A landscape book by a Scottish photographer released to help raise money for charity is causing a sensation in the professional photography industry. We chat to John G Moore about the amazing project and how Adobe Lightroom helped him realise his extraordinary vision.

Over the course of Spring 2008 to Autumn 2009, Scottish photographer John G Moore travelled along the 211-mile John Muir Trail through California's Sierra Nevada Mountains photographing his journey along the way. Starting at Yosemite Valley, the photographer travelled south, ending his journey at the highest peak in contiguous USA, Mount Whitney. The adventure culminated in a beautiful book of landscapes – Spirit – on sale through Blurb.com, with a percentage of proceeds going to Yorkhill Childrens Foundation in Glasgow, Scotland and Access Adventure in Fairfield, California.

Moore was motivated to carry out the book project after a relative’s four year old daughter tragically passed away. He felt compelled to help in some way, and decided to support the charity based in the Glasgow hospital where she had received care. As the book was shot along the John Muir Trail in California, he also decided to help support the US charity Access Adventure, run by Michael Muir, the great grandson of the legendry Scottish-American conservationist John Muir.

Moore tells us that, aside from the final book design, the whole project was carried out from inception to completion using Lightroom. "This included the import and sorting of images in Library view, processing the images fully in Develop view, exporting 300dpi images for both the book and media publications, exporting 72dpi proofs for web features, and also creating web galleries," he says. During his adventure, John used his Lenovo laptop to load Lightroom, flip into Library View, quickly sort through his images and do some edits. This saved a lot of time before the photographer returned to Skyline Studios in Glasgow to complete the project.

So, what's next for the photographer? "I’m currently working on a large format limited edition version of Spirit," he reveals. "This is planned for release during June 2010 to tie in with an exhibition of my work. I also plan to spend some time shooting in the USA again this summer. One project will be an extension of Spirit, the other will be completely different – a portrait book featuring some well known faces." Stay tuned for updates.

See more and buy the book at www.johngmoore.co.uk

After Effects is the professional choice for motion graphics artists everywhere – with all manner of incredible tools for doing just about anything you need to with moving images. Here, Fraser Davidson at award-winning London-based motion graphics, animation and VFX house Mainframe, shares some of his favourite tips...

Tip 1

Keyframe Velocity

A useful tool for giving any sort of animation – whether positional, scalar or rotational – particular emphasis is the Keyframe Velocity console. By right-clicking (Ctrl-clicking on a Mac) an Ease in/ Ease out/ Easy-ease keyframe and selecting Keyframe Velocity, After Effects gives you total control over the influence of the ease you want. Using High values of influence will tend to give your animation a more natural soft motion, and lower values will give you a jerky, mechanical feel. This is particularly useful for camera motion, as using different values when keyframing both position and point of interest can give your moves a more hand held feel – as the camera will appear to pan independently of its motion.

Tip 2

Simple warm grade

For a quick and easy colour grade that will 'warm up' any footage or animation, add an Adjustment Layer to your composition (Layer > New > Adjustment Layer) and apply a Tint (Effect > Colour Correction > Tint) to it. Map a bright orange to the white and a deep purple to the black. Set this layer to between 10-30% to suit. Adding an additional slight grain or noise will help eliminate any banding issues you have in 8-bit renders.

Tip 3

Simple Camera Rig

By attaching your camera to rig like in the image here, you can make your moves much less complex to animate, easier to amend and more natural looking. Only use your camera for the main zooms, pulls and pans in a scene and use a null layer to put in the extra, gentle motion between these. This will save you bother when trying to keyframe faster camera moves into slower moves and avoid unwanted motion caused by your spacial interpolation settings. By attaching your null layer to subsequent 'wiggle' layers, you can achieve a natural, hand shot feel within scenes.

Developers and designers may be like chalk and cheese, but by employing simple working practices even the most complicated of web app or site design can be made a much simpler proposition. We talk to two creative professionals to find out how designers and developers can come together in perfect harmony.

It's a known problem – designers and developers sometimes just don't get on. It's not always the case of course, but how many times has a designer built a front end for site or app, only to hear a sharp intake of breath from the developer who proceeds to say what can, and can't be done! Sound familiar? In order to get an insight into how designers can better understand the needs of developers, we caught up with two UK-based creative professionals – Stewart Hamilton-Arrandale and Andrew Skinner to get their views.

Stewart Hamilton-Arrandale - the designer

Stewart Hamilton-Arrandale is an award-winning freelance interactive designer behind www.creativewax.co.uk. His clients include Crown Paints and Original Source, amongst many others.

"Generally what I would say is a lot of designers will never take into account limitations of technology or supply assets in the right manner. A good designer is someone who has a good understanding of what you are doing together as a group. This obviously rings very true the other way round and a good developer should work close with a designer to maybe keep them in check sometimes, but more importantly come up with good viable options to problems that might arise with what they are doing, or bring lots more ideas to the table based on their experience with app or site development."

Andrew Skinner - the developer

Andrew Skinner is founder of Small Science, a company that specialises in helping brand and content owners navigate and monetise emerging technology channels. Find out more at www.smallscience.co.uk

"For years in traditional advertising art directors and copywriters have worked in pairs. Each has a distinct skill set that is separate but complementary to the other, and they work together to devise an overall concept for an ad, commercial, mailer, brochure, and so on. It's a formula that has shown to be very effective over the years. I believe that there is an opportunity for digital pairings to emerge in our industry of designers and programmers that move from job to job, agency to agency together. Over the years developing an understanding of how each other work, mutual respect for each other's skills and how to get the best out of each other. Their pairing is their selling point. The digital landscape is small but very transitory and established partnerships are hard to find."