Category: Photography

home garden photography

whbeebe

I have been working more and more with my camera equipment lately, having purchased a few items that were heavily discounted during Christmas, as well as going back to some very old equipment I purchased eight or more years ago. One of those old purchases was my humble but vital tripod, a Benro A-269M8 with a B-1 head and Arca clamp. My Pen F has the Olympus grip ECG-4 with the Arca plate rails machined into the grip. With a Lumix G Macro 1:2.6/30mm macro lens, it makes for a very competent setup. A camera on a tripod allows you to slow down and literally focus on one precise spot in the viewfinder, and to make sure it’s in critical focus. And so I put my Pen F with the 30mm mounted on my tripod, with the Pen F in manual focus, to work earlier this evening during the golden hour. I was then able to photograph some of the flowers in my back yard garden in a satisfactory fashion I haven’t been able to in a very long time.

Everything was post processed using Olympus RAW in Lightroom 6. I resisted the urge to post process even further in some of my Lightroom plugins, such as the old Nik Collection’s Color Efex Pro 4. I’m trying for subtlety of tones and colors, not the “technicolor puke” also known as HDR. Believe it or not, that’s the way the bougainvillea in the first two photos actually looks.

I have a lot more flowers beginning to bloom, thanks to global warming. Today’s temperature was 81F, and it will be in the low eighties all next week. Not bad for January in central Florida.

mirrorless fool frame cameras

whbeebe


Today’s contemporary digital camera systems have reached such a high point of sufficiency and competency across every sensor size that the idea floated by the “fool frame” crowd about full frame (i.e. using digital sensors that are the same size as analog 35mm film frames) being the only true way to photograph digitally is laughable at best. I’m continually surprised and pleased at the technical quality produced by cameras with anything but fool frame. On the web in particular I can’t tell the difference. The only time I know what sensor size was used in the creation of an image is when it’s called it out. The distinguishing factor is the talent of the photographer behind the camera, not the gear they used.

I would be more impressed with Nikon’s and Canon’s latest if I thought they would lead to interesting new areas of creativity, but they won’t. They’ll wind up as points of trivial tribal arguments on various forums and websites (like ThePhoblographer). Nikon and Canon’s latest are a response by the two companies to halt the leakers from leaving their respective brands. But I don’t expect to see anything different visually.

The cost of the latest from Nikon and Canon, along with Sony’s fool frame cameras, are outrageous. They have become what Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer has labeled as a Veblen good (he did that with Leica, but it applies here equally). A Veblen good is when you telegraph how rich you are that you can participate in conspicuous consumption by purchasing such a good as a status symbol because of its expense. Unfortunately talent and financial ability to afford these cameras don’t go hand in hand (that’s why the phrase “starving artist” exists and has for centuries).

In any event, I won’t purchase anything from these two, any more than I won’t line up to buy from Sony. The price is too great for the functionality and true value provided.