.
It doesn’t matter – just do what makes you happy.
Now I have the first image on my screen, with no other distractions, it is time to get stuck in to choosing the images.
I have refined my process to this.
It is that simple.
Well it took me 47 minutes to go through the images on a first pass – that is 759 images.
And out of those 759 images I picked how many?
Well first we need to get this information out of Lightroom. If the Filter Bar is not showing at the top of your screen hit the key \ and you will see four words appear.
These are very powerful tools in Lightroom. In this case I only want to see the Picks, so I select Attribute, and another bar appears below the filter bar.
Here click on the left flag which you will see to the right of the word attribute on this new bar, and Lightroom, quick as a flash, shows you the picks only.
Ouch – 227 images in the first pass – far too many.
I was hoping for 20-50 picks, but am not going to be driven by numbers, only by the best images. One of my criteria for selecting an image is this – do I want to spend the time editing an image in Lightroom and Photoshop?
Another criterion is this – is the image I am selecting one that I will use in any way other than to look at on my PC and congratulate myself on how wonderful I am?
Hmmmmmm.
Next thing I do is go through the selection of picks and remove similar images. I am not too careful on the first pass – I just pick what I like and move on. And that takes me long enough!
I need to say at this point that the second pass will vary depending on the images that I am selecting, and what they are for, but this is typical of what I go through on a multi-day foreign trip.
One thing that I forgot to do until I was half way through was to give instantly good images a 5-star rating, just to make them stand out. These are images that immediately hit me as good, which is a good sign. I went back and did this exercise, reducing the set down to 58 images.
Now I have 58 images which are first glance are strong contenders – next thing is to go through the rest.
This might seem like a lot of work, and a lot of time, but this is 5 days of shooting after all, and one thing I never do is rush my image selection. This is very important to me, and the images that I select, edit and use will be with me for a long time to come.
There is a lot of time, money and effort invested in capturing these images, so spending a few hours going through them is perfectly justifiable.
And one other point I need to make – on a shoot like this I will only delete duplicates and complete technical rejects – I keep everything else. I don’t need to, but it makes the image selection easier, and makes me happy!
At the end of the process, if I want to delete all the rejects from my hard drive (and why wouldn’t I?), I have to tell Lightroom to do this. Selecting reject greys out the image and puts a black cross in the top left-hand corner.
First pass took 47 minutes.
Second pass was to look at groups of similar images, and choose the best. I might have five different views of one scene, which is fine, but do I need all images say? Of course not.
But as I said before – my image selection is based on the quality of the images that I want to work on, use and sell.
So, if there are 100 images so be it.
It was a stunning location with fantastic weather after all.
Second pass took me 15 minutes.
I start the second pass in the grid view, which you can get to by pressing the key G. From here I click on image groups, those if the same scene, and press N to bring up those images only, in what Lightroom calls survey view.
I look at these images, and Unpick the ones I do not want to keep from a group, by pressing U. Once I have unpicked them they disappear from view, as I am using a Pick filter.
If I am happy to keep an image as a pick I just remove from view by using Control and left click. It remains as a pick but is removed from survey view. This is about reducing the number of images after all.
Once I am happy to keep images as picks I hit the key G to go back to grid view and move on to the next group of images.
This is how I narrow down the images, just using Picks. I do not use the stars or colour labels or anything else in this process – just Pick or Reject.
This works for me, and is nice and simple.
I picked 227 images on the first pass. After the second pass I am down to 131 images. And here I stop.
At this point I normally sort out my filing. For this set of images, I create a new sub-folder within my Worldwide folder called Santorini 2017. Well what did you think I was going to call it?
Next, I select all the images, and add them to a folder called “Rest”. I do this for a reason which I will come back to.
From within the rest folder I select the picks, and add them to a new folder called “Picks”. I also add the picks to a new collection called Santorini 2017, which I sync with Lightroom Mobile. I do not need access to all the images everywhere I go, just the picks are fine.
Once the images are in the Picks folder I remove the Pick flags and any star ratings.
And that is my filing done.
And why did I add them to that folder first? If you add them to the main folder, Santorini 2017 in this case, and then move the picks into a new folder, the main folder still shows the same number of images. It just gets confusing, so I put them into a sub-folder first and then break out the picks.
As I write this I realise if I move the Picks only to a folder called Picks, I can select the rest and add to a folder call rest.
One final word – I might have 131 images but that is a lot better than over 200, and is my starting point. When I am editing images some more will fall by the wayside – committing time to editing images often makes me really question myself and if an image is good enough.
For now, I am just happy that I have made the initial selection of images.
OK - image selection done. Next – edits.
And before I go here are 10 steps to select the images you want in Lightroom
Import images into Lightroom (this is not step 1 by the way)
And then go and edit.
Photo of a wine bar interior, Santorini by Rick McEvoy Travel Photographer
I remember this bar well. Very atmospheric. And a great interior. Great light. A truly lovely bar in Santorini.
This is the only Santorini photo to make it into my series of my images of 2017, for one good reason.
Not happy with that I decided, whist going though my 2017 Lightroom Catalogue, to choose and edit quickly one of the images. And this is the image I chose.
Interior photography is seomthing I particularly enjoy, especially in an interesting space with directional light giving depth and meaning to a space. This is such an example, photographed from the end of one of the corridors that span off the central bar.
This is a single image captured on my Canon 6D, edited in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad Pro - I will explain why next week.
This is the beginning of that thing I have been waiting to do ever since my wonderful wife whisked me off to Santorini for a birthday treat to die for – a photographic trip to Santorini no less.
I know – how lucky am I?
I wrote about this back in April, check out this blog post from 20th April.
This is the nuts and blots of the article that I wrote on April 20th on my photography blog.
The first morning was taken up with the excitement of the clouds down below – more on that in a later post.
Here is the list, as typed into my iPhone 7 Plus sat on a hill.
”Thoughts
OK. Just needed to get that out of the way.
I have written about this before, but here I am going to summarise everything into this single introductory post. Forgive me for repeating myself but it has been such a long time and now I am finally ready to begin.
I have been waiting to write this first post ever since I went to Santorini in April. Work has got in the way though. I always feel like December is a good time to take stock and reflect, and I am going to do that and give myself time to enjoy my pictures of Santorini, whilst developing various parts of my photography business.
This will provide a blueprint for me for future trips, as well as trips I have already been on.
I know – before I go on, I have missed a week already, this being the 7th December. No problem – I will add a week in February.
Here are the things I will be working on, writing about and spending time doing.
I have decided that I am going to do some quick edits of images I like just because I can. Then I will get into the serious stuff. I have been working very hard recently and need some enjoyable image editing work.
And then I will get into the detail of the process of sorting out the images. I want my blog to be helpful to photographers, and for the images to be of interest to everyone. I will explain the entire process from import to having a set of images to edit. I will talk in this post about rating and rejecting images, and what I do with rejected images.
I have the time to do this in an organised and structured way – and that is the point of this exercise. To give myself time to work on the images from a special trip.
In sorting out the images I will explain the entire process, including the very boring subject of metadata, and specifically the following fields I will be populating in Lightroom.
An extension of the metadata is the research that is needed to identify the metadata that will help me not only sell my images, but also will give me the maximum SEO benefits of these images on my website, photography blog and I guess in social media outputs.
Once I have selected images of interest, I am going to process them as I usually do in Lightroom and Photoshop. When I say as I usually do I mean using the latest refinements of my digital image processing. This is the processing that I would do for portfolio images or images for commercial clients.
At this point I do not know how many images I will be editing. I have said before that if I get 20 images that are good enough to publish I will be happy. I will talk about this more in the post about sorting the images, but need to make the point that I am going to be selling these images as stock images, so I am not just producing portfolio images, so the number of images I edit will be higher.
There is an important point here – when you are selecting images you need to know what you want them for. If I was looking for 1 or 2 portfolio images out of this set of over 2000 images I would be looking for very specific things. As however I am looking for images that are going to be for sale in stock libraries the criteria for selecting images is much more different – basically I am choosing images that I think have a commercial value.
One additional note here that has just come to me – alternative crops.
I am going to look at alternative crops of images to see what I can come up with. I am thinking here of extracting a point of detail, like a picture of a single church amongst the cliffs of Santorini – I guess you can call these intimate landscape images.
This is something I really enjoy doing but to be completely honest I often forget to do – this is the time to do this and work this into my workflow for the future. Thankfully the resolution of my Canon 6D allows me to take quite a small area of a picture and produce perfectly viable commercial images. I am writing this with a particular image of a white church in mind, having just taken a sneak look at the first of my Santorini photographs.
This will really finish off my editing work and I am delighted that this particular image has prompted this thought.
And black and white images. I must not forget them.
As well as doing my conventional editing with Lightroom and Photoshop I will also be trying other photo editing software.
Luminosity Masks using Raya Pro – bought last year but I have never had the time to experiment properly.
Luminar software – the windows beta was released in July which I am looking forward to trialling.
Aurora HDR – if it has been released on Windows by the time I have had a proper go with Luminar.
Amd a new one to my list.
Lumenzia – another luminosity masking programme.
And, software on my iPad Pro.
I am going to spend the time to learn how to use these different methods of processing images, and decide which if any of these I want to use going forwards, or if I am happy to stay as I am with Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. I might process just a selection using these different photo editing software products – let’s wait and see. I do need to give each of the software products proper time to learn them though, to inform me about which I will be using in the future.
I want software that is quick and easy to use that takes the images processed in Lightroom to another level. That or it replaces processing images in Lightroom altogether?
And now that the Nik Collection is back on the scene I might have a look at that as well.
Which reminds me – I need to choose a go to black and white software package.
Is this viable? Can I go to a mobile only workflow? Apart the fact I have just spent some money on a brand-new monitor it would be interesting to see if this was viable. I don’t think this is viable but will certainly have a look. There may be some magical things that I can do with my iPad Pro that I am not aware of. It is worth exploring for sure. If I can replace the default Lightroom/ Photoshop with something more current and cutting edge this could well be of interest to me. I get the feeling that photo editing software is going to change significantly in the next couple of years.
As well as looking at a brave now mobile photography world I will of course look at how I can take some base RAW images and edit them using
And I will have a browse and see what else is out there.
I am keen to look at other ways of working here. This is why this is going to take a couple of months, but all with the same set of images.
Currently I love Plotagraph on my iPad. I will have a play with some of the selected images and see what I come up with. And see If there are other ways of getting movement into images.
This is very important to me – I want to write about how I approach a trip such as this, how I prepare, and the things that I did not think of such as taking some decent footwear. All I had was my Moshulu red pumps would you believe!
I am going to describe the gear that I took on this trip, and how it worked for me. I have lots of shots of my gear in action. When I say in action, in use is probably more realistic!
And even some pictures of me. Looking a bit bedraggled to be fair!
I am going to talk in some detail about the equipment I took, the equipment I didn’t take, what I learnt and any regrets!
I took some videos on my iPhone, and will be looking at these and seeing what kind of quality I got from my phone. These videos I am going to publish on You Tube and my blog. I am also going to look at how I can improve my videography in 2018.
There are also videos I took and pictures of my camera setup and the views I was capturing. These will all be included in the posts on my photography blog.
I even took videos of my Canon 6D actually taking photos – exciting stuff eh!
The next thing in this process is what to do with the images I have produced.
Sell them is my plan.
This is how I am going to approach the image selection – I have not decided which edited sets are going to go for sale yet – best wait until that has been completed and I have all the image sets to compare.
I need to decide which stock sites. For that I need to read a book. But that will be a separate post. Or separate series of posts about making money from stock photography.
This is the beginning of me taking stock photography much more seriously, with the aim of producing a tangible income from stock images and stock videos. This will be the research stage, and this might run on after everything else as it is such a big subject in its own right. The pictures of Santorini are really just the beginning of this.
Obviously, I am going to share all these images on social media, and I will report on how this went, which images were successful, which weren’t.
How has everything up to this point shaped my photography business going forward? I will be thinking about this every step of the way, as I strive to produce better images more efficiently and get them into the most appropriate and lucrative commercial markets.
I am also going to be looking at commercial partnerships with camera equipment manufacturers.
At the very least I will have 12 pictures of Santorini on my website, and 2 months of blog content. I will wait and see what other influences this process has on my website.
No point doing this if I don’t record what I have learnt, and even more importantly act on these things. I will set the date now of the 15th February for a post called – lessons learnt from my trip to Santorini.
I know other things will happen along the way, but I must capture the things that this fantastic photography trip has given me, and it is important that I give myself the time to work on the images captured.
Being a travel photographer would be my dream job – that is my end game if I am completely honest!
I am allowing myself a period of two months, December 2017 and January 2018, to concentrate on these things alone, with the following outputs. Dedicating so much time means I need actual outputs.
That should do it!
2200 images. 10 outputs. 2 months.
Time to get on with my Santorini photography.
And a last-minute change - 10 quick edits. Sorry can't wait. This I will do first and then take my time over the rest of it! 10 edits, 10 days. 10 blog posts. And that will buy me some time to get the next lump of text written and suitably polished to provide the next splendid read for all of you.
And with that it is time to edit the first image. Ooh and look what it is……..
This is my next job. And a job I have been waiting a few months to start. Well ever since I went to Santorini in April.
There are various strands to this, so by way of an introduction this is what I will be working on and writing about next.
You can see the screenshot from Lightroom. 2254 images.
Firstly, I need to select the images I want to process. That will be at least one post, on how I sort out over 2000 images from one trip.
Next will be all the things I do to such a set of images before I get around to editing them.
Distraction is a dangerous thing!
No. I have the time to do this in an organised and structured way – and that is the point of this exercise. To give myself time to work on the images from a special trip. This will provide a blueprint for me for future trips, as well as trips I have already been on.
Once I have selected images of interest, I am going to process them as I usually do in Lightroom and Photoshop. When I say as I usually do I mean using the latest refinements of my digital image processing. This is the processing that I would do for portfolio images.
So, I have to choose some images to work on.
I have browsed the images I took in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad Pro, and hope that there will be somewhere between 10 and 20 really good images at the end of this exercise. If there are more then fine. If there are less fine.
If I have captured 20 images worthy of consideration for my portfolio I will be delighted.
I know – 20 images out of 2000 – that is quite a low hit rate!
I will select images that I want to edit, and am happy to spend time editing. Images that are good enough to be put up for sale. And this will be the new benchmark.
There are also videos I took and pictures of my camera setup and the views I was capturing. These will all be included in the posts on my photography blog.
I also have pictures of my gear in action. Well I say in action, in use is probably more realistic!
And even some pictures of me. Looking a bit bedraggled to be fair!
I am going to spend the time to learn how to use these different methods of processing images, and decide which if any of these I want to use going forwards, or if I am happy to stay as I am with Photoshop and Lightroom. I might process just a selection using these different photo editing software products – let’s wait and see. I do need to give each of the software products proper time to learn them though, to inform me about which I will be using in the future.
Once I have done this, and have my completed sets of images, I will upload them for sale to stock sites.
But I need to decide which stock sites. For that I need to read a book. But that will be a separate post.
I am allowing myself a period of two months, December 2017 and January 2018, to concentrate on these things alone, with the following outputs.
That should do it!
2200 images. 10 outputs. 2 months.
Time to get on!
And a last minute change - 10 quick edits. Sorry can't wait. This I will do first and then take my time over the rest of it!
Waiting for an image to download so you can work on it in Lightroom Mobile?
Simple.
Select the cloud icon top left. Turn off syncing, and choose “Get this photo”. And that is what Lightroom Mobile does.
You can download the Smart Preview, or if you select it a second time you can download the original image.
Rick McEvoy - Quick Tips in Lightroom
I like Lightroom Mobile. I use the Collections feature on a daily basis, allowing me to access images from my Lightroom Catalogue on my iPhone and iPad Pro. This really is an invaluable feature that I genuinely use on a daily basis.
I do process the odd image in Lightroom Mobile, but do all my commercial work on actual Lightroom on my PC with lovely big Dell Monitor. One reason is that Lightroom was developed for the PC (yes and Mac), long before the iPad and (I think) iPhone. Lightroom Mobile is a much more recent addition, and a fantastic one at that.
And free - let's not forget that.
So it has been designed for a different platform.
Here are the 10 things that I cant do in Lightroom Mobile - it might be that I have just not found them yet?
Today is Adobe Max.
I think there is going to be some news....
Check my photography blog tomorrow and hopefully I will have some exciting Lightroom news for everyone.
See - cutting edge photography news from me!
Rick McEvoy Photography
The first part of this post was written in December 2016.
"One of the main things I use my iPad Pro for is photography related. No surprise there then. This post is all about what I do and how I do it.
Before I go on a quick note about my iPad Pro. It is awesome. Along with some incredible software and use of the cloud it has made a significant proportion of my photography workload fully mobile.
You can buy the IPad Pro 9.7 with 128GB of storage (the version I have) from Amazon for less than £650 (December 2016 price).
OK, back to the how, then the what.
Lightroom Mobile, my PC, my iPad Pro and my iPhone
All my photos are located on an external hard drive. They are backed up to the cloud and to a separate hard drive.
Yes, I can edit photos without having access to the physical files – I still find this scary!
Anyway, back to the point I was in the process of making.
My photos are on an external hard drive. Lightroom CC (and Photoshop) are installed (though the Creative Cloud) on my laptop, which now never leaves my office.
The more I write this the scarier/ more amazing it gets.
I add images on my PC to collections in Lightroom. I sync these collections to Lightroom Mobile.
I have the Lightroom Mobile app on my iPhone and my iPad.
And this is how I get to the photos on my external hard drive anywhere I am.
I can sync pretty much as many images as I want.
And I can edit on my phone or iPad and the changes appear on my desktop.
Lightroom Mobile works so much more for me now I have my iPad Pro.
Having explained how I access the images on my iPad, what do I actually do on my iPad?
On my sofa. In my car. In the pub. Anywhere.
Completely awesome.”
That was what I wrote in December 2016.
And here is the October 2017 update.
As well as image editing using Lightroom Mobile, I use my iPad for the following business-related activities.
Client briefs are added to iBooks and are available to me anywhere
Client briefs are reviewed on site with the client – this is particularly useful and is often the starting point of a commercial shoot.
I use Lightroom Mobile to view images at client meetings, even diving into live editing during the meetings! Being able to have sets of images available to view remotely in collections is incredibly useful, but you need to ensure that the previews of the images are there, just in case there is no data.
Listening to the radio when working on my PC. I have now got rid of the speakers on my PC as I only ever use my iPad, either with the built-in speakers which are excellent, or with Bluetooth headphones.
I extend my listening to music to washing up and cooking!
I keep a schedule of my blog posts and social media sharing of blog posts in Excel which is sat on my iPad. I find it much quicker to update on my iPad than on my PC. It is interesting that there are things that I do on my iPad even when I am sat in front of my PC, mainly because they are quicker and easier to do.
I do all my commercial photography editing however on my PC with large monitor. I do not see that changing yet, but time will of course tell on that one.
Another great thing I do is watch video podcasts on my iPad whilst working, mainly episodes of The Grid where they are doing photo critiques.
And keeping with the Scott Kelby theme, I try to watch one class a week on Kelby One on my iPad. I have not done this yet - all I have done is watch a class when I needed to learn something specific, but I want to make this a regular part of my own photography learning and development.
Other developments that have made my iPad Pro more and more invaluable are these
Plotagraph – the app that allows you to add movement to a still image. I love this app for producing something new.
The Apple Pencil – the only thing that has made me want to go down the Wacom tablet route is the excellent Apple Pencil. I love dodging and burning in Lightroom Mobile using the Apple Pencil. I also use it for masking in Plotagraph.
Obviously, internet browsing, Amazon shopping and Ebaying are all great with the iPad.
With an App called FTP Client Pro I can upload HD videos to Adobe Stock effortlessly, and do some of the SEO work once uploaded.
And I can edit and sort photos when I am flying!
One final final thing – I need to get my iPhone and iPad working with my Canon 6D using the Canon Connect app – this will open up a lot more possibilities for me in the future.
All in all, the iPad Pro has given me so much for not that much money in the scheme of things. And on that point, on the day of writing this post the iPad Pro like mine will cost you £550 here on Amazon.
Rick McEvoy Photography – iPad user
I bought an Apple Pencil for my iPad Pro. It cost me just under £100. Not from Amazon, not this time. I bought it at Dixons World Travel at Gatwick Airport.
I thought I would save 20% buying it "Duty Free" from the airport, but rather surprisingly it cost me £98.
That is 99p cheaper than on Amazon.
But there was one thing that I could not change. I had a flight. Three hours stuck in a seat. And I wanted that pencil. And three hours back of course.
So what are my initial thoughts?
Don't worry Apple - after my review of the Apple Watch (listen to me telling Apple not to worry what I think about one of their products - who do I think I am ha!).
It is fantastic.
I use it to edit photographs on the new app Plotagraph. That is what I bought it for. And I thought I would use it for editing photos in Lightroom Mobile too.
And it was.
I think that this might be me going down the road of a Wacom tablet. I am not going to rush into this, as I really enjoyed dodging and burning in Lightroom. Producing pictures with motion using Plotagraph was also a pleasurable experience.
And also using the clone stamp tool in Photoshop Fix on my iPad.
All these things have been massively improved by the introduction of this piece of kit.
But back to that pencil.
Installation was a doddle. Plug it in and after a few seconds all connected and working.
I do find it weird writing on my precious iPad Pro screen though, even more so when taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity.
And if you read my post the other day entitled "My thoughts on photography gear - how much photography gear is too much" I will put the Apple Pencil straight into the category of something that makes my work better, quicker, easier and more enjoyable.
So a definite hit with me. I will no doubt write more about the Apple Pencil as I get to know it better.
Rick McEvoy Photography
I have come up with a new selection of pictures of Bournemouth for my Bournemouth photographer web page.
I wanted a new set of images, as this page needed a refresh. I edited the images in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad, having used the collections in Lightroom to get down to 12 images. I will write about each image over the next 12 days on my blog.
When I got to the end of the selection, the next job was to delete the images that were there before. This is when I came across a picture of the stadium at AFC Bournemouth taken some time ago. I decided that I needed to get a new picture of the stadium as AFC Bournemouth are quite big news these days what with being in the Barclays Premier League!
So that is a job for me to do. I want a new image as the ones I have are a bit old, and I feel that my image capture is much more refined these says.
And then there is the commercial photography work I have done. I need to go through that lot and see if there is anything appropriate for my web page all about my Bournemouth photography. I have photographed many construction sites in Bournemouth, and construction sites and construction products which form parts of the development of Bournemouth University.
So, my initial choice of 12 pictures did not include any commercial photography work, nor any pictures of construction sites or development work in Bournemouth.
Which does lead me onto the question of what are people hoping to see in a web page about photographs of Bournemouth? Obviously I need to get the maximum benefit out of the keyword Bournemouth photographer and variations on that theme.
That is the question. I will get the new picture of the Vitality Stadium at AFC Bournemouth and see how a set of 12 images looks.
I hope that you like the series of Bournemouth photographs, and would like to invite anyone needing any photography work carrying out in Bournemouth to get in touch with me by phone, email or using my contact page.
I am writing about photographs taken by myself in Bournemouth, but would also like to direct new readers to my photography blog to the following pages on my website which are specific to these areas of my commercial photography work, namely
Construction product photographer
Ok after going through that lot I am going to restrict this page to pictures of Bournemouth only - ones that people looking for pictures of Bournemouth might find interesting. And that will include the picture of the Vitality Stadium, the home of AFC Bournemouth.
And here are 10 reasons why I love my iPad Pro.
And I can instantly show before/ after.
I am quite careful with my technology - new gear has to improve how I work - I do not buy gear for the sake of it.
And the iPad Pro gives me so much more.
And it is lovely and very cool indeed.
Writing this post has made me think how much I would lose if I did not have an iPad Pro. And that is quite a scary thought!
For the iPad Pro I say thank you Apple!
Rick McEvoy Photography - Bournemouth, Poole, Sandbanks, London, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire
Sorry about the Apple Watch Apple – to redress the balance 10 reasons why I love my iPhone 7 Plus.
1 – It just works.
2 – The camera is ace.
3 – Video capture is fantastic
4 – The podcast app is excellent and I use it every day
5 – I use the email app every day
6 – There are lots of other apps that I use
7 – Lightroom Mobile gives me my images wherever I go with all the Lightroom edits
8 – It has very good battery life
9 – The quality of the screen is astounding for a phone.
10 – It syncs with my iPad pro seamlessly
I could go on. But I did say 10 reasons.
Rick McEvoy Photography - Bournemouth, Poole, Sandbanks, London, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire
I was going through my Lightroom Catalogue looking for pictures for my architectural photographer page. I had to have the picture of the front facade of the magnificent Duomo. And then I found this picture, unedited. Just sat there.
I started editing the image in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad Pro, liked what I saw, so finished it off in actual Lightroom.
This is what I write about on this page (no point re-writing what I have already written is there?).
"Return visit. Detail. Door.
These were my notes.
Brief then.
After all the splendour of the front façade of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence I wanted to include a picture from the return visit I made the year after.
And this is that picture, of one of the huge doors on that front façade.
This image is all about the intricate detailing in the doors and the surrounding stonework. All those details and textures in wood, stone and marble."
And that is that. This is one of my favourite architectural pictures. And I have to say Florence is one of my favourite places.
Rick McEvoy Photography - Architectural Photographer
Architectural Photographer – Bournemouth, Poole, Sandbanks, London, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire. And Florence
And it looks like they are sorted.
Lightroom Mobile on the iPhone had a major upgrade recently, but the iPad version did not.
Now it has.
Check out all the features in Lightroom Mobile for iOS 2.8 here. Below is an extract from that very web page.
"This release of Lightroom for mobile iOS rolls out the following new features and improvements for iPhone and iPad.
iPhone
iPad
Looking forward to trying this version out on my iPhone 7 Plus and iPad Pro.
Rick McEvoy Photography - Bournemouth, Poole, Sandbanks, London, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire
Rick McEvoy Photography - landscape photographer in Cornwall
This is the edit using Snapseed by Google of the original image edited in Lightroom Mobile.
Rick McEvoy Photography - landscape photographer in Cornwall
Rick McEvoy Photography - landscape photographer in Cornwall
This is another picture of Watergate Bay beach in Cornwall. I will post two alternative edits.
This is the first edit produced using Lightroom Mobile
Rick McEvoy Photography - landscape photographer in Cornwall
This is the edit using the Snapseed HDR filter
This is the edit using Lightroom Mobile
The top image is the Snapseed edit. The bottom picture is the edit in Lightroom Mobile, used to create the top image.
If that makes any sense?
Possibly not. Let's try again.
The bottom image is the original edit in Lightroom Mobile, which was then opened in Snapseed on my iPad and the HDR filter applied.
Which image do you prefer?
Misty path by Rick McEvoy landscape photographer in Hampshire
Today a couple of pictures that I like.
It is a Saturday in June. It is going to be a hot day.
So let’s just look at some nice pictures today. Nothing too heavy.
As well as the colour version you can see in this post I will also post the black and white version of this picture later.
The image was captured using my Canon 6D and Canon 17-40mm lens, mounted on my Manfrotto tripod.
This is quite a stark, contrasty image. This was deliberate processing as I wanted this look for this image.
And for completeness I guess I should tell you where I took this image.
The Vyne. The National Trust site in Hampshire.
The Vyne is one of my favourite places with fascinating woods which I am hoping to return to this summer when everything is in full bloom.
I find landscape photography very relaxing, and also a very productive time for me. I have changed my approach to landscape photography these days, and take much fewer images than I used to. I enjoy walking in the English landscape, looking and enjoying being out and about. Only when I have found something of interest do I get my camera out of my bag, which for landscape photography (as well as any photography on construction sites) is my Peak Design Everyday Backpack.
As well as getting my camera out I also remove my Manfrotto tripod from the external pocket and place it where the scene is I want to photograph.
Landscape photography for me is something to be enjoyed, not rushed.