Wolfgang Lonien

After reading Kirk Tuck’s articles “Getting ready…” and “Re-inventing the portrait…” today, I was impressed. Frank Grygier, a friend of Kirk’s had told him that with these newer Olympus Pen cameras (like the E-P3, the E-PL3, and even the E-PM1 as I checked) you can not only set face recognition, but even eye recognition to have the camera focus exactly on the nearest, left or right eye. Kirk tried it and confirmed it, and not only that:

“What a burden lifted.”

and

“Thank you, Frank.”

were his comments. And when a Kirk Tuck, a well known professional photographer and a real artist in portraiture says something like that, you can bet that these are good and useful functions.

Our slightly older E-PL1 cameras can’t do that. But like so many others, they have at least face recognition, so I thought I’d try that. And that also works, except of course if you still do photographers’ errors. Like, when there’s no face then there’s no face – nothing to detect here:

The second one I tried also shows a photographer’s error. I had detached the focusing from the shutter release button, and assigned it to the “Start taking a video” button on the back of the camera. So I had to press two buttons (like in the first image as well), but here we have a moving person – me. And if you move ever so slightly between focusing and the final “click”, well that’s not the camera’s fault:

It also works when people are far away, tho this could also be the result of depth of field. However – this is how it looks from my work place to Steven’s desk in the next room:

Soon after that, my colleagues Arno and Udo came around the corner and asked me out for a smoke. So I joined them, taking the camera of course, and I did the fastest possible thing to get focusing and release button back into one again: I set the camera to iAuto (Olympus’ “intelligent auto”, which simply means auto everything – it even overrides the max ISO and noise reduction settings).

I showed the guys what the camera does then, and we were all pretty amazed – it even tracks more than one face if it has to. Wow. Took two fast ones of Udo which I might have to remove again tomorrow (haven’t had the chance to ask him yet if it’s ok to have these on Flickr):

Udo, ISO 1250. The next one is ISO 640:

Well – the near eye is sharp. If that works reliably, then this small thing is one hell of a portrait camera! On the way upstairs, I tried it on myself in the lift again – without even looking at the camera:

Works. And works great. I think I’ll put the focusing and shutter release buttons back together on their normal place again for a while, so I can test that further without letting the camera decide about everything else as well. Might be fun, might be frustration, let’s see. Wow.

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We had a nice and sunny day around here, but with temperatures still constantly below zero Celsius – the plastic cup filled one third with water which Zuleikha put out on the veranda is solidly frozen. Otherwise, with the low winter sun, it would have been a great day to just walk around to take pictures. But ok.

Still, even in winter the light is best short after dawn, or short before dusk. And when it hit our walls, it was so nice and strong that I simply couldn’t resist and started to take photos inside. Like this one, desaturated and cropped square:

The cat had just eaten some fresh chicken, and came to watch me. First I caught her yawning:

See how nicely she was lit by both the living and the dining room windows, plus the reflection of the sun on the wall? Irresistible – so I took a few more, like this one, where she was watching someone or something behind me in the dining area:

When I went out for a smoke soon afterwards, I caught two planes above our house:

And back inside, I decided to take a self portrait, which I haven’t done since some time. Here I’m looking at a photo I took earlier today, of our drapes:

Thanks for viewing and reading.

Mitchie’s birthday present was the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 1:1.8 45mm lens, and since she has that one, it hasn’t left her camera. So I had the chance to borrow her 20mm Panasonic lens from time to time. More often than not, I use the kit lens on my Pen camera at either 25mm or 17mm, so 20mm is a bit of an in-between focal length – but very close to the ~22mm diagnonal size of the (micro) Four Thirds sensor, which makes it a “normal” focal length, with a slight tendency to the wide side (a 25mm would be slightly long).

So I’m pretty much used to this “normal” way of seeing. But what makes a difference to my kit lens is a) the much wider maximum aperture of 1:1.7, and b) the really good sharpness this small “pancake”-like lens provides.

Here’s one from last Sunday, taken with f=2.0 and ISO800 in the Greek restaurant where we went to meet some friends and to celebrate Mitchie’s birthday:

I like it how the background falls off into a nice blur when using that lens almost wide open and at close distances.

And here’s one from today, taken at f=2.8 and ISO400 with daylight, overexposed +1.7EV in the camera plus 0.18EV in RawTherapee (where I also slightly cropped that image):

This isn’t sharpened at all in post production. Nice lens indeed; I like it a lot. Hard to decide whether I should get the 1:1.4 25mm Panasonic Leica for my camera, or this one – for the price difference I’d almost get a Panasonic 1:2.5 14mm as well…

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P.S.: Almost forgot to show Mitchie’s 20mm lens (and hood) on my camera:

And a sleepy photographer as well. Still, I had to take some photos of her:

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It’s announced since approximately 3am our time: the Olympus OM-D system with the E-M5 camera:

For more info here in Germany, please visit the Olympus or the OM-D pages.

Nice cameras, and especially: nice lenses (around 30 together with those from Panasonic/Leica).

Well, actually I took three, but it wasn’t my most creative of days. Plus it was super duper cold, so we didn’t leave the building except for short cigarette breaks. This is what I took from inside, through our window:

Just people from IBM and Deutsche Bank, on their way to and from lunch. Processed with the ‘BW-2′ setting of RawTherapee, which gives a nice contrast. Not sharpened (neither in-camera nor afterwards). Plain standard output from my E-520 and the 50mm macro lens.

Thanks for viewing.

Sometimes less is more. Today I really wanted to play around during our lunch break, so I took the E-PL1 “Pen” camera, and set it to:

• square
• black & white
• auto ISO (200-3200)
• 25mm (equivalent to 50mm, which is considered “normal”)

I took 39 photos, most of them inside because of the temperatures. Here are some of them:

I never had a medium format (or “Rollfilm”) camera, but I’ve played around with squares before. This time, I really tried and learned to see in square, and in black & white. And this is interesting, and real fun. I might do some more of this, let’s see.

Oh, and one more thing: I had to straighten the image of the passageway a bit, and turned the second cabinet photo 45 degrees, obviously. No other image was cropped or altered except the simple conversion from raw to jpg.

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One more, this time with the DSLR and the macro lens, and with the studio flash bounced straight up over the ceiling. Zuleikha’s “Teddy” and “Cutie”, which she considers her little sisters:

Thanks for viewing.