Shooting with my hybrid cam

I think I now have a pretty fair lens collection to feed my OMD.

• The very good kit lens Olympus 12-50mm f 3.5-6.3 for landscapes & macros.
• The fabulous Panasonic Leica 25mm f 1.4 for... basically everything!
• The excellent Olympus 45mm f 1.8 for portraits.
• And now the surprisingly sharp (but heavy!) Panasonic 100-300mm f 4.0-5.6 for tele range.

And I'm sure I have to stop here for a while... In my case, having too much possibilities gives generally rise to some difficulties in enjoying the heart of the field and in finding new exciting ideas. I had some bad experience in the past on this point, especially with music, and I don't want to reproduce this.

"Be reasonable, guy, don't try to get the moon !" Oups... I did it !^^

Original JPEG at 300mm, f5.6, 1/250, Iso320, with additional digital zoom *2
(recompressed as usual by the crappy CanalBlog engine, sorry for this)

Coming back from Scotland, we spent some good time - as every summer - with family & friends in the South-West of France first and then in Brittany near Guérande and Loctudy.

This was a very lovely & refreshing time. Except the fact that we celebrated my (already 40th) birthday^^ But guess what ? I was offered a brand new lens,  the one I was dreaming of, the Oly 45mm f1.8 ! THANK YOU so much folks !!! 

SO ! I can now confirm that this one is really an amazing lens... It is extremely light and so small that you have the impression that your OMD has become a small compact camera. It focuses very fast (faster than the Pana 25mm to my point of view) and produces amazing sharp images with very nice bokeh. Just look here above at my very first shot using it ! 

I think this lens is presently becoming my favorite... And this was to be expected, given that I love so much this focal length ;)  

We spent one week in Scotland in July. We first stayed in Edinburgh and then went North through the Highlands. We spent some time in particular in the Inverness area (we haven't found Nessie unfortunately) and in the Isle of Skye near Portree, where you feel like you are at a the very end of the world... 

Scotland is definitively gray and green. And soooo rainy and windy ! This has been a really exciting experience, but really uncomfurtable as far as shooting was concerned, even with my weather sealed OMD. Here are anyway some shoots from this trip. A few portraits (I love shooting portraits^^) and many landscapes mainly - here I have still to practice, I know...!  

It has been raining all the week-end long, it has been cold, most of us are now in our fourties... And guess what ? This week-end was amazing :p

Some photos here, all using the "Pin hole" Olympus filter, that I really find attractive for portraits.

Only one picture has been shot using the "Dramatic tone" filter: will you find it ?^^

It would be so great to be able to have a human eye in front of your camera sometimes... Human eye is so fast to focus and powerful to adapt in total darkness that it wins hands down against any lens ! 

Nevertheless there are some situations where your camera can do better than your eye. The first one is obviously telephotos, that are able to sharply give rise to some distant details quite invisible with your eye. I'm personnally looking forward to trying one of these days a lens like the Olympus 75-300mm...

The second one is the macro situation, for which the human eye is totally inappropriate since it isn't able to focus to very short distances. In this respect, I have done some first tries with the OMD and its kit lens (12-50mm in "pseudo" macro mode), and I've been pretty much impressed by the results... You will find below the example of this beautiful pink flower, the details of which I really discovered looking at my camera screen ;p 

Shooting moving subjects in very low light conditions is obviously an extremely difficult task for a camera - and for the shooter.

As far as I am concerned, I never succeded with my old G3 in getting sharp and nice pictures in such conditions, except using very slow shutter speeds  to create intentional movement blur effects, which can give nice results but is very limitating... I was therefore quite curious to test the OMD on these aspects, attending to my daughter's year-end dance show.

Here are the shots. The scene was really really dark, with only red or blue soft lightings here and there. I therefore chose to use exclusively my high aperture PanaLeica 25mm (by the way, I should also have used the kit lens for comparison... too late !). Most of the pictures you can see are shot in Aperture priority at 1.6, with shutter speeds of 1/60 or 1/80. Note that the color temperature is most of the time retuned around 4000K.

So, what about my conclusions? Well, the result is miles ahead from what I've been used to, hopefully ! But I know I can do better out of the camera...

Especially, I have missed several times the exact focus I was trying to settle with the AF. Because of several reasons I guess: 1. the dancers where moving quite often and I was not reactive enough; 2. I sometimes recomposed the scene and I guess it was a bad idea with such a short depth of field at nearly full aperture; 3. also I desactivated the AF "beep" and infra-red light and I probably shot some totally out-of-focus photos without even noticing it. I guess I should have tried to work in manual focus mode maybe.

Another point is that I'm sure I did'nt choose the optimal aperture/speed/ISO operating point. Probably I should have bumped a bit the ISO (to systematically 3200 far example) to be able to increase the shutter speed a bit more and get sharper results. And try to shoot in Shutter priority mode also.

And finally, I have to say that I often found myseld quite uncumfurtable with the 25mm focal length. I guess I would have preferred something longer to be able to shoot sharper portraits of the dancers, typically like the Oly 45mm f1.8, that will very probably be my next investment :p   

With the Nokia Lumia 800, you can do it. This is very fast & easy, and the rendering is quite fair given that you are using a (smart) phone. But this is of course very poor compared to a real camera hopefully...!

Here are the examples I've been promising a few days ago. Just to show what can kind of pictures can be generated out of this Lumia.

I spent the last week-end in Millstatt, Austria, with 8 of my best old friends. This was a quite intense & amazing time - thank you guys ! 

It was also for me the opportunity to practice with my camera & its two lenses, feeling their bokehs and playing around with most of the parameters of the E-M5 body, including Olympus filters especially. And I have to say that I've been pretty much impressed by the capabilities of this camera.

Here are my 40 favorite pictures. Hope you will enjoy them, but please be aware that there is no real unity in the batch since I tried a lot of different settings ... Still learning !

You may need to know a couple of things about myself as an amateur photographer.

The first one is that I'm indeed a complete amateur, even a beginner you could say. My goal is to have fun, as simple as this !

The second thing is that my antediluvian Powershot G3 died for good six months ago, leaving me a bit distraught... It performed really quite well for such a old-generation expert compact camera. And allowed me to enjoy & produce several very nice shots during the last ten years. I'll try to share some of them in a future post. 

But this is the point. It finally failed. And since then, I was thus forced to use my brand new Nokia Lumia 800 phone as a back-up camera. By the way, I have to say that it performs not so bad in luminous circumstances and has quite fun applications (e.g. panorama, I'll also try to share some examples), but it becomes a real crap as soon as photons are missing...

So I had to do something. And what I did is very simple, even if my decision took a loooong time...

I bought the new Olympus micro 4/3ds, the OMD EM-5. Together with the Olympus lens kit (12-50mm f/3.5-6.3), plus the excellent Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4 lens. This happened in Paris two weeks ago, at Photo-Denfert, a very recommendable shop by the way.

But let's go to the main point. My very first shots with this amazing toy, performed inside at home. You will there discover a few pictures of my wife, daughter, son and cat ;)