Shooting with my hybrid cam

Pana-Leica 25mm, f/1.8, 1/60, iso 2500

We recently spent a week in the Alpes, in Notre-Dame de Bellecombe, near Mont Blanc. This was a fantastic week: good weather, fresh snow and last but not least, not overcrowded AT ALL !!!

Here a are a few pictures... I love mountains :)

I've been a bit lazy these days about photography... Actually I have a good excuse, I've been working hard on my new music project, called ParSe project.

By the way, you can track down several pictures from this blog on the ParSe project brand new website... Including some art covers like this one here below. And for your information, it was simply made using the very good Inkscape freeeware, that is more than convenient when you don't have an Adobe Illustrator license.

Good to know, isn't it ? ;)

Pana-Leica 25mm, f/1.8, 1/60, iso 1250

I realize that thanks to the christmas eve, the new year's eve and all these end-of-the-year parties, we should all have opportunities to see and hear fireworks in the coming days. Luckily, i already heard two of them during the past days, i.e. before all these celebrations. Odd, isn't it... could this be a special sign from heaven or from some kind of gentle fairy...?^^

View the picture here below, shot during last summer, & please receive it as my personal E-greetings for YOU, dear reader ;)

7.5mm fish-eye, f/3.5, 22sec, iso200

I'm used to travel from time to time for business - my business being conferences, workshops, scientific meetings - and I recently realized that I almost never brought my camera during such trips... There are several reasons for that, the main ones being that I have usually no much time for tourism and that I prefer to travel as light as possible (i.e. without hold baggage). But I have to admit that these are quite bad reasons (especially owning a m43 camera !) and I therefore decided to bring my Olympus with a couple of lenses during my very last trip to... Capri :)

What you need to know about Capri is that this is one of the most beautiful places I know worldwide. Tiny island, paradisiac landscapes, fresh italian food, sweet mediterranean weather... All you need to care of is to be sure to avoid the summer season which is (from what I understood) far too much crowded.

So... Fed up with grey winter time ? Leave and spend some time in Capri, you will not regret it ;)

 
November time in Capri can be summarized by 3 words: sea, sun & sweetness...

...even if Mount Vesuvius might seem a bit threatening on the horizon^^

Tiny streets & stairs are everywhere...

 
...and oranges are in the trees... and in the shops

The island is extremely small - this is part of its charm...

...just as the cars ! Isn't this old red FIAT 500 pretty :)

Of course, jet-set oriented ads are everywhere...

... but they get along with authentic fishing boats (yes, this is a boat^^)

Don't get lost or you might fall...

...or spend the rest of your life in one of these charming hidden churches :)

Hopefully, light will save you at the top of the stairs...

...unlike you listen too long to the nearby mermaids.

But in any case, please be nice. The venerable stone pine tree is watching you !

I spent the last week at the really excellent SRF2013 conference, and as part of the usual social events, we were invited for a 1 hour "historical & poetical" river cruise of Paris. This was quite nice but as you can guess, the historical and poetical interest of such a tour was very limited^^

- "And now you can see here the "Tour Eiffel", 324 meters high, built in 1889 by... guess who... ? G. Eiffel !"

- "Et maintenant vous pouvez voir ici le "Tour Eiffel", 324 mètres de haut, construit en 1889 par ... devinez qui ... ? G. Eiffel !

- "Y ahora se puede ver aquí el "Tour Eiffel", 324 metros de altura, construida en 1889 por ... supongo que ... ? G. Eiffel !"

- "そして今ここで1889年に建てられた324メートルの高い"エッフェル塔"を、、...、見ることができます誰を推測...？ G.エッフェル！"

- "Und jetzt können Sie hier sehen Sie die "Tour Eiffel", 324 Meter hoch, gebaut im Jahre 1889 von ... erraten, wer ... ? G. Eiffel !"

- "现在，你可以在这里看到的“艾菲尔铁塔”，高324米，建于1889年...猜猜我是谁...... ？ G.艾菲尔！"

- "E ora si può vedere qui la "Tour Eiffel", alta 324 metri, costruita nel 1889 da ... indovinate chi ... ? G. Eiffel!"

Actually, more interestesting & exciting was to look at people inside the boat. I selected for you a few nice examples of all-around-the-world representatives...

First you can find the European style, introspective & tormented.

Then of course the American style, quite standard but full of joy & strength.

The African style was also present, ancient & mysteryous.

And finally the Asian style, quite weird but soooo cute & sexy :)

 And guess what...!? From my point of view, the winner is, surprisingly...

... the African style ! \o/

الحذر! أفريقيا يراقبك!

108 mm - 1/4000 s - f / 6.3 - ISO 200
(Olympus OM-D E-M5 w/ Panasomic Lumix G Vario 100-300/4.0-5.6)

During the past weeks, I spent some time to prepare a few pictures to participate to a small exhibition - my first one! - called "Dualities", that you can find here on Flickr. By the way, did you notice that Flickr now offers a new pretty interface and a 1 To (yes 1 To !!!) free storage offer... Amazing !

But back to the topic... Preparing this exhibition was a quite heavy but interesting process to go through. I first started to preselect a batch of about 75 pictures from my last year production. This was then extremely tricky to decrease this number to about 25, and I have been helped for this by a few close friends & relatives hopefully - thank you all !

The second phase was obviously to prepare the pictures for printing. Here I used my new workflow based on Lightroom, working in TIFF format in the largest  color space, i.e. ProPhoto RVB. I ended with a final soft-proofing step using the .icc profiles given by the printer. This is actually not the most exciting phase but a crucial one to reach a good quality print, and not so easy to perform correctly. Especially, the re-lightening of dark areas, which are naturally very luminous on a screen, needs to be done very accurately to ensure a good rendering on the print (and I failed to do it right on a couple of pictures actually...).  

The printer I selected is Impression Panoramique this time (they are cheaper than Darqroom for large size fine-art prints). And I should say that I've been extremely satisfied with both the kindness of the people and the quality of the prints, which is close to perfect compared to what I got on my screen during the soft proofing phase - except for a couple of cases where the prints were a bit too dark (but it's probably largely my fault). I also tried different papers, and I can really recommend the Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta that really impressed me. On the RC paper side, the Tecco PL285 Photo Luster is also a very good value for money.

Most of my prints are 40*30cm and a few one 60*40cm. I chose low quality frames in the surronding hardware stores but I ordered the mats (black or white depending on the pictures) to a specialized german workshop called Passepartout Versand. And here again, I highly recommend them: they are quite cheap compared to other offers, and the quality I got is excellent. My mats were even sent in a splendid wooden box :)

All in all, this was a lot of work and money spent, but the pleasure to see and feel your best pictures fine-art printed and framed really worth it ! This is not a so common pleasure nowadays in our more and more dematerialized world.

Lights Vs Night

As you might know, Olympus recently released its 3rd version of Olympus Viewer (3.0). I was quite excited to test this new version, expecting some major relevant improvements. And I have to say I 've been terribly disappointed: there is NO significant improvement at all to my point of view. All the main drawbacks of this (very nice by the way) RAW processing software are unfortunately still there: extreme slowness, poor noise processing engine, limited image processing capabilities in general. 

I therefore decided to definitively switch to a more complete tool for my picture processing work flow, the contenders here being: Dxo optics pro, Lightroom and Capture one pro. After extensive testing of each of them, it was quite hard to make a choice since these are 3 excellent pieces of softwares. I first tended to go to Dxo for several reasons: nice interface from my point of view, excellent sharpening & perspective correction tools, powerfull plug-ins (Dxo Filmpack) for post-processing, French company^^. But one of the big cons of Dxo I experienced has been the relative slowness of the software when you are working at 100% zoom for noise reduction of sharpening  adjustement. This is absolutely not the case when you use Lightroom, that I finally chose. The other additional Lightroom advantages that drove this choice were: great picture management capabilities, soft proofing possible (almost mandatory for good prints), and last but not least,compatibility with a very high number of plug-ins.

Presently, my work flow is therefore mainly based on Lightroom 5 + Perfect Effect photo Suite 7, the later being an absolutely magic tool that can works as a plug-in in Lightroom. The only case where I still use Olympus Viewer is when I want to keep the famous Olympus "Dramatic tone" effect, which is the only Olympus effect that is extremely time consuming & difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce: in this case I simply apply the filter & export to Lightroom in TIFF format for further processing, like for the picture below.

So what can I add ? Well, that I'm 100% happy with this new powerfull combination, that I highly recommend !

Smoking Hulot

At night, everything becomes quiet and silent, but also extremely fascinating. Especially because this is the only time where you can notice and enjoy all the slightest sounds and lights the world can provide.

The two pictures below try to illustrate this feeling, catching all these strange signals you can notice only at night. They were shot using the Samyang fish-eye with a quite long exposure time - about 2 minutes, long enough for the earth rotation to start to transform stars into white lines - and using the very convenient "Live/Bulb mode" of the Olympus OM-D.

In picture #1, the red and white light lines simply come from my (new hybrid!) car going back and forth. In picture #2, I tried to write "Hello" with my phone LED and by chance, I also captured the trajectory of an Unidentified Flying Object that illumated the clouds with its orange light during more than a minute... And by the way, I still don't understand what this thing could have been. Possibly an authentic strange signal ???^^    

Strange message #1 

Strange message #2

Our annual old friends meeting happened this year in Marseille. This was a perfect week-end, as expected, plenty of discussions, playing cards, restaurants - we went to Le petit Nice ! - and hiking through the wild creeks of Marseille.

And this was obviously the opportunity to shoot plenty of portraits with this fabulous Olympus 45mm f1.8, as u can see below. More pictures ? Look at here ;)