I edited down yesterday's shoot at Middleton Circle Library this morning which took the best part of an hour. I use DXO to process the RAW files on every architectural shoot because DXO removes all lens distortion automatically and also has a really useful and good highlight recovery feature. It falls down though when it comes to the initial edit (where I chop out all the unwanted pictures). Once you open up DXO the thumbnail preview is too small to properly assess the picture so I use Lightroom to run through each RAW picture full screen and then delete the unwanted ones as I go (after backing everything up twice before hand).

The job went pretty well although it's going to be a time consuming one post processing wise as I need to use some layer blending via a program called Photomatix because of the huge contrast in most of the shots. This is effectively high dynamic range imaging and that's the only practical way to cope with a dark interior lit by large windows with bright sunshine outside. In the days of film I would have used colour print film to get as much latitude as possible but with digital imaging I can get a more accurate result.

We had some good enquiries in today too which was great news. One of our regular clients has a school for me to photograph next week and another regular has asked us to photograph an office interior at the end of April then go back and shoot some video clips and interviews in May. Another good client has also asked me to come up with a location for some product photography which will be great fun to do.

Tomorrow I'm doing a portrait shoot in the studio for a lady whose boyfriend bought the session for her for Christmas and I'm looking forward to it as I haven't done many portraits in the past few weeks because of all the location work we've had.

Usually I upload a picture to the blog from a recent commission but today I'm uploading a few pictures that I took last Sunday at Quainton Railway Centre where we had a family day out. I took the shots on my Panasonic G1 and as I mentioned before I really like this little camera.

I love the pictures of the old flaky paint on the side of one of the old railway carriages - my wife always says I'm odd for taking these kind of pictures but I just love texture and colour.