Have you ever been skying at La Grave La Meije ? If not, U'd better try ;)
Samyang fish-eye, f/22.0, 20s, iso500
Olympus MZ 12-50, 15mm, f/11.0, 1/800, iso200
Samyang fish-eye, f/16.0, 1/1000, iso200
Olympus MZ 12-50, 12mm, f/10.0, 1/500, iso200
Olympus MZ 12-50, 12mm, f/11.0, 1/640, iso200
Olympus MZ 12-50, 26mm, f/11.0, 1/640, iso200
Shooting objects mooving fast with a telephoto lens is really not easy...A good compromise needs to be found between speed and aperture and, last but not least, you need to be able to focus properly!!
I had the opportunity to make a few tries with my Panasonic 100-300 during an airplane exhibition, and well, at full aperture, it was really not easy to shoot a sharp in-focus picture - unless you are somehow lucky... The most cumfortable compromise I found was to close a bit the aperture and shoot at f /16. But I'm sure I can do better... Practicing here is probably crucial^^
Pana Lumix 100-300, 252mm, f/16, 1/1250, iso500
162mm, f/5.6, 1/1000, iso200 100mm, f/5.6, 1/1250, iso200
300mm, f/16, 1/1250, iso1050 246mm, f/16, 1/1250, iso1250
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!
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
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 ;)
Manual lenses are very fun to use actually. The more I practice, the more I have fun using them :)
Here below are a few new pictures I like pretty much, 1 from my "home made" Fujian macro lens and 2 from the excellent Samyang fish-eye. Partly processed using Perfect Effects 4 freeware this time. Miam !
Sexy raspberry
Coquelicot
The girl, the player & Godfather
Here is the list of the current 20 best rated micro 4/3 lenses.
To do so, I've picked up and process the data from all the consumers' reviews (& associated yellow stars) I've been able to found on the Amazon websites worldwide, the most relevant ones being US, Germany, Japan, UK & France. This list is therefore made from a total number of 2767 reviewers' rates, that starts to be quite good statistics.
Globally, this ranking is pretty on-line with the known reputation of the different lenses, but you will nevertheless find a few surprises... In any case, and as expected, the winner is...
Lenses with a mark lower than 4.39 or gathering less than 1% of the total reviews (i.e. less than 28 reviews) are not quoted in the list.
Last thursday, my brother (ty Crikou !) brought me a very exciting present: 3 CCTV "toy" lenses (25mm f1.4, 35mm f1.7, 50mm f1.4), coming together with a m43 mount adapter and some macro rings.
As you probably know, such very cheap C-mount lenses are initially intended to be used as security cameras, and even if they are pretty fast, their optical qualities are obviously quite poor. They are nevertheless known as very fun to use, and after a few tests, I have to say that I completely agree with this statement !
I first tried to compare the 25mm lens with my Panasonic 25mm f1.4 lens to have an idea of how "bad" it was. As you can see here below, the CCTV lens has indeed very high optical defaults: the picture centre is quite sharp but as soon you go off centre, a lot of distortion appears, vignetting is very high, and - worse point probably - the picture becomes more and more soft if not totally blurred. Stopping down clearly improves the situation as far as softness is concerned, and a good compromise might be to shoot around f/4 to try to reach something that approaches standard-quality lenses.
Comparison at 25mm f1.4 (1/40, ISO200) using the Panasonic lens (left) & the CCTV one (right) & same OMD settings
But the point is probably exactely here: this lens can't clearly compete at all with standard high-quality lenses, but if you use its defaults in a creative way, it can doubtless give you a lot of fun while producing very characteristics & appealing pictures. Especially as the produced bokeh, distorted & blured, is quite unusual & therefore interesting from my point of view. I'm sure it can be very charming for portraits... if the face is centered ;)
Bokeh test in my home studio - Shot at 25mm f1.4 - Focus is made on the bass first fret
But where I became even more enthusiastic testing this 25mm CCTV lens was when I started to play with the macro rings to try to transform my camera into a kind of hand-made microscope ;)
My OMD-EM5 equipped with the CCTV 25mm lens (pictures from my phone):
normal mode (left) and "microscope" mode using 9 macro rings (right). Funny isn't it?^^
With this configuration, it have to confess that doing some macro shots was not very easy because the subject needs to be very close to the lens and that you need to step down near to the fully-closed diaphragm position to be able to recover a decent depth of field.
But with an adequate lighting, the results you can get are really amazing as you can see in the pictures below !! And the obtained true reproduction ratio exceeds 2:1 (i.e. a 35mm equivalent magnification factor of more than 4:1). For comparison, the macro capability of the Olympus 12-50mm kit zoom is 0.36:1 (0.72:1 equivalent 35mm). My home-made microscope is doing 5 times better !
I think I already love this toy lens \o/
Full-size (uncropped) shots of a 20€ bill (JPEG straight from the camera); the width of the real subject is 8mm, and the m4/3 sensor is 17.3mm long, leading to a more than 2:1 actual magnification factor (4:1 35mm equivalent)
Same bill shot with the 12-50mm Olympus lens in macro mode; the actual magnification factor is here "only" 0.36:1 (0.72:1 35mm equivalent)
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
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 :)
Is this...
Pana-Leica 25mm, f/1.4, 1/30, iso3200
... the end...
Olympus MZ 12-50, 36mm, f/11.0, 1/640, iso200
... of the world?
Olympus MZ 12-50, 12mm, f/9.0, 1/400, iso200
Hmmm... Don't think so :)
Pana-Leica 25mm, f/4.5, 1/15, iso3200
From our holiday time in Pinarello...
Paradisiac place, w/ beautiful lansdscapes, beautiful beaches, and my beautiful daughter :)
Samyang fish-eye, f/11, 1/2000, iso200
Samyang fish-eye, f/11, 1/4000, iso200
Samyang fish-eye, f/11, 1/500, iso200
Pana-Leica 25mm, f/1.4, 1/80, iso800
Olympus MZ 45mm, f/1.8, 1/100, iso400
Olympus MZ 45mm, f/1.8, 1/80, iso3200
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