Three films, one portrait I liked

Maybe I was a bit sloppy. Or maybe I just pressed the shutter too fast and on too many objects. Out of the three Kodak black & white films which I had in my camera lately, I liked exactly 1 photo – a portrait of my colleague Arno, like so often:

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I quickly (and again, sloppily) “scanned” the negative using my OM-D E-M10 with the old Four Thirds ZD 50mm/2 macro lens against a white background illuminated by one of my studio strobes, using a polaroid slide copier holder in front of that macro lens. So what you see here is a digitized version (ca. 13.5MP) of the 24x36mm negative turned positive.

This was also one of the first photos I made with my new old 135mm/2.8 lens, and it’s very nice and sharp even when used fully open like here.

Like always, thanks for viewing.

Some snapshots, some playing around

Played around with Silver Efex Pro 2 again today, on this:

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This is the original photo, with the “Natural” setting of my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera. In Silver Efex Pro2 I used the “020 Fine Arts” preset this time, which is a bit more high key than the 019 one, and which also adds the frame border you see here. What I also did was to selenium-tone it (number 4 in SFx).

Here’s another snapshot from today. It’s the Latin version of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”:

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And as always, thanks for viewing.

More photos on white

Today I made photos for Zuleikha, all with the white background like in my last article. Zuleikha needs some photo for application letters – next year those kids will do a practical fortnight in their preferred professions, and they have to find jobs themselves, it’s just part of the game.

I took Zuleikha’s favourite photo from the session and also made a black and white version of it, just in case, and just out of my own curiosity. Looks nice with the “019 Fine Arts” preset of Nik Silver Efex Pro2 (plus a bit of final tweaking in RawTherapee like always):

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Here’s another one of Zuleikha’s choices, tho this ain’t for applications 😉

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Our chosen ones are all on Flickr, so Zuleikha can use and download them on demand whenever she likes to or needs them. I have unlimited storage space on Flickr; time to make use of that 😉

As always, thanks for viewing.

Me on white

I’ve got a third studio strobe. The reason is that the original seller/distributor in Germany (who is just another photographer) doesn’t seem to continue selling the ones I bought, and so I’ve got a similar – maybe slightly older – model from another seller via Amazon.

And just an hour ago I did the first real test: light something “on white”, which means put two strobes onto a white background, and one on your subject.

First test was with two bare strobes (just standard reflectors) at level “2”, and that main one through a 20″ socked beauty dish on level “3” – that measured aperture 11 on the background, 8 on the subject, which gives a difference of exactly 1 stop. Should have raised the background ones to 2.5 to blow out the white just a bit more. Set as I did, I had almost no light “spill”, which surprised me a bit – the place was a bit small for a setup like this, so I have to check again with those background flashes powered up more. But for a first check it was ok, at least in black & white.

Mitchie took my picture with these settings (thanks sayang!), and I worked on it a bit with the usual 3-step process for black & white, which is OV3 and SFX on Windows, then RT on Linux. It’s borderline usable, but it shows the direction, which is why I show it here:

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Wolfgang, November 2017

As always, thanks for viewing. And as Joe McNally uses to say/write, more tc…

My 50mm macro lens, used as a “normal” one

I once bought a used ZD 50mm/2 macro lens from the Four Thirds digital series, and I still love that one. Its autofocus is slow on CDAF machines like our small Pens and the E-M10, but the rendering of that lens is, in lack of another word, special. And yes, it’s very very good as a macro lens, but since I bought it I mostly used it for portraits and the likes – with an equivalent field of view like a 100mm lens on film, and with a max aperture of f/2 it’s just beautiful for everything. Here are 1 picture from this morning, and two from my lunch break:

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Arno, buying breakfast for us

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The view from the middle

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Selfie in the lift, fim simulation, toned

All three of these photos were made with the lens wide open at f/2, where it’s nice and sharp already. And if you stop it down one or two stops, it gets razor blade sharp. But that’s not the point of it – from all the lenses we have, and we do have some nice ones, this might still be the one with the most beautiful rendering of the image, and therefore, if you will, “the best”.

As always, thanks for viewing.

Tuna from yesterday, Arno from today. Both toned.

Here are two photos I made yesterday and today, and both are toned using the Lab curves in RawTherapee. Arno’s photo was converted to black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro2 (with the 019 “Fine Art” preset), Tuna was more or less out of camera (and Olympus Viewer could do the same).

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Oh, almost forgot: Tuna was lit with two of my studio strobes (both simply reflected over the walls), while I took Arno’s photo in natural daylight in the company.

Another difference: I photographed Tuna with the 25mm/1.4 Panasonic Leica DG Summilux lens at f/2.8, and Arno with the new, old, and manual OM Zuiko 135mm/2.8, also at f/2.8.

As always, full resolution photos are on Flickr – you get there if you click on the pictures here.

Also as always, thanks for viewing.

Some more digital monochromes

Here are a few more photos which I made with my camera set to black & white:

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 fully open at f/1.4)

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Olympus OM G.Zuiko 50mm/1.4 fully open at f/1.4)

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Tuna the cat, November 2017 (Olympus OM G.Zuiko 50mm/1.4 at f/2)

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Arno, November 2017 (Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm/2.8 at f/4)

Thanks for viewing.

“Black and white are the colors of photography” (Robert Frank)

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”

Robert Frank

(got that quote from here, after reading it elsewhere several times by now)

At the moment, I’m using my digital Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera in black and white. In camera, I simulate a slightly increased contrast, and also a yellow (sometimes orange or red) filter, but I also save it as a raw file so I can do whatever serves the image best still afterwards.

For the first of the images here, the camera was still on colour, but I decided against colour later on my computer. So here are some photos, a last one from October, and some of November already:

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Mitchie’s camera, with which I took the photo of my own one, was also set to colour internally, and even to a RGB colour space (I use AdobeRGB). But like I said, these in-camera settings are what they are for me – just previews of what to expect. For that last photo I also wrote a ‘howto’ which you can read on Flickr if you click on that image.

As always, thanks for viewing and reading.

A walk with the 40-150mm zoom lens

Mitchie & me both have the Olympus Zuiko Digital 40-150mm 1:4-5.6 lens; the “old” one from the Four Thirds line, not the newer Micro Four Thirds version. I got mine together with the E-520 DSLR, and Mitchie got hers with the first Pen E-PL1 camera, as double zoom kits. So Mitchie also has the original MMF-2 adapter, and I have a third party “Viltrox” one. Both allow these lenses to autofocus on Micro Four Thirds cameras, albeit slowly (only the top-of-the-line E-M1 camera has phase detect AF like the old DSLRs had).

Yesterday I thought about the zoom lens since it also covers the 135mm range of my new old OM Zuiko lens, although not at an aperture of 1:2.8 – our variable aperture zoom lenses are almost 2 stops slower at that focal length. The newer 40-150mm/2.8 PRO would do the job but costs a dozen times more, and weighs much more than what we have.

So today I had that zoom on my camera, and took a walk with it. Here are some photos I made, one even before leaving the house:

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It’s a very versatile lens. I used it at 79mm for the cat, and at 114mm for the step counter on my mobile phone. All outside photos were taken at 40mm (and all are wide open at f/4), which seems to be a “normal” focal length for me.

You get the newer Micro Four Thirds version of this lens for about 150€ (or $) – a very good value. Highly recommended.

Thanks for viewing.