Mu-43.com - Micro Four Thirds User Group
-
Laowa 7.5mm f/2 MFT 'Compact Dreamer' Lens Review
The Laowa 7.5mm f/2 MFT Lens is a new, fast, ultra-wide rectilinear prime lens for the Micro Four Thirds system. It is currently the fastest 7.5mm lens for our system.
25May 29, 2017 at 1:14 AM -
Hawk hunts for Lunch
I live on a small pond which gives me plenty of photo opportunities. One of those was a week ago. I had just finished lunch and was doing some yard cleaning when I spotted the hawk in an unusual spot for him. He is a red shouldered hawk and has been around the pond for years. He was on a fallen tree that stretches out into the pond. It’s been there for several years and other birds, and turtles, love it but I’ve never seen him on it. He usually likes to be up high in a tree. I ran to the house and grabbed my camera, Olympus EM10-II and I keep the Oly 75-300 mm lens on it.
I walk slowly back into the yard and leaned against a tree about 100 feet from the hawk. I knew he could view me just before I would get to the tree and kept my fingers crossed he wouldn’t fly away. Luckily he didn’t, he just stayed there and watched me for a minute, then went back to looking around for lunch. I zoomed out the lens and turned the auto-focus off (the auto focus seems to use some invisible light beam that really bothers birds and I can’t find any menu to turn it off). He looked back up and I snapped several photos from the location but I knew it was pushing the max distance for a great photo for this lens. I decided to get closer.7May 22, 2017 -
A weekend in Slovenia
Here's a tourist's documentation from a long weekend in Slovenia. The base was Ljubljana and from there rental car daytrips. Brought the E-M1 II plus Samyang 7.5 fisheye, Oly 12, 17, 25 and 45mm (need to get a PRO zoom for next time, my wife hates all the lens changes). Hesitated to bring the 17mm but it turned out I used that the most.
Slovenia was really photogenic (as I had hoped) and overall a lovely place, highly recommended! Ljubljana is one of the smallest capitals in Europe (~300'000 habitants) with lovely strolling paths, nice cafés and restaurants, Lake Bled has stunning views, the Postojna caves more than 20 km (15 miles) deep and the Mediterranean coast with small towns like Piran ensure a great vacation trip with some hot photo spots.
Some (too many..?) samples below. I noted the lens used for each image.
Lake Bled (Samyang 7.5mm Fisheye)13May 19, 2017 -
A Gentle Reminder
I got to my favorite gator park over an hour after sunrise on Saturday, kind of slept in by accident. As I am getting my stuff together I can hear them down in the swamps bellowing because it is the middle of mating season. Unfortunately by the time I get down near 40 Acre Lake they had slowed to only hearing one occasionally bellow. This time of year the park is full of Yellow-Crowned Night Herons hunting crayfish so I locate one and take a seat. The photograph above is a 180 degree panorama from my iPhone and past that tree on the left is where the story really starts. You can see the trail on the right and left sides of the photograph and the opposite side of the trail drops off into the swamp. To the right is towards the parking area and the to the left is what's called the causeway trail. The causeway trail is just that, a causeway that goes through the swamp and ends up at Elm Lake (which is where this story ends). The causeway trail is one of my favorite places in the swamp because it is really thick with lots of stuff to photograph and the overhanging trees filter the light fairly well during our harsh summers. Anyways……my heron flew down to the other side of that tree on the left and was close to another hunting heron, so I moved down there.
While sitting there watching the herons hunt is where my gentle reminder starts. Out of the corner of my eye I see this gator pictured below crawl out of the lake just on the other side of that tree to left (I was sitting closer to where you see the open water to the left). You would think that I would have seen him coming through all those weeds on the surface of the lake but I didn’t notice him until he started crawling up the bank. He was about 8 or 9 feet long and stopped to lay in the grass after getting partway up the...33May 21, 2017 -
Basic Jewellery Photography
Jewellery photography is a subject with it’s own challenges. Highly reflective surfaces and jewels that don’t always react to light as you might expect.
These images were for various clients, and mostly for their catalogues or brochures. That said, most clients tend to look for web images before moving onto a full catalogue inventory.
The image above was painstakingly crafted in the studio. Why "crafted"? Because it took several images, lighting each aspect of the watch individually, and then carefully compositing the final image. This is where most clients don’t see or understand the time and effort that goes towards the production of the final image.
Because the lighting heads were pretty close to the subject (all were within three feet), a 200Ws studio head had more power than was actually needed. The problem with using higher output heads, say 600Ws, you can run into issues when working very close to your subject. You can sometimes find you just can’t turn the heads down far enough.
A lot of the most basic, low powered studio heads are absolutely ideal for close up work, and not to mention quite cheap. Even with a gridded beauty dish fitted, I still only needed the output to be ¼. This was positioned frame left lower corner and low, so as to skim the bezel.
A second 200Ws head was firing through a 60×60 softbox, slightly higher and angled downward. This head was moved a number of times to provide more of the general lighting, which was then composited into the final shot. It can be seen as the general highlight along the top of the bezel between ten and twelve o’clock. Output was again at ¼, but the head was a little further away than the beauty dish. A silver 5-in-1 reflector was used to bounce light into the top right side of the frame.
The effect of the gridded beauty dish can be clearly seen across the surface of the slate.
1/125th sec ISO200 f16
Here, we used a Macro 60mm lens, and...12May 10, 2017 -
Birds, E-M1ii, 300mm f4 and some guidance from Tesni Ward
I went along earlier this week to Tesni Ward's "Coastal Birds" workshop in Yorkshire, UK. I thought some of you might be interested in my experiences and thoughts.
1) The workshop
Tesni charges £100 for the workshop and I thought it was good value for money since I got to spend a day with a professional wildlife photographer and shared the experience with only two other people. It's the first time I've been on a workshop and TBH I'm usually the over-confident type who tries first to do things without help! So why take a workshop this time?
Well, I've been a photographer on and off for over forty years but have never really tried wildlife photography in any serious way. Unlike the landscapes and travel stuff I usually do, wildlife is elusive, moves a lot, can be too far away, and above all, can be challenging to make images from that are original and inspiring. Mix in the need for excellent technique and the equipment to match and it's easy to understand why it's one of the most demanding of photographic genres. As such, I admired others' images but decided it wasn't for me.
At The Photography Show in March I listened to Tes's talk on the Olympus stand and I was impressed both with her images, which I think are full of character and emotion, and with her down-to-earth approach to her work. So, I decided to go on one of her workshops to see if I could emulate at least some of that magic. I came away with a dozen or so images that I'm very pleased with and gained enough basic knowledge to step out on my own to learn more if I decide to. Tes knows her wildlife, where to find it, and most of all how to use a camera to capture it.
Anyhow - here is a shot of the group, sans moi. There's an E-M1ii on the left and an XT-2 on the right (let's call them John and Gary!).14May 19, 2017
Page 1 of 12