I’m still “having fun” with our server, and with some of the software on it. Not much time for music, photography, or any other hobby. So I thought I’d show a photo which I took lately when I had the 50mm macro lens on my camera to “scan” some negatives (from Zuleikha’s films). And while I had RawTherapee open on my Linux box, I decided to use that to make a jpg out of the raw file from the camera. So here’s Tuna from last Sunday or so:
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
Love the colours in this one. A good contrast between the cat and the sofa. Oh, and I cropped it into 3:2 like all the “scans” I made from Zuleikha’s films.
Just heard her outside with what was probably the black & white cat which I saw the other day. Tuna is always fighting, probably protecting her territory. In the photo she was cleaning herself after eating, and I took this hand-held with ISO 6400 and 1/10th of a second at f/1.4 (my lens wide open):
After the meal and before the fight, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
Midtoned as usual, and cropped 3:2 like from a film camera. Oh, and I haven’t used any noise reduction whatsoever, so this is *much* better than film IMHO. And with 1/10th of a second hand-held, what saved me here is the wonderful IBIS (in-body image stabilisation) from my camera. So I couldn’t have done the same with film anyway.
A first cat snapshot since we’re back from England:
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
Taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 and the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/2.0, converted with Olympus Workspace on Windows 10 and with RawTherapee on Linux. Uploaded to Flickr manually.
I first saw this mentioned in a blog post and thought that it might be a nice addition, much smaller than the 40-150mm lenses we have from the Four Thirds system and which need an adapter, a bit sharper perhaps, and with a faster autofocus. Even image stabilized though we don’t need that on our Olympus cameras which have the stabilization built right into their bodies already. So I had put it onto my wishlist at some big store, not further thinking about it – and what a nice surprise when all of a sudden I had it!
It comes with a lens hood which is reversed on the lens in the picture above (take that, Olympus!), and it is indeed nice & sharp at all of its focal lengths which compare to a (much bigger) 70-200mm lens on a 24x36mm film camera. I used it on last week’s photo of Tuna the cat already:
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
But this photo is heavily processed with its “in-body” (added by OV3) pin hole art filter. Still, this somehow also replaces my 75mm/1.8 which was stolen in Paris last year.
Today I used it at the longer end and somewhere in the middle (at 64mm) on some flowers on our veranda:
Some flowers on our veranda, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
So with its variable aperture of f/4 to f/5.6 which closes down pretty fast when you zoom in it’s a pretty little lens for outdoors – but I also tried it indoors at 35mm already with good results:
Cool. This might come handy for the upcoming documentation project of Zuleikha’s school event, and also for the upcoming summer holidays. How great to have this; thanks a lot!
I took a photo of Tuna again, using two of my studio strobes and with the PanaLeica 25mm lens on my camera set to f/4.
Then, after “developing” the raw .orf file using OV3 on a simulated Win7 box, I also saved a copy in black & white, using a simulated orange filter (you can do that either in-camera or with Olympus Viewer 3 in post production, the resulting image will be identical).
I also took the colour converted .tif file and loaded it into Silver Efex, trying their 019 “Fine Arts” preset, and also Ilford HP 5 Plus and Kodak Tri-X 400TX film simulations.
And I “developed” all resulting .tif (or in case of SFX, .TIFF) files with Raw Therapee on Linux, and added some meta information. Then I compared the results on my screen for a while.
The “in-camera” (through OV3) black & white conversion was the smoothest of them all, the “Fine Arts” preset of Silver Efex had the most information and almost some kind of a slight HDR look, and the film simulations were very close to each other in this case. In the end, I opted for the most contrasty one of them all which also had some fine simulated grain, which was Tri-X.
As always, I midtoned it to get those grey tones a bit more brownish, and I also cropped it to a 3:2 format like Kleinbildfilm used to have – I thought that also fitted the Leica branded lens on my camera.
Here’s the result:
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019
See Flickr for full resolution if you’re interested in that.
