News update

I've been rather busy recently with work, so I haven't had much time for working on my photographs. Meanwhile, however, my photographs have been working for me!

On 5 February, the shortlist for the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards was announced, and my Quiver Trees by Night 3 was shortlisted in the Open Panoramic category. Quiver Trees by Night 2 earned a commendation in the same category. The category and overall winners will be announced on 19 March, so I'll have to sweat for another month.

Around the same time, the finalists for the 2012 Environmental Photographer of the Year competition were announced, and Quiver Trees by Night 2 was selected as one of 53 finalists. The finalists will be exhibited at the Royal Geographic Society in London, 9 April - 3 May, and again later in the year at the Grizedale Forest. It is unlikely that I'll be able to visit the exhibitions, but if anybody reading this does see it, please drop me a line.

In other news, I have finally bought myself a decent desktop computer: Intel i7-2600K processor with 16GB of RAM, and an SSD for the important stuff (Windows, Lightroom, Photoshop). Man, that thing flies! Furthermore, since it runs Windows 7, I could finally install Lightroom 4, which was very generously sponsored by Russel Preston Brown, a senior creative director of Adobe Systems, Inc. Thanks, Russel! Besides extra capabilities (e.g. for producing books or webpages), Lightroom 4 also has an improved image processing engine, in particular it is now better at extracting shadow details - very useful for my type of photography. With my new machine, I no longer have to wait for each image to load and processing lots of photographs has become much less painful. I can also build much larger panoramas now without running out of memory, maybe I'll post a nice one soon.

Lastly, I can't post a post without a nice photo; and since readers should be quite sick of my quiver trees by now, here's a golden oldie from Madagascar.

Waiting for the Tide - Canon 40D, Canon 17-55, 1/125, f/5.6, ISO 200