Rapids! are one of those rare bands that actually sound the same live as they do on their recordings – no vocal skullduggery here, Mr Cowell! The band have recently signed to label Heist or Hit, and their debut single will be released in September.

The band were gracious enough to invite me to a practice session so I could get in the way with my D700. Funnily enough, in the darkness of the practice room, I had a problem. The D700 was too responsive to the light. Shooting at ISO 1800 and above the shots looked “normal”, so I had to slow the shutter speeds and revert to ISO 800. More of a challenge to focus, but ultimately the proper feel for the indie rockers they are.

Look out for the single, in the meantime you can listen to Rapids! here.

I’ve said before that if you’re a photographer you owe it to yourself to give it a go. I know there are people that find Photoshop a bit scary, and Lightroom is much easier to manage, especially on a workflow basis. Personally I use Lightroom for 90% of my photographic work.

So what’s different? This is Tom Hogarty’s take, part of the Lightroom team:

Import
We’ve redesigned the Lightroom import experience to make it much easier to visualize how Lightroom allows you to manage your files. You’ll be able to see exactly where you’ve asked Lightroom to copy your files off your card and then use import presets in compact mode to get fast repeatable results every time. You can also quickly browse your hard drive to find exactly the right file you need to work on.

Publish Collections
We live in a connected world so you need direct access to publish your photos on your favorite sharing site from directly within the Lightroom Library. In the Lightroom 3 public beta we’re providing direct access to the Flickr photo sharing site so that adding images to your Photostream is as simple as a drag and drop. You can see all of your uploaded images and if you make any changes to those images you can have them updated on Flickr automatically.(Pro accounts only) When a visitor comments on your images, Lightroom can pull that comment right back into the Library so that you can see feedback on your files where it belongs, next to the image in your Lightroom library. We’ve built this functionality with the same extensibility designed for our Export Plug-ins so if Flickr isn’t your cup of tea we’re working hard to support developers who can create connections to any of the popular photo sharing sites. Publish collections can do more than just publish to a photo sharing site. You can have a publish collection that allows you to publish images to my iPhone sync folder with drag and drop simplicity.

Image Quality
Sharpening and Noise Reduction
In the Develop module we’ve focused on tuning our raw processing algorithms to extract incredible detail and quality from your images. Capture sharpening and Color Noise Reduction improvements work together to give you incredible noise reduction results without losing that fine detail. We’re only halfway through our noise reduction efforts but believe that you will be very pleased with the results so far. We’ve actually disabled the previous Luminance Noise Reduction so that you can focus on evaluating the Color Noise reduction implementation.

Grain
While Lightroom’s improved noise reduction will give you incredibly smooth images, sometimes you want a little texture or grain in your images. We’ve added a grain tool that can add a natural film-style grain to your images to get that perfect look for your photo.

Vignette
The Lightroom team received quite a bit of feedback on our post-crop vignette tool in Lightroom 2 that allows photographers to apply beautifully styled vignettes after cropping is applied. While the tool was received quite well, we found that photographers wanted a more natural vignette that utilized an exposure or brightness effect rather than just painting black and white on the edges of images. We’ve added two vignette modes in Lightroom 3 beta, Color Priority and Highlight Priority that attempt to provide the natural vignette that photographers have requested. Let’s not get hung up on the technical details of these models but rather focus on which you prefer for your images and why.

Process Version
The changes above are so significant that for the first time since the Camera Raw plug-in was introduced in 2003, we’ve needed to add the concept of a process version. The process version specifies which version of certain Camera Raw image processing elements should be used when rendering and editing files. Process version can affect raw, DNG, TIFF, JPEG, and PSD files. The process version is incremented only when major changes to the raw processing or features are changed. In Lightroom 3, the demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening, and post crop vignette were all updated. Depending on what is applied to the image, different image characteristics will change more dramatically than others (i.e. sharpening should change sharpening characteristics etc.), but the demosaic changes apply across the board, so there will always be some change. By default, we’ll leave your images just as they were but if you want to take advantage of the latest processing technology, just update to the current process version. You can update to the latest process version by selecting the notification triangle that includes an exclamation point above the left hand side of the histogram. (Or from the Settings -> Process Version file menu available in the Develop module) By default, all new files in Lightroom 3 beta will receive the latest process version.

Slideshow Export
One of the most elegant ways to present your images is in a slideshow accompanied by music. But until now, you could only share that slideshow with music when playing it directly from within the Lightroom application. But with Lightroom 3 we’ve added the ability to export high quality movie files that include your detailed layout and the music track you’ve selected. By utilizing the popular H.264 movie format you can share these movies on many popular video sharing sites or optimize it for mobile media!

Custom Print Package
Lightroom 3 adds a new custom layout option for photographers who need complete control over their print layouts. Add as many different images in whatever configuration you desire on a single or multiple pages.

Watermarking
Lightroom 3′s new watermarking function lets you embed your identity or other information in your images themselves. You can apply text or graphic watermarks to a photograph with adjustable size, position, and opacity. Available in the Print and Web modules as well as the Export dialog, your identity can now travel with all of your images.

Taken from The Lightroom Journal.

Check out these resources for more on the beta:

NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) LR3 guide and videos

Terry White (Adobe) Tech blog

It was the first wedding I’d been to in some time where I didn’t have some other responsibility so I could just concentrate on taking pics. I’ll post about this in more detail with some of my favourites as I work through them in Lightroom, however I thought I’d show off a brief bit of Photoshoppery. I knew Paul and Lucy were back from their honeymoon this weekend and I wanted to give them something, so armed with a copy of OK! magazine this is what I came up with!

It’s a bit of fun which they like. Please don’t sue me nice OK people!

Prices on the 70-200 Nikon cover above start at $79.99, and I’ve got to admit I’m really tempted. There are a number of different camo styles to try too.

Although the Lenscoat site has covers up to 600mm listed, they do custom jobs too; check out the video for making a cover for Canon’s 1200mm f/5.6 lens on the Lenscoat home page.

Nikon have just announced the launch of the D300s, the successor to the number one selling D300. Aimed at the prosumer, the D300s will be the flagship DX body for Nikon ahead of the D90.

The most striking addition is the ability to record HD video. As I’ve discussed before, I’m not a fan of video on DSLRs so this isn’t a big point for me. Dual memory card slots is useful though – that was one of the features from the D3 that I would have loved on the D700. Apart from this the only other headline grabber is a new Quiet Shutter mode, which locks the mirror up for a while when you take the shot. I’ve never considered Nikon shutters to be noisy in the first place but this will be useful for wedding or nature photographers at those critical moments.

The only update I can see on the new 18-200mm DX VR lens is a focus lock button – the VR side of things hasn’t been changed. The original version is still a cracking lens and in my opinion should be in the arsenal of all Nikon DX users.

Nikon have also announced an update to the popular (and my favourite) 70-200 AF-S VR lens. Some criticism was levelled at the first version mentioning soft corners; personally I’ve never experienced this to any great degree. This new version is optimised for FX users (D700, D3, D3X) and the VR is boosted too – it’s going to be a wonderful lens, but I’m not upgrading yet.

Details of all the new gear is on the Nikon website.

Sadly Iggy can’t really help me. But there are a number of ways of improving my workflow that really will save time. I’ve mentioned before that I use Lightroom to process my images, which already saves me loads of time. About 95% of my adjustments (white balance, the odd crop here and there) are done from Lightroom. Photoshop is there if needed, but I only tend to fire this up for serious image resizing or complex edits. Photoshop is for the designer; Lightroom is for the photographer.

I’ve installed a new plugin this week which lets you export your files directly from Lightroom to Flickr. It’s a brilliant piece of work by Jeffrey Friedl. Working as part of the export process, it uses the Flickr API to automatically upload your pictures using the keywords as tags. Metadata can be expanded or restricted as well. Download the Lightroom Flickr plugin from Jeffrey’s blog and see what I mean! It will even tweet out when you’ve added the pictures if you want.

I’m a bit of a latecomer to Flickr (well, properly anyway). I’ve dabbled for ages, but in the past I used Picassa to upload pictures. Now I’ve put some of my favourite images up on Flickr – feel free to take a look – You can find my Flickr feed here. I’ll rename the images and tag them properly, honest.

In going through my pictures to choose a few for Flickr it’s amazing how self critical you get – images I rated as a four only a month ago I downgraded to a two. As Henri Cartier-Bresson said,

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

So my workflow is refined, I can now capture, rate, keyword, edit and output my pictures online at speed. As soon as I take some decent shots I’ll be there…

I love having a project to aim at and thanks to Strobist and Clay Enos I’ve found one. Urban portraits!

The prospect of taking pictures of complete strangers creates all sorts of feelings. I like Clay’s approach in the video above. At some point every photographer has to overcome that barrier, whether it’s a portrait session, wedding or whatever. The subject needs to be comfortable with you, and you need to be comfortable with that process. Clay doesn’t give the subjects much time to think about the situation, and as a result comes away with some great results.

Can I translate this into a series of portraits of my sleepy New Forest village? I don’t know. But I’ll relish the challenge!

This last week has been Carnival week in Sway. It’s a great community event with everyone joining in lots of events, from treasure hunts and scarecrow making to the fete and carnival procession itself. My team improved one place in the village cryptic treasure hunt this year – second by only half a point! Next year…

For the carnival procession I bolted on my MB-D10 grip to the D700 and used the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens. As it was so overcast I had the auto ISO on, but started it at ISO 1000. I was shooting mostly in aperture priority at f/5.6 which in turn gave me a shutter speed to avoid camera shake. The only problem I had was the focussing distance – people gravitated towards the camera and I couldn’t get the shot!

I’ll put a few shots up from the carnival soon, above are the Carnival Prince and Princess who led the procession. Who needs Rio!

PDN Gear Guide featured an article yesterday on a gadget developed to stop pictures being taken of celebs (or Big Brother contestants) without their consent.

Consisting of a sensor attached to a set of LEDs, the device detects the light of a flashgun and emits enough bright light to wash out the picture. The project is a brainchild of NY University graduate Adam Harvey, who is working to patent the device and reduce the size.

Of course if you’re shooting with a D700 or D3 you could ramp up the ISO without flash and beat the system… for now.

Read the full article at PDN Gear Guide here, and check out Adam Harvey’s site for full details of the project.

Picture above courtesy Adam Harvey / ahprojects.com