I was fiddling around with a photo I took of Stephen at the restaurant Monday night, and finally found a ‘look’ I was happy with.

We had a very windy night last night, with gusts that were almost scary given that we are quite high here and it was slamming against the windows. Today is partly cloudy, but sunny enough to make the house quite warm. I’ve switched off the heating and opened a couple of windows. Mind you, I’ve just done some housework, partly getting ready for Stephen’s cousin Ron, but partly just because it needed to be done. No wonder I feel warm!

We had a ‘heads up’ from Melanie on Monday that Ron has a cold and feeling pretty poorly, so we don’t know for sure that he will come and stay, but want to be ready, just in case.

Stephen is having a bit of a headache and nausea today, similar to what I felt on Monday. He has had a morning in bed – taking breakfast to him going up and down stairs was a bit challenging – but hopefully, like me, the fresh air will help him to recover. On the weather report it said that Saturday is to be the first really cold day here, with 8 degrees for the daytime maximum temperature. We shall see… So, far the temperatures have been mostly quite mild and our cold weather gear is not really had any sort of real test.

I’m very relieved that Lightroom has just been updated back to it’s normal importing setup, the one they introduced with the last update was slow and difficult to manage. Of course, I still don’t use it for importing from the SD card, I either use Adobe Bridge or the Sony app, so that I can put them into folders for use in any program. Then I import into Lightroom for light editing, then to Photoshop if I want to do something a bit more creative.

The photography site DPreview has finally done a comprehensive review of the Sony A7R II. They have done a few short articles on different features, and that has been incorporated into the final review. I felt it was a fair review because although it brought up some negatives, it also discussed some of the many innovative and photographer centric stuff that interests me as a landscape and travel photographer. In the end they gave it a Gold Award and 90%. One of the obvious comparisons was with the Canon 5DR, which is a 50 mp camera. For my purpose, as a stills camera, having more dynamic range is important. But in the video comparisons I liked the Canon ‘look’ very much. I can see why people still want to use Canon cameras for video. It is probably possible to replicate that look with grading, but that would take some experimenting and trialling LUTs.

I still have lots of photos that haven’t been edited and posted to Flickr. For this blog I am not choosing necessarily the best photos, but those that help to tell the story of what we are doing.