NZ Photo Info

With it raining off and on (more on than off) for the past few weeks I have had little chance to use my new Olympus E-510 since getting it.

So, as the rain poured down on Saturday afternoon I decided to build myself a light tent. Not that I really have a keen interest in product type photography, it is still an area that I wanted to explore. It is a great inexpensive way to learn more about lighting and what does and does not work.

I decided to build a PVC framed box covered with a white cloth. For lights I used some cheap lamps with a clip rather than a base which meant that I could clip them to the frame and position them where required.

At the moment I am using 20 Watt Eco Bulbs (Equivalent to 100Watts incandescent lights). They have a colour temperature of around 2700K. I will try some other light sources as the time permits.

I upgraded my version of lightroom last night from 1.0 to the new version 1.1. The most notable feature that is benefit to me is the ability to work with Olympus E-410/E-510 ORF files (there are also some other new cameras supported). I should be getting my E-510 in the next few days and didn't really want to do a DNG conversion and then an import into lightroom.

Another little annoyance that has been corrected is that during import folders were incorrectly tagged with the date based on GMT rather than the local time on the computer. With Lightroom version 1.1 this problem seems to be gone.

Adobe have also made some other refinements to the user interface and now have some additional sharpening controls, including:

As you increase the ISO (or amplification) of your available light in digital photography it has the effect of introducing noise into your images. While the current range of DSLR's generally produce good results, sometimes the images need a little bit of help.

After testing a number of different products (all the big names that I could find evaluation copies of software for on the net) I have settled on Noiseware Professional.

Overall, with my testing it produced the most effective and natural looking results across a broad range of different subject matter in different lighting conditions.