Mu-43.com - Micro Four Thirds User Group
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Jamaica Carnival 2017
I've been preparing to cover the local Carnival for months. It's a fantastic oppurtunity to practice street shooting , with amazing colorful and eager subjects
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I met up with some other photographers at one of the designated start locations and we got ourselves primed:
I was very appreciative of my MFT kit when I saw what this guy was carrying. I walked with my Peak Design Everyday backpack and threaded the neck strap through the shoulder straps on the bag so that the bag took all the weight of the camera and the the waist strap took the weight off my shoulders. Heaven
Vuvuzella Vendor
Police escort for the Road march
Every year , this particular road march is headed by a local innercity youth drum troop.13May 26, 2017 -
Stepping up my Light Painting Game : Bridges, Abandoned Farms, and more
I've been really focusing on experimenting with light painting with color at night. I built a basic set of ROYGBV gels for my light painting panels, and have been trying all kinds of different applications. Here are some of the most recent results, all taken in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in NE Ohio.
This bridge crosses the Cuyahoga River, leading to the Towpath Trail, which runs the length of the park. During the day, this is a high traffic area, with hikers, joggers, bikers, boaters, fisherman, and more.18May 24, 2017 -
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.
179May 29, 2017 -
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.11May 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)15May 19, 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
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