What's new in 22

Many exciting things are happening.

The fall season of Camera Club has officially kicked off and we just had another great Salon night.  There were many great photos and it's fun to see the progression of the members of the FM Camera Club. 
The competition is getting tougher and tougher and we are becoming such a fun and interactive club.  There are so many great comments and great learning opportunities for all the members of our club. 

Many new people are coming to the meetings as well.  We try to welcome everyone with an interest in photography no matter if you photograph with a Cell phone or a high end camera, whether you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced photographer.  It's fun to compare notes and photos and talk about where and how you captured that great shot. 

So What's new? 

I have a new lens which is inspiring me to look at the world in a different light.  It is a Viltrox 13mm F1.4 so it can capture many low light opportunities that I wasn't able to get before and it is super sharp and has pretty good autofocus.  I am looking forward to putting it through it's paces for some aurora photos once we get a good night for that.  I also look forward to some Milky Way photos next spring and summer and potentially using it for waterfalls and other scenery photos as well. 

Also new in the last few weeks is an update with some great new features in Adobe Lightroom CC, and Adobe Camera Raw. 

There are new options for masking which allow you to quickly pick people, and select many features such as teeth, eye scalera, Iris, hair, eyebrows, face skin, body skin, and lips, and quickly create individual masks along with the ability to make presets which affect these areas separately.  These new features have sped up my processing times immensely for portrait work and also made the photos look consistently better. There are also new options for selecting subjects, objects by painting on them or drawing a box around them, selecting sky, or background along with the standard brush, linear gradient, or radial gradient as well as using color ranges or luminance ranges to define the masks.  All in all a great addition to the masking suite. 

The other major addition which I find amazingly helpful is the addition of a content aware erase feature.  The previous versions would have to pick from a similar area as a clone stamp or a healing stamp.  The content aware is more of an eraser, not a replacer. 

These new features are making my life much easier when it comes to post processing. 

There are many other new things on the horizon including a New Year coming much before we know it, and of course, snow and cold.  We northlanders, do relish our snow and cold.  Either that or we simply go to Arizona or Florida for the winter.  Snow birds make good photos too. 

I will be writing more regularly, so I hope you will keep checking back. 

Here are some fun photos from this summers events.  I will post more next month. 

Gordon.