I’m doing this because I’ve got all this camera gear lying around, yet I still find myself lusting after something newer and very expensive, like the Pen F, E-M1 Mk II, and the GH5. I’ve got digital camera equipment that goes back to 2009 and the Olympus 4:3rds system, and film equipment that goes back even further to the early 1980s. For this work I took a very “classic” 4:3rds system Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens and mounted it on an E-M10 Mark 1 via a Panasonic 4:3rds to µ4:3rds adapter (DMW-MA1), then went around trying to produce some “interesting” photos of the kittehs with the 30mm nearly wide open for that “pleasing bokeh” effect. That’s Ellipses at top followed by Luke the Gingersnap.

All focusing was manual because the 30mm Sigma lens, already glacially slow to begin with on 4:3rd systems, is a joke when it comes to auto focus on any of my µ4:3rds Olympus bodies, starting with my E-P2. I put the lens in manual focus mode and used the E-M10’s back screen to carefully focus. The camera was set to a custom color mode (Muted picture mode, contrast -1, sharpness 0, saturation -1, and high key) that provided a more pastel-like color palette and character than the heavily saturated overly sharp look I tend towards. I then set the lens to f/1.8 and went out stalking the cats. Well, more like following and cajoling. They, of course, cooperated only on their own terms…

Once something was duly captured, I used the Olympus OI.Share app to move the JPEGs over from the E-M10 to my iPhone. Just a little bit of trimming in Snapseed, then I opened a new post in the WordPress app and selected the three images to go into the post. Then I closed the post as a draft and re-opened it in my MBP using the web-based WordPress editor.

A bit complicated, especially that last part, but once you get into the flow it flows pretty quickly. It keeps my cellphone as my “creative center”. I’m thinking I’m going to give both Scrivener and Ulysses an opportunity Real Soon Now to write and post to my blog.

My complaints against the WordPress iOS app on the iPhone are growing. I’ve noticed that you can’t set the size or the location of the photo when you import the photo. When I check the photos using the web-based editor they’re full size and not centered at all. I have to do some cleanup to get the images how I want them on the page. This might work if all you do is write for, and read from, smartphones exclusively, but I also check to see how my blogging looks on tablets (iPads and Android) as well as regular PC browsers.

But hey, that’s why we’re doing this. It’s a “learning experience.”