Creating an iPad portfolio

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Apple’s iPad, with its Retina display, is a great way to carry a high-quality portfolio around with you in a small package without having to pay for prints. Keeping the portfolio up to date is not as complicated as it might seem, if you use Lightroom and iTunes in combination to set a folder on your computer to be synchronised with your iPad.

The first thing you need to do, in Lightroom, is create a Hard Drive Publish Service, called iPad. In the Library module, down at the bottom of the left-hand column, right click the ‘Hard Drive’ bar and select ‘Edit Settings’. This will display the following window:
Hard Drive publishing setttings in Lightroom

Since mine has already been set up, the folder location can’t be changed, but under the ‘Export Location’ heading you can define the location of the folder which will contain all your iPad photos.

You can use the same settings I have picked, or something else (if you are using the iPad 1 or 2, for example, you may want to use 1024 pixels for the image sizing instead of 2048). The resolution figure is irrelevant, of course, for display on digital devices. The sharpening, metadata and watermaking I’ll leave to your discretion.

Once you’ve created the publishing service, it will be listed in the Library side bar as follows:

Screen Shot 2013-04-12 at 15.13.29

You can then add sub-folders according to your needs, thus:
Screen Shot 2013-04-12 at 15.14.21

Add photos to these folders and publish as you would any other publishing service in Lightroom. Once they are all published, switch to iTunes and ensure your iPad is connected.

Select the iPad from the list of devices, and choose ‘Photos’ in the top bar. Select ‘Choose folder’ from the drop-down menu next to ‘Sync photos from:’Screen Shot 2013-04-12 at 14.45.27

Then navigate to the top-level folder your Lightroom Publish Service is connected to, and select ‘Open’. The next time you synchronise your iPad, the photos will all be copied across and will be visible in the Photos app under the headings defined in your Lightroom Publish Service:
photo

 

Little Britain

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A military monument at Cap de la Chèvre on the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, France
A military monument at Cap de la Chèvre on the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, France (click to view full size)

Believe it or not, ‘Little Britain’ is one of the many names given to the French region of Brittany. This ties in with the French name for it, ‘Bretagne’, as compared to their name for Great Britain, ‘Grand Bretagne’. Settled by migrants from Cornwall and other Celtic regions of the British Isles, Brittany has its own distinct identity and even has its own language, Breton (or Brezoneg) which is very similar to Cornish.

I recently visited on a family holiday, staying in the region known as ‘Cornouaille’ in the south west of Brittany, near the city of Quimper. Some photos are online on my site, and all are available to buy as prints. Please feel free to have a browse by clicking here.

Fine dining

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Many hotels pull out all the stops when it comes to their restaurants. Given that most of them are open to the public as well as paying guests, they are likely to be seen by more people than any other part of the hotel, so it makes sense to make them look as good as possible. Here are some of my favourites from the past year.

I should add that these photos wouldn’t have been possible without the lovely people at Hotel Tonight who had faith in me and signed me up as their London hotel photographer. In the course of my work with them I’ve been to some amazing places.

(Click on the pictures to view full size.)

The restaurant in NH Kensington
The restaurant in NH Kensington
CitizenM London Bankside's dining area
CitizenM London Bankside’s dining area
Flemings Mayfair's extravagant restaurant
Flemings Mayfair’s extravagant restaurant
The restaurant in the Bloomsbury Hotel, London
The restaurant in the Bloomsbury Hotel, London
Top floor restaurant at Hotel Indigo in Birmingham
Top floor restaurant at Hotel Indigo in Birmingham
The Corner Room at the Town Hall Hotel, London
The Corner Room at the Town Hall Hotel, London
London's Apex Temple Court hotel
London’s Apex Temple Court hotel
Angler at the South Place Hotel, London
Angler at the South Place Hotel, London

Some more impressive hotel lobbies

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Well, while I can’t quite match the impressive hotels seen on the Telegraph’s travel page, I CAN share with you some of the best ones I’ve visited in the past year or so. Here are some of my favourites, in no particular order.

The Town Hall hotel in Bethnal Green is full of Art Deco highlights, such as that cubic clock, the marble pillars and the star on the floor.

The Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green, London
The Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green, London

CitizenM London Bankside is the Dutch hotel chain’s first London based property. Guests check themselves in on arrival, and can relax in this ultra modern, eccentrically-lit rest area on the ground floor.

The CitizenM London Bankside
The CitizenM London Bankside

The South Place Hotel was designed by the world famous Conran partnership with wonderful detailing throughout, like the photomosaic tiling on the pillars and the log-pile wallpaper surrounding the slate fireplace.

London's South Place Hotel, in Moorgate
London’s South Place Hotel, in Moorgate

The Hempel Hotel is a minimalist’s dream, and after dark the lighting in the lobby changes colour to match the floral arrangement on the reception desk.

The Hempel Hotel in Bayswater, London
The Hempel Hotel in Bayswater, London

In Birmingham’s Rotunda, the Staying Cool apartments have a sparse, narrow corridor as the lobby, illuminated by long aluminium poles with colour-changing LEDs set into each one.

Staying Cool at the Rotunda in Birmingham
Staying Cool at the Rotunda in Birmingham

Tilt-shifting at windmills (and other tall buildings)

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What does “tilt-shift” mean to you?

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Get that thought out of your head right now. Yes, tilt-shift lenses CAN be used to do that, but there’s so much more to them. To start with, the above effect was created in Photoshop, but when you tilt a lens in the opposite direction you can actually achieve a WIDER depth of field by aligning the focal plane with, or close to, the ground, without having to stop the lens down to f/11 or smaller. But that’s not why I use these lenses.

Take a look at this photograph of the railway arches near where I live:

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It was taken with a 17mm lens from ground level, meaning that to include the top of the viaduct in the photo I had to tilt the camera back. With a rectilinear (i.e. not fisheye) wide angle lens, this has the result that all vertical lines start to converge, distorting the shapes in an unpleasant, almost vertiginous manner.

Luckily, the 17mm lens in question has a shift feature (the tilt wasn’t used for the next shot). So I shifted the lens upwards and aligned the back of the camera to be parallel with the walls of the viaduct:

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Now the vertical lines on the structure are vertical in the photograph, and yet I still have the top of the viaduct in shot. This is because the 17mm TS-E lens has a much larger image circle than a standard 17mm lens. When you shift the front element upwards, the image circle also moves so that the portion that hits the sensor is towards the top of the scene. Using the same lens but without shifting would have resulted in a photo with only the bottom portion of the arches in shot, and far more pavement than would be reasonable.

This shot of Watford Fire Station was taken with the lens shifted up partially, meaning the building is centred vertically in the frame, rather than towards the top:

_MG_0279An extreme example (when you stand a bit closer to a building than is strictly necessary) shows how the perspective towards the edges of the larger image circle can be a bit overblown:

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However with a slightly less wide lens (24mm in this case) and a building that’s further away, shifting the lens can result in very pleasing ground-level shots of tall buildings:

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Apologies for the lack of windmills in this post. I just couldn’t resist the pun.