For a longer time I’ve been looking for a replacement for my camera strap. As a landscape photographer, I use it very rarely, but I also didn’t wanted to be without one for those few occasions when I need it (usually just to hold the camera for safety). So I wanted something that can be easily detached and reattached to the camera. As I was ordering the Capture Camera clip v2 from Peak design, I also took the Leash with it.

My impressions with it are very positive. The material is great to the touch and very soft. It glides very nicely across the clothing (as its the same material as seat-belts) and feels very strong. The attachment loops are around the right size, so they are not in the way if you leave them on the camera. The attachment feels secure and it’s not so easy do detach. I actually like that, as it should be harder to detach it accidentally. The length is also more then adequate. You can expand the leash from 48cm up to 152cm, with the anchors being rated to hold up to 45kg.

I would not use this strap to hang my camera from my neck. The strap is just too thin for that. Maybe with addition of some padding this could be OK. On the other hand, having it hanging across a shoulder is much better. With my Canon 5D mark II it was quite comfortable. As I said, the material glides very nicely across clothing, so moving the camera back and forth is also very smooth.

You get 4 attachment loops with the leash. This are meant to be attached to the camera, the leash itself, your backpack or anything else. I like this approach, as you can attach you camera to anything. I can think of many times when I wanted to secure my camera to the railing, or just have it connected to my belt so I don’t have to fear it falling down from a cliff. It also works nicely with the Camera clip v2, as that special holes for the loops to be attached.

Overall I like it very much and it will replace my old strap permanently for now. This should have been a Leach & Cuff review, but I have some issues with the Cuff, so I will get to that in a separate review.

For more information, please visit the Peak design site.

View all my other reviews here.

Trey Ratcliff’s New Zeland Photography tutorial

Just finished watching Trey Ratcliff’s latest HDR video tutorial. Yes, I watch other photographers tutorials, and I do it a lot. I probably watch everything about HDR and landscape photography. It does not mater how good I think my photos are (or bad :)), there is still a lot to learn.

I like Trey’s videos, even if I don’t learn that much from them anymore. His videos are mostly made for beginners and he often goes through editing basics. Still it’s intersting to see how a another photographer edits his photos, and I always end out with few new ideas, on what to implement in my own photo processing.

So if you are a beginner in HDR photography, or somewhere around intermediate level, and you like Trey’s style, this is a must watch. If you are already quite familiar with HDR photo editing, you will probably find something new in his videos, but probably not that much.

More information can be found on the New Zealand tutorial page and if you decide to give them a try and buy them, use code “SIC-6591” for 10% discount :)

Dual screen wallpapers

I have updated the wallpapers section of this blog with something new :). This time, it’s 4 dual screen wallpapers, all with the resolution of 3840×1200 (so really big). These are best for two monitors, both at full HD, or smaller. Head over to the wallpapers page to download them.

Sunny side of Paris

This one took so long to edit, and I’m not even sure I’m satisfied with it. This happen’s when one takes photos in not that great light. But as I was in Paris only few days, and some of them it was raining, I had to take photos every opportunity I got. If I was at home, I would not even go out to shoot in such light. But the result is not that bad :)

I took this photo in May of this year, and I think it’s obvious where it was taken. It was my first trip to Paris on my own, and as I don’t speak a word of french, it was also quite an adventure. But luckily I prepare quite a lot before my trips, so after a day I felt completely at ease, with having no problems finding my way in Paris. And I know I will go there again, as soon as possible :)

For this photo, I had to take two series of 5 brackets, one with my hand covering the sun (check out my tutorial on removing lens flares to see why). I then created two HDR photos in Photomatix, each one from 5 brackets. I then blended those together with the original shots in Photoshop. Btw. I left the lens distortion in the photo on purpose. I had a version where I removed it, but than the photo lost the feeling of scale and depth, which I didn’t liked.

Free eBook for all newsletter subscribers

Maybe some of you have already noticed the change in the sidebar, but I have created my first ever eBook. This one is for free to all, who subscribed to my newsletter. So if you still haven’t, now is your chance :) Head over to the newsletter page for more details, or you can subscribe directly in the widget to the right of this post.

Topaz Star Effects review

There will be still many more reviews on this blog. Today the new one is about the Topaz Star Effects. As I mentioned before, my reviews are short and I try to stick to the point. That is, what the plugin is for, and why you would like to use it. Same this one :).

And btw., between the December 10th and December 31st 2013, you can use the code “decstar” for a 50% discount on this plugin. More information can be found on the Topaz Star Effects site

Sunset at the Michael’s gate

There are not many high spots in the center of Bratislava, so one has to use all one can find. So last week I visited all the towers that are accessible (all two of them :)). I don’t think there are more, but correct me if I’m wrong. I already posted a photo from the Town hall tower earlier, so here is one from the Michael’s gate. It’s not really that all, but in the Old tow, it’s still one of the tallest.

This is a HDR created from 5 shots in Oloneo Photoengine and then merged with original exposures and finished in Photoshop.

Wow.. how quickly the week has passed again. With all the stuff around the contest and the new newsletter, it was over in a second. But again we are at a Tuesday, so we are at another process post.

For today I chosen for you a photo from Maribor, Slovania. As you will see the original photo had quite a good exposure already, so I only had to correct few things to make it a little more interesting.

So to get to this photo:

I started as I always do, with few tweaks in Lightroom. I corrected the horizon, so it’s nice and leveled. Then I corrected the white balance, removed lens distortions and chromatic aberrations and added a little noise reduction.

After that I loaded all the files into Photoshop and did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposure to start with
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and lights in the photo
3. -2EV exposure to darken the brightest lights
4. +1EV exposure to brighten the bridge
5. +2EV exposure to brighten the bridge even more
6. Color efex Pro contrast to correct the colors and add more local contrst
7+8. Added glow to the photo (view my tutorial on this)
9. Brightened the shadow dark’s as I felt the bridge was still too dark.
10. Sharpened the photo using high pass filtering

And that’s all for this photo. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

Your need for noise reduction depends very much on the way you process your photos. Especially HDR processing can create an enormous amount of noise, which has to be dealt with. There are different ways you can do this and I think Imagenomic is one of the best.

Imagenomic Noiseware gives you a big amount of sliders you can push around to remove noise, but in the years I’ve been using it, I never used one. I bet that will make the results better, but the results you get just using the first two under Noise level are good enough in almost all cases.

I also never use it at strong settings. The values go from -20 to +20 and I usually don’t go above 0 for most of my photos. In the sample screenshots I included different situations with different settings.

Recently with Lightroom noise reduction getting much better, the need for a separate noise reduction plugins was not that big. But for some photos, Lightroom can remove very much detail when removing noise. Noiseware can have better results there. I personally use both, Lightroom noise reduction by weaker noise, Imagenomic by stronger noise. Sometimes even both, Lightroom for the initial noise reduction and Imagenomic for finishing touches.

Btw. same as with all noise reduction, be careful not to overdo it. It can remove photo detail and also introduce color banding into your photos.

You can find more information on the plugin on the Imagenomic Noiseware site.

View all my other reviews here.