Author: wjl

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Old lenses, and film simulations

I love my old manual lenses from the film SLR cameras, like my Olympus OM-2n. I have two 50mm lenses (f/1.4 and f/1.8), and Mitchie has another 50mm/3.5 macro. Zuleikha has a fourth 50mm/1.8 on her OM-1 film camera. Plus I also have a 135mm/2.8 lens which is quite wonderful.

The difference between these lenses and more modern ones is that they are manual (no autofocus), they aren’t as “bitingly” sharp – so more forgiving for portraits which is a good thing IMO, and they’re also less contrasty and often deliver a more pleasing look when compared to the more clinical modern counterparts.

I also loved using film when we were younger, mostly Kodak Ektachrome 400 colour slides, and Ilford HP5+ black & white film. I still do that today from time to time, but time hasn’t stood still, and film and those chemicals have some costs which add up quickly. So let me show you how I sometimes use those old lenses on a modern digital camera, and then simulate those films. Here are two examples:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/44522160490/
Zuleikha, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

That is a photo of Zuleikha, taken with my 135mm/2.8 lens fully open, mounted (via adapter) to my OM-D E-M10 Mark 2 camera with ISO3200. I used an Ektachrome 400 simulation from Color Efex Pro on this one, and I will show you the differences in a moment.

Here’s another one:

7e2_c160059-sfx-tuna
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

That is of course Tuna the cat, taken with my OM Zuiko 50mm/1.4 lens at f/2.8, mounted (via adapter) to my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark 2 camera which took ISO6400 for this one. I used an Ilford HP5+ film simulation from Silver Efex Pro for this. Plus I midtoned this as usual with RawTherapee.

The differences to digital images? Have a look at the thumbnails in my file browser (Nautilus of the Gnome desktop):

The black & white photo preview has more contrast, tho I reduced that about 10% in SFX already. And the colour preview shows that even in those ancient times, people knew about colour science, didn’t they? That simulated film image looks a lot less dull and boring than its “digital” counterpart (and yes, of course they’re all digital, but still I hope you’ll get my point).

I should do this much more often. I love manually focusing such nice lenses, and I also love the results.

Thanks for viewing, and for reading.

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First snow

As predicted in the forecasts, we’ve got the first snow in our area for the upcoming winter season. And of course Zuleikha took the chance to make a snow cat again:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/32464613018/
First snow / Snow cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

Thanks for viewing.

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Looking for Emily

What a wonderful track from Oliv, Shi, and Wade. I had this on my list since a while, and today I just played a bit on the track:

This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.

List of musicians:

Thanks for listening.

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Cat on girl

Took this with two of my studio strobes last evening:

7e2_c140042-cat-on-girl
Cat on girl, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

Thanks for viewing.

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In-camera black & white

Yes, the Olympus in-camera black & white mode is great. I also love the fact that with modern cameras of the “mirrorless” category you can have a preview of the outcoming image right in your viewfinder or on the rear display, in black & white. And if you use the camera makers’ raw converter program, you *could* still have it in colour, but you *don’t have to* even see colour once in the whole process. Which I’ll describe for this photo of our cat from today:

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Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

So the first thing of course is to take a photo. For this one I used the black & white mode of my camera, and ISO 200 at an aperture of f/2 – which meant 2 seconds exposure time, and a tripod.

Then I loaded the raw .orf image into the Olympus Viewer 3 raw converter on a virtualized Windows 7 machine, but only to check exposure, sharpness and contrast, and then to convert it into a 16 bit .tif image.

This resulting .tif I loaded into Silver Efex Pro 2 (still on Windows) to use its “019 Fine Art” preset, and to create a white border (no. 14) around the image. Saved again as a .tif (Silver Efex makes this a .TIFF)

Back in Linux, I then use RawTherapee with my self-produced and saved midtoning, which leaves the blacks & whites alone but tones those mid grey levels to a brownish tone – looks much nicer than just grey. In RawTherapee I also set the title, correct some Exif error from Silver Efex, and add some keywords like “cat portrait”, or “b&w” (you can see those in Flickr).

Final step: I used The Gimp to add the image title to the white border as well – good for prints or if you’ll have the image out of context somewhere.

So this is my routine for black & white photos, which I still love since my brother Willi and me developed our own Ilford films and made “prints” with his Durst enlarger and some chemicals in our parents’ bathroom…

Thanks for reading.

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Three good articles from SJVN

I read (and I’m even a member of) LXer – a news aggregation site for anything Linux and open source. And while we’re linking to other media there, over the years one name is standing out because of his continuing work for the same old media company, and his good and thoughtful articles about Linux and other open source software and hardware. That name is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, and he writes for ZD Net (yes, they still exist).

Let me cite the man in his latest article MS-Linux? Lindows? Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux? which I read today, after again finding it through LXer:

I used to say that Microsoft would release a Microsoft desktop Linux — MS-Linux or Lindows — when pigs fly. Lately, though, I’ve been hearing oinking from the sky.

SVJN in the ZD Net article linked above

It’s interesting as always to read the man – and here are two other notable articles of his which I read lately:

Edge goes Chromium, and open source wins the browser wars

and

Dell XPS 13: The best Linux laptop of 2018

Enjoy, if you’re interested in stories like these.

Edit: If you already have Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise on your machine and want to try and get your feet wet testing Linux, here’s an article of Steven’s colleague Ed Bott on that topic:

Windows 10 tip: Run Ubuntu Linux in an enhanced Hyper-V session

Enjoy.

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Flickr statistics are still weird…

Have a look at my “recent activities”:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/44438437920/in/photostream/

And then have a look at my stats:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/45342704405/in/photostream/

So many different numbers, all for the same image.

How many views were it? 8002? 12999? 8072? Or – my favourite – 74% of 17489 (which would calculate to 12941,86)?

Strange, ain’t it? Our customers would nail us to the next tree if we’d come up with numbers like these…

Anyway, lots of views for a cat photo, that’s without question 🙂

Thanks for reading my short rant…

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My new camera

My brother Willi reminded me that I now have shown some photos taken *with* my new camera – but none so far *of* it.

So I borrowed Mitchie’s Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark 2 once again to take a photo of my own one with it. Mitchie currently has the 45mm/1.8 Olympus lens on her camera, which is a small jewel in itself, and a must have for users of this system. My camera has the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1:1.4 mounted with which I took the latest cat photos:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/46243866401/
My new camera, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

So this is how it looks – from this distance, it more or less looks like my older original model, tho some dials, knobs, and switches were moved.

Anyway – so glad I have this now. Thanks again to the customer service of Olympus Germany.

Thanks for reading.

Update from Sunday evening:

Here’s another photo *of* my camera – this time I used Mitchie’s together with two of my studio strobes:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/45523367964/
Another photo of my new camera, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

Thanks again for viewing.