Wolfgang Lonien

… and she’s also cataloguing them with own photos, names, and maybe even numbers:

Loom art. Olympus E-520 with 50mm/2 macro lens. Cropped 16:9.

Update, one day later:

Here’s one more, this time in daylight. Same camera and lens, manually focused:

More loom art. Olympus E-520 with ZD 2.0 50mm Macro at f/8.

In the background you see what these are made of – small silicone rubbery rings…

Thanks for viewing.

Mitchie has a couple of pots outside in which she’s growing chili peppers – the very hot sort from Thailand I think. And tho they’re still very young and tiny, definitely less than my own thumb size, I tried to take some photos of them since yesterday. First I took the “Pen” camera with the longest lens I have, the 40-150mm fully zoomed out (which is equivalent to a 300mm lens on 24x36mm film):

Young chili peppers

And today I tried again with my 50mm macro lens on the DSLR (like 100mm, but a lot closer than yesterday):

More young chili peppers 1/2

More young chili peppers 2/2

Young chili peppers, close-up

They’re moving a bit in the wind, so you really have to be patient and wait for the right moment if you don’t want to use a high ISO setting. Especially if you’re that close.

Thanks for viewing.

This morning they took down several trees around the houses where we live. Now the view is like this:

A missing tree. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Lumix 14mm/2.5 lens.

And it used to be like this:

An old friend. Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens.

It had to be. That tree was indeed old and bent over, and one of the next storms would probably have brought it down anyway. Plus – and that’s more important – it happened on demand of the fire fighters. That tree was blocking access to the house for their rescue ladder trucks, so it was a bit of a silly idea to plant a tree right there in the first place.

Still I miss it. The place and the sky simply look naked without it. It gave us a nice and cool shadow during the summers, and it was home and shelter for some doves’ nests as well.

Well – nothing is eternal, right? Still I feel a bit like Dogmatix (Idefix in German) whenever Obelix rips out one of those trees…

Thanks for reading.

We have thunderstorms since a few days, and rain. Which is good – the plants need it. Mitchie and Zuleikha went to the cinema, so what does a man do when left at home? Right. He starts dust-cleaning a bit 😉 😛 – and of course, playing around as well.

I mounted the Four Thirds Zuiko Digital 50mm macro lens onto my E-PL5 camera via an autofocus-capable adapter and first took a photo of a still uncleaned figure:

Dusty “nubi”

Then I took off the front panel of one of the speakers to take a photo of its tweeter:

Tweeter (of a Nubert model 381 loudspeaker)

And after cleaning that little guy a bit as well, I got real close. The closer you get, the more you have to stop down because your depth of field will become very thin. Thankfully, with a 50mm lens there’s still some room – but this is f/22:

“nubi”

It’s about as close as I could get with my 1:2 macro lens. If you want to get closer, try the 35mm 1:1 macro from the Four Thirds series, or an older manual Olympus OM or any other manufacturer’s macro. There’s a 90mm/2 macro from the OM series which is possibly the best you can get, but these are over 1k€/$ even used, and they’re a bit hard to find. The best value should be the 35mm, or any used and manual 50mm macro (ours was about 120€ or so, not even a third of my also used autofocus lens).

Update, about three hours later:

I took a photo of that small guy again, this time with Mitchie’s old and manual OM Zuiko 50mm/3.5 macro lens, at f/11 (instead of f/22 with my own). If anything, it’s even a bit sharper, which it should be because diffraction won’t be as bad at f/11. Colours and contrast are a bit different, but it’s also because of the time of day – 16:30 and 19:30 means different light of course. So here’s the photo from a 120€ lens:

“nubi” with a manual OM lens

At least as good as my ZD lens, which is great praise.

Thanks for reading.