It’s been a long, dark, wet winter here in Bristol. When the clouds finally parted last weekend, the sun came out and the crappy moods lifted, I decided it was time to venture outdoors again (in layers, it was still cold after all).
Luckily, I live about 45 mins away from Slimbridge Wetlands Centre, and on recommendation from my bestie, we set out on a cold, bright Sunday afternoon to go look at some birds.
I took along my Fuji X-T20 and my zoom lens, not expecting to see much that I’d actually be able to take photos of. But I was wrong! Instead of being a bunch of hides on an estuary, as I expected, there were aviaries, enclosed areas, open habitats – all within point-and-shoot distance. It dawned on me as I watched geese follow small children around, eager for the feed pellets clutched in their little hands, that an up-close experience is vastly more entertaining (and profitable) than a bunch of sheds with holes in the sides.
The birds on display were varied too – not only species from the UK but all over the world, including an abundance of flamingos of all kinds (I get the feeling they started with just a few and have ended up with more than they expected, as there are multiple flamingo enclosures).
My favourites were the Eiders, which make a fantastically camp “ooooooh” call, sounding just like Kenneth Williams. We also saw a Water Rail sneaking from one side of the path into the bushes, which was an unexpected delight – they’re very shy and hard to spot in the wild.
At the far end of the park were the open spaces, with some traditional hides looking over the estuary. As we got there fairly late in the day, we were shooed out by an employee warning us that the park was closing, but not before I got some shots of the scenery bathed in warm, low sunshine.
I took lots of photos, trying to break out of my usual frugal behaviour (learned from years shooting only film), but sadly I missed the focus on quite a lot of shots, or the shutter speed was too low, giving a bit of blur on the subjects. Learnings for next time – trust the autofocus, and use a faster shutter speed!
Developing, how I hate it
After my lovely day out, I thought I’d come home and quickly process my shots on my new MacBook Air, ready to post up on social media.
Haha. You fool. You absolute rube.
In the time between the last lot of photography I processed (last year maybe) and now, Affinity Photo seems to have completely buggered up their handling of RAF files, Fujifilm’s version of the RAW format. After selecting my files to open, I sat with my eyes going vacant for a full 5 minutes before giving up. I selected a few less, and tried again. Still no dice. It was only when I selected 6 files of 50mb each and tried to load them, that Affinity Photo finally cranked into life, albeit very very slowly.
Now, this is a fairly new M2 MacBook Air I’m using. I bought it to replace one I’d had on the go since 2017, and I’m sure I didn’t have this probelm last time.
Searching online turned up nothing of much use, so I tohught I’d try processing the RAF files first, then importing into Affinity Photo afterwards. RAWTherapee managed fairly well, but I couldn’t get my head around the workflow, and more importantly, couldn’t repicate the Veliva filters I’d used when shooting.
A bit more searching brought me to Fujifilm X Raw Studio, a basic and kind of weird app that uses the image processor on your camera, to process the images on your computer. A clever idea, if a bit tricky to get your head around at first. However, I found a great guide online (thank you, Kevin Mullins!) and quickly converted my RAF files to JPG, keeping the Velvia colours intact. For a couple of images I was even able to switch Velvia to Provia, for a more muted look – nice to be able to do this after the fact.
After that, I opened all the exported JPGs in Affinity Photo and finished off my processing – not much more than cropping, some lens correction and tweaking the contrast for most. I did have a go at a light gradient mask on my image of the flamingos (see above) – I wanted to isolate the birds in the foreground from the background a bit more, but couldn’t get the hang of proper masking so just applied a gradient layer and erased some of it away.
Going from a single app doing all my processing (oh Lightroom, I miss you) to two different ones is a bit of a pain, but there’s no way I’m paying £9.99 a month for something I barely use. I’m sure i’ll get used to it, I just need to watch a few more Affinity Photo tutorials – if anyone knows of any good ones, please do link them in the comments!
