Music. Photography. Thoughts.
While I was setting up the lights and background for today’s family photo session, Tuna helped me a lot. And she seemed to like the storm grey, so I had to take her photo of course:
Tuna the studio cat 1/2. Olympus E-PL5 with 45mm lens, flash.
Tuna the studio cat 2/2. Olympus E-PL5 with 45mm lens, flash.
Thanks for viewing.
Two photos, one from 2 days ago, one from right now:
Nectarine. Olympus E-PL5 with OM Zuiko 50mm/1.8 at f/4. Room light.
Olympus OM-2N. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 at f/4. Room light.
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… Kirk’s article, plus the comments.
My old and trusty (read: slow, but so far reliable) CD / DVD burner didn’t wanna work anymore since a while – it denied to read in any new media I tried on it. Simply gave up. So I looked for a replacement, put some found device onto my Amazon wish list, and forgot about it.
And when I came home from work yesterday, there it was – a brand new drive, waiting to be assembled.
This is what I did, but I had to open the computer case twice: the old one was ATAPI, the new one SATA, and I knew we had cables somewhere; just couldn’t find them. And after cleaning my PC a bit with a vacuum cleaner, I also took some pictures of course. Here are one from its inside, and one of the new and shiny (black) CD / DVD drive:
PC. Olympus E-PL5 with PanaLeica 25mm/1.4 lens. Studio strobe with gridded beauty dish.
LG DVD burner (and a card reader). Olympus E-PL5 with PanaLeica 25mm/1.4 lens. Yongnuo YN-460II compact flash bounced over a wall.
The best thing about it? The experience with the operating system. Did I mention that I just love Linux, and Debian in particular? Except making the device known to the machine’s BIOS (and selecting the boot order), it meant no configuration at all – no fumbling around with drivers, no operating system config changes, nothing at all, everything went unnoticed by the user. Much easier than with any other “user friendly” operating systems I know. It’s in fact the way it should be.
Oh, and because I could finally disable the legacy IDE chip in the BIOS, the machine even boots a bit faster now. Perfect.
Thanks for reading.
Andy from Austin, Texas was given the opportunity to try an Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro lens and wrote about it in two articles, here and here. Now he and one of the commenters on his blog are considering to buy one, and all I could say to that is: excellent choice!
Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro. Picture by its makers.
I use this lens for everything. Macros and portraits are the obvious choices, but it’s also my go to lens for product shots, still life, sometimes even landscapes. In fact it pretty much lives on my DSLR (and that’s why I mostly have the 25mm PanaLeica lens on the “Pen”, so I have a normal and a short telephoto lens without even swapping lenses).
Take this photo from this morning for instance:
Cups. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.
Here is some of the Exif data from the original out of camera jpg image:
Lens ID : Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro
Focus Distance : 1.29 m
Circle Of Confusion : 0.015 mm
Depth Of Field : 0.04 m (1.27 - 1.31)
4 sharp centimeters in 1 meter and 30 distance – and if you focus on the closest edge of the cup, you even lose half of that in-focus plane. That’s what also makes it a great portrait lens; with apertures like f/2 or f/2.8 you’ll have the eyes in focus, the nose still ok, but the ears will show some slight blur already. With f/4 at close but normal distances, a head will be sharp and perfect as it can be.
I showed Andy this photo in a comment on his page:
Happy birthday to Zuleikha. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.
This was taken on December 29th, 2012, on Zuleikha’s 8th birthday when she gave a party for some of her friends. Even Robin Wong liked this one (and he loves that lens as well). You can separate single people out of a group when used wide open, again at close to normal distances. Here’s another favourite of mine showing the same separation effect:
People from Moerfelden-Walldorf. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.
Here are some of my more popular images from Flickr, without further comments:
Looking out. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.
Zuleikha, May 2011, lit. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/5.6. Yongnuo YN-460II at 1/4 power through a 24″ softbox. Background is a white wall.
Marble. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/5.6. Yongnuo YN-460II flash behind object into 24″ softbox. Cellophane surface, partly reflective – no “shopping” around here…
OM Zuiko 1.8 50mm. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens at f/5.6. Simock E300 studio flash with 36″ Octabox.
And if you want to see more, here are some more…
This lens is wonderful, one of the best if not the best I have. It is in fact the one reason I’d never consider switching to other systems (another reason is the in-body stabilization of Olympus cameras, so all of your lenses, even the oldest manual ones from the OM film system become stabilized lenses). Apart from Olympus, only Pentax has that (if I remember correctly).
I bought mine used, so it wasn’t the most expensive lens I’ve got (that would be until now the PanaLeica). Still, if I were Gollum, this one would be my preciousssss – the one I’d take to the proverbial island, the one I’d shoot all of my images for the rest of my life with*. It really is that good. Or, as DPReview wrote in their test of this one:
“Quite simply, every E-system user should own one.”
Thanks for reading.
* Take this as what it was meant to be – a joke. Of course, people are much more precious to me as things could ever be, so should I really crash on that deserted island, I’d know whom to take 😉
This morning I ran into a bicycle race, looked like it was part of a triathlon. I had my zoom lens on the camera set to 17mm, so I was closer to the action than it looks here…
Bicycle race. Olympus E-PL5 with 14-42mm lens at 17mm.
Thanks for viewing.
Some of the kids – including Zuleikha of course – were wearing these on the school party:
Artificial flower necklace. Olympus E-PL5 with 45mm/1.8 lens and off-camera flash.
Thanks for viewing.
Zuleikha’s class had a goodbye party yesterday, where they performed a theatre play, showed some of the stuff they made, and invited for snacks and so on. I took photos, while Mitchie made a video of the play. Of course we know these people and respect their privacy, so I can’t show any photos of people here without asking them first. So here are three which I can show:
Mitchie’s camera, set up to record a video of a theatre play at school (E-PL5 photographed by E-PL5)
Zuleikha, proud artist
Paper owl, made by Zuleikha
Thanks for viewing.
… with a 16:9 format, with RawTherapee, and with The Gimp.
Blooming
Car
The Rock
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When walking around my employers’ garden this morning, I found this:
Not enough (brain-) power. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/2.
The label says “energy drink”, tho about half of it seems to be beer. Anyway – even tho this is a bottle with a token on it (meaning you’d get money back for it somewhere), it doesn’t seem to give the consumer enough energy nor mental power to even take care of his/her litter. Might have been left by some youth folk at night, but we also have enough suits with ties who weren’t lucky enough to receive some proper education from their parents; you see those everywhere these days.
Thanks for reading.