Joep, thanks for your comments about my pictures. It was not my intent to take the same picture twice, although it was the same field. To be honest, I did not even think of doing a series of season changes. If I thought of that, I would have taken another picture with the same angle of view as in the picture with the clouds.
The lower picture lives because of the sky with the clouds. I like the structure of the clouds very much. They form two diagonals and the big cloud is located exactly above the bigger group of trees. By the way, I had shown a different version of this picture before:
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Olympus E-PL1, 18mm @ f/8.0, 1/350, ISO 100
It happens, that I am not sure about which version I should favor. I tend to prefer the black and white version, but all people I showed both versions in real life favor the colored version. What do you prefer?
However, there were no clouds in the sky when I took the upper picture one week after the lower one. I chose to place the horizon in a way, such that the structure of the cut field dominates the picture. There are long piles of straw and I wanted them to lead away from the viewer, which is the main reason that I took a different angle of view. I tried different balances, too, but I came to the conclusion that I like this composition best. On the other hand I cannot rule out the possibility, that an other photographer had chosen a completely different composition, which I might prefer to mine.
Are identical camera settings for both pictures an incident or on purpose?
This was an incident. I saw this when I wrote above post and I am still a little amazed by this coincidence, although both days were sunny and thus at least the same exposure value is not that big surprise.
Hi Christian, you moved from Nikon to mft Oly.
The Nikon has an OVF, the PEN hasn't an EVF aboard.
Was it hard for you to get used composing on the backscreen LCD?
I bought my pen I had photographed thousands of pictures with my Canon S90. So I was already used to composing with a screen and I have nearly never missed an OVF. This sounds quite surprising. There have been some situations when I didn't see anything on the screen of my Canon S90 because of the sun in my back and these situations were the only exceptions.
The screen of the pen has less resolution, which I considered as a disadvantage at first, but then I realized, that the screen of the pen is great even with the sun in my back after turning the brightness of the pen's display a little bit up (it is at about 3/4 of the scale).
As a matter of fact I like the screen better. With the screen it is possible or at least much easier to keep an eye on the surroundings. I can see things happening which I would miss, if I narrowed my field of view by using an OVF. I find it easier to compose with a screen than with an OVF and I can take angles of view which would be impossible with an OVF. Having an articulated screen would be even better.
Sometimes it is much easier to take photos with a screen because I feel to be much more unobtrusive. Let me demonstrate this by the following picture:
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Olympus E-PL1, 36mm @ f/5.6, 1/90, ISO 200
I saw these dummies and the cigarette automat and positioned myself to take a photograph of these dummies when a man went to the automat. Suddenly he turned around and looked at me holding my camera at waist level. I looked at him, too, and released the shutter quickly. The interaction between this man, the dummies and me would have been completely different with me holding a big DSLR in front of my face. At least I feel much more relaxed with a pen in such situations.
Which camera is user friendlier when it comes to menus etc?
I do not miss my Nikon, but I find it user friendlier having more direct possibilities to access settings like ISO and white balance instead of being forced to press many buttons. On the other hand the E-PL1 has some advantages over the Nikon D90, which I find much more essential than not having these additional buttons and wheels.
Although I don't have any problems with the pen's menues, my impression is, that the Nikon's menues are better tidied up. The advantage might be small, but I think it is the Nikon which has slightly better menues. On the other hand the E-PL1 has more possibilities to be configured to ones own needs, which results in a more complex menue system nearly necessarily.
The pen offers me to save two different configurations to which I can reset the camera. I missed this feature so much when I had the Nikon! It is possible to reset the Nikon, but there are always some settings which I had to change every time I reset the camera. This was rather annoying.
How you shoot with your PEN, what are your preferred settings?
The default setting is the professional mode P, auto ISO and auto white balance. I switch to whatever I need, but this is the most basic setting I start with. I always shoot in raw only. The red button is set to AE-Lock using spot metering. The function key is set to the switch between AF and MF. In MF the red button activates the AF and is exactly that, which is the AF-On button of Nikon's and Canon's professional cameras. The AF is set to S-AF with manual override. Please ask, if you are interested in further details or in why I use specific settings.
Thank you, the same to you!
Christian
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