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Introducing The Oasis

No, it’s not a re-group of the 90s rock band but a section of our land behind the house that always seems to have water.

Water Trickle

We live on top of a hill, however, there always seems to be water on a section of the land behind the house, even in the hot, dry summer there is evidence of water. There are a few theories; Does our Water Cistern (we have a bore hole) leak? Does our Septic Tank release the clean water here? Does it take the water from the roof guttering here? Is there some strange water spring?

No matter how this water gets here, it creates a fantastic Oasis of wild plants. I’ve noticed that this time of year, the returning winter birds congregate for breakfast just after sunrise. Numerous Finches, Robins, Waxbill, Chiffchaff, Stonechat to name a few feast on the flower seeds and insects.

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Disable the Windows 10 Lock Screen (Video)

Although not really Photography related, I thought I’d share with you how I disabled the Lock Screen in Windows 10.

In Windows 10, the Lock Screen is displayed when you first boot up where you have to press a key or a mouse button to continue to the login screen. This is also the case if you Sign Out of Windows.

Both my PC and Laptop are fitted with SSD drives, therefore, they boot very quickly just a few seconds. It was annoying me that you have this extra step before login.

The video explains how to disable the Lock Screen in both Home and Pro Versions. Some details are also found below the video.

{Remember to watch in HD if possible}


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Review of “Exposure Calculator” App for Android by Quicosoft (Video)

There are plenty of resources to calculate changes to the Exposure Triangle and as a photographer you really should be able to work them out in your head. However, sometimes it’s easier to cheat when out shooting so that you can concentrate more on getting those shots than working out exposure times.

As I’m about to try my hand at Moonlit Night Landscapes, a new thing for me, I wanted to be able to take test shots to check for lighting conditions. Moonlit photography can demand very long exposure times at base ISO (the lowest your camera will go without any extended ISOs) which means getting the exposure correct means less time standing out in the dark.

Exposure Calculator in the Play Store

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Using Adobe Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro 10 to Edit An Almost Deleted Photo (Video)

I had a few long distance shots of the Short Eared Owl that, due to high ISO, I almost deleted. They had a fair amount of noise and because I had to crop in, the noise was too much to be able to edit it.

However, I thought I’d let DxO OpticsPro 10 have a go at reducing the noise and as always it delivered. I was so impressed how it cleaned up the noise that I thought I’d show a complete workflow of the post editing.

The video maybe useful for any one else editing, but also may be a good watch for any non-photographers to see how a photo evolves through it’s post processing stage from it’s RAW format to it’s final published copy. For more information on RAW files and post processing, please see a post I made quite a while ago – RAW, JPEG and why Lightroom isn’t Cheating.

Here is the image that the camera captured, it’s a conversion to JPEG without any post processing

Original RAW
Original RAW
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Automatically Back Up Lightroom Catalogues When You Logoff From Windows (Video)

If like me you have many different catalogues within Lightroom then you might get lazy when it comes to backing up your Lightroom Catalogues. As you may know, the catalogue stores all of the non-destructive editing carried out on your photos. Lose the catalogue and you lose the edits. Catalogues have to be stored locally and therefore is not easy to have them stored on resilent network storage such as a NAS.

I was getting concerned that I didn’t backup my catalogues often enough and decided to fix it once and for all and even turn off the backup notifications in Lightroom. I created a simple method to automatically backup any changes to my catalogues each time I log off or shut down my PC, please note, it doesn’t run if you just sleep or hibernate. As I’ve got an SSD in my PC it boots so quickly that I always shut it down when not using it.

Yes, this is important, I said “my PC”, I’m not a MAC user so this is not relevant to MACs but I suspect there is something similar available. Although I’m using Windows 10, this method should still work for 7 and 8. Please note, you require access to the Group Policy Editor, this is not available in “Home” versions of Windows and requires you are running a “Pro” version of Windows.

I’ve recorded a How To Video complete with written instructions below

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