I'm not good at macro/close-up photography but this photo I took last spring turned out to be quite good. I especially like the focusing, bokeh and vivid colours here. It was taken with Canon 24-105L lens at 105, with f/4 and 1/200s exposure. I set ISO to 160. Probably shallower depth of field would work even better here but I didn't have my 50 mm f/1.8 with me that day.
On the other topic, Adobe have just
released beta of Lightroom 4. To be honest I'm not a great fan of Lightroom as I prefer to manage my photos in Bridge and post-process them in Photoshop CS5 (with actions and good workflow it isn't much slower in my opinion) but I decided to give it a try (
BETA is available for everyone for free and expires on 31st March 2012) and I must admit I quite liked it.
There are numerous changes of course - many in the basic panel. There is no Fill Light and Recovery Sliders - instead Whites, Highlights, Blacks and Shadows are used. What's more moving Blacks/Whites doesn't affect midtones anymore! So it gives much better control over the result. Clarity slider behaviour has been greatly improved and you know what - it rocks! Even on its maximum setting it doesn't produce any halo artifacts! Fantastic! Brilliant! There are other useful improvements like local noise reduction adjustments or local white balance control (that's pretty cool tool too!). There is much more of course but I don't really care about book creation and similar stuff ;)
I was a bit disappointed with the time it took to export all the developed files (during export Lightroom consumed quite a lot of resources so I couldn't do much more on my PC) but to be honest my computer isn't really powerful so it might be its fault :)
So will I use Lightroom 4 once it is released? That's hard to say. Probably most of the interesting changes for me will make it to Adobe Camera Raw as well. But I plan to play a little longer with it to give it a chance.
