Caught a quick snap of Zuleikha after dinner:
Zuleikha, April 2014
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Two photos with a manual lens
Today I mounted the first manual lens I bought for my DSLR onto the “Pen” camera. It’s an Olympus OM-System Zuiko Auto-S 50mm 1:1,8 lens, made in Japan (according to what’s engraved onto its front). I paid 36€ for the lens, and I forgot what I paid for the OM-µ43rds adapter later. Here are two photos I took with that combination today, the first one at the lenses “sweet spot” which means f/5.6, the other one is a hand-held quarter second portrait of the cat with the lens fully open at f/1.8:
Sunset
Tuna the cat, April 2014
And while I took the first one with ISO 200, the other one is ISO 5000. This 1/4 second is over four and a half stops slower than the recommended 1/100s (for a lens with an equivalent angle of view of a 100mm one on film), but for me that photo is still acceptably sharp. As an aging coffee junkie like me, you just gotta love that Olympus in-body stabilization.
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More presents
Tulips
Mitchie got these from a cousin of mine.
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Qotd, and two links
The quote of the day, for me, comes from David Taylor-Hughes, about using a lens with a “normal” angle of view:
“I like the lack of choices and I like the fact that It’s me that creates the image not some fancy optic and that there’s no stretching or compressing of perspective. It’s down to me whether what’s in the rectangle works or doesn’t. It is, in fact, my favourite kind of photography.”
It’s from this blog post of his. And he’s right – my 25mm lens (50mm-equivalent on film) is also my favourite one.
One who has and uses the newer 25mm lens from Olympus instead of my Panasonic/Leica one is Andreas Manessinger. See for example this post, and browse others from there as well. Impressive, to say the least.
These were taken within the same half hour
And what a difference light can make:
Waiting…
Let the sunshine in
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Presents
This was for my aunt who turned 74 last Sunday:
And this is what Zuleikha got in return from her:
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Other photographers: Trey Ratcliff
I’ve decided to show the work of others here as well. Sometimes that’s possible, sometimes I would have to ask their permission first. It’s possible if/when others have or use the same or a similar CC licensing for their photos as I do – in that case, you can, if not, ask them. Easy as that.
One who is very well known, maybe because he shares freely, maybe because he’s simply that good – is Trey Ratcliff. Presenting him here isn’t really necessary, as he has lots of followers and people who admire his work. He’s pretty good even with HDR, and wrote some tutorials about it, and he has lots and lots of cool landscape and/or cityscape work.
His blog is called “Stuck in Customs“, since he’s also traveling a lot. And from his latest post which he called “Facemasks of Toyko“, here’s the first one he showed. Taken with a Sony A7R camera and using a manually focused Leica 50mm/1.4 lens:
Shibuya Hair, by Trey Ratcliff
Well worth a visit, if you don’t do that anyway already.
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A week with the 14mm lens
I want to further explore how to take wide angle photos, something I’m not really good at. So I mounted my 14mm lens onto the camera at the beginning of the week, and never took it off until now. I didn’t get any breathtaking or world changing photos until now, but at least I experimented a bit with it, like shooting straight into the sun, using high ISO settings, or trying to fill the frame with the 88 keys of Zuleikha’s piano. So here are some from the week which ends soon:
Celltower silhouette at noon. 3 stops under-exposed.
Thirty perfumed candles, stacked up in perfect squares by Zuleikha. ISO 5000, no noise reduction.
88. +1EV exposure compensation, lit by a 6W LED reading light turned away from it. Turned back half a stop in post.
The creek
The land where trees have numbers
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A Sunday walk, and what grandma made
Took a few photos during a walk we did today:
Fallen tree
Zuleikha’s hiking stick
And this morning I took a photo of what my grandma – the mother of my mother – made for the whole family. This morning’s photo wasn’t good enough, so I took the same one again this evening:
Egg warmer, made by my grandma
Pretty genious idea, isn’t it? And no – they’re not for sale, even if I could make these myself.
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Cat on the fence, at dusk
When I went out for a smoke last time, Tuna joined me. And instead of leaving our veranda through the fence, this time she decided to just sit on it. It was getting dark already, and tho the sky looks very bright here – in fact it’s overblown in this picture – this is ISO 2000 with the lens opened to f/2, at 1/80th of a second, so it was darker than it may look here. I applied “auto gradation”, but no noise reduction, and did only minimal post processing like always:
By the way, I like Flickr’s new image viewer a lot, especially the small camera and lens symbols and the exif data, if the photo has some. The dark background is also kind of cool. Very well done, bravo!
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