This Old Blog

OM-D E-M5 showing weather seals on body, 12-50mm lens, grips, and flash. I have, since the release of the E-5, led something of a tortured existence with Olympus. I was not happy with Olympus' releases, and when Bill isn't happy, ain't nobody happy. I certainly expressed my unhappiness in various blog postings, and not just with the E-5 , but with the E-P3 as well . That unhappiness motivated me to try and find an alternative camera system with Canon, Leica (yes, Leica), Nikon, Pentax and Sony. It was good to go out and really compare and contrast, because I learned a lot. But at the end of the process I wasn't motivated strongly enough to make a switch away from Olympus. The biggest de-motivator was the price of all those camera systems . I've already spent a fair amount of money purchasing Olympus equipment as well as a fair amount of time learning how to use it. As good as all those brands were, there was nothing that leaped out and inspired me to want to t...

There's something sad and forlorn when you see the empty shell of a former payphone. Especially when it's right across the street from the University of Central Florida. Payphones are the victim of the pervasive spread of cellular phones throughout our society. So pervasive, that according to one story written last June the number of payphones has shrunk to just 500,000 in the entire US, down from some 2 million in 2000, and 2.6 million in 1998 . During the last 15 years payphones have retreated to transportation hubs such as airports and bus stations. The greatest victim of this shrinkage? The homeless and the poor. In spite of the low cost of phones and the pay-as-you-go plans for many of them, it's far still cheaper to drop quarters into payphones when you need to make a call, rather than buy a phone card for as little as $10. Sometimes you need to spend that $10 on something more important, like food. On the way to pick up lunch I came across an empty beer bot...

I know that there's a new version of Lightroom on the horizon, but I had it filed away as something to think about at some undefined point in the middle-to-distant future, and paid no more attention to it. Bill's recent experience with the LR4 public beta reminded me that it was something that I needed to pay more attention to. Seriously – first photo with LR4 beta. Canon S100. I use Adobe software as the core of my image editing routine. Lightroom handles 95% of it, while special tasks are farmed out to the now-ancient Photoshop CS3. The weekly-updated Vuescan drives the two scanners for the film that I use, and I'll occasionally use Photoacute for focus stacking and super-resolution processing with digital images. I've been using Lightroom since the third beta – the first feature-complete one – of the grand-daddy program. The beta for Lightroom Four looks great, but I've developed a few decent tricks in soon-to-be-old versons. My favourite was to work with...

In a word, Nikon . Nikon rumors have been thick for some time about the release of the follow-on to the D700, the D800. And it's supposed to be released Tuesday, 7 February. That's tomorrow. So it would have behooved someone in Olympus marketing to get ahead of the Nikon story before the Nikon story broke like a tsunami and washed all over anything that Olympus had to say. Especially if the Olympus announcement was the day after the big Nikon announcement. It looks like somebody in Olympus marketing might be picking up their game a bit. If this is truly the case, then this makes the second decent marketing effort by Olympus. The first decent marketing effort was the The Pen Ready marketing project and the slogan "Pack Small. Shoot Big." back in September 2011. The careful leaking release of information about the E-M5 has stoked considerable interest in the E-M5, at least within the Olympus faithful. Whether it will extend into the greater marketplace only ti...

Nothing out of the ordinary. After installing regular Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 I created a new VMware VM installation of Fedora 16, except this time I selected the KDE desktop environment. The version of KDE that ships with Fedora 16 is 4.7.4. The installation proceeded without any incidents, all the updates came down from the internets and installed just fine, including the latest Firefox release, version 10. What's interesting is how performant Firefox 10 is compared with older Firefox releases, especially when executing in a virtual machine. One key reason for installing Fedora 16 with KDE was to replace OpenSUSE 12. The lab is comfortable with Fedora (we are, after all, a RHEL site as well, paying for Redhat support). I was pleasantly surprised to see that Marble 1.2.2 ships with the KDE desktop. I searched for it via KDE's panel and found it after a few keystrokes. It looks and runs the same as the version that ships with OpenSUSE 12. I can now continue my KML experiment...

The dialog says it all. I downloaded Lightroom 4 Beta after receiving an announcement email from Adobe. I sat on it for a week before reading a tweet from Petapixel, who was in turn quoting Scott Kelby. Mr. Kelby thinks that Lightroom 4 Beta is the bee's knees . He raves about how my photos will look better processed in Lightroom 4. "Period." With that kind of ringing endorsement I installed the beta and fired it up, thinking of how much better my photos were going to be. Period. But then I was bluntly informed by Lightroom 4 Beta that my Lightroom 3 catalogs couldn't be opened by Lightroom 4 Beta. Period. So, unless I want to run with two versions in parallel, I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait and continue to turn out less than stellar photographs with Lightroom 3.6 until they release a version of Lightroom 4 that can read my old and busted LR 3 catalogs. Too bad. So sad.

Chasing the ball It's superbowl Sunday. I have no idea who's playing, no idea what time the game starts, so I won't tune in. I didn't go out and buy empty-high-calorie food and beer to consume like some Conehead. Instead my wife and I went out on a few errands just to get out and enjoy the wonderfully mild winter weather in Orlando. First stop was downtown at city hall. I intended to re-photograph the sculpture I'd written about in the post about depth of field and subject/scene separation . Matthew Robertson'd sent me an email asking an interesting question about one of my assertions in the post. I went back to city hall, cameras in tow, to prove which of us was correct. I used the E-P2 with the 20mm and the 45mm, and for good measure I took the E-1 with the Sigma 30mm along as well. After taking multiple photos with all three lenses and two bodies, and after looking at everything back home, I decided I didn't like anything I'd taken. Maybe it was...