This Old Blog

Taken the same time as "party of two", this photo of just Ruby shows why I prefer sepia over neutral black and white. There's just more life in the sepia output, and the dark areas are truly dark. Part of this is the composition, but part of it is the internal tinting that takes place. Both of these (rubester and party of two) were taken with the E-PL2 and Panasonic 14mm at f/2.8. Foreground/background separation is rather nice. Again none of this was retouched; SOOC. Love me, love my Labs.

max and ruby Can't get through a TV program without the Labs showing up. It's showering again this evening so everybody came in to be with me. I'm watching " Dinotasia ", narrated by Werner Herzog (who sounds an awful lot like Christopher Lambert ). The Labs keep looking at the TV whenever the dinosaurs roar, then turn around to look at me as if to ask "what was that?" I guess Labs don't like dinosaurs.

This is going to be a rather cruel post, so if you're of a sensitive nature I advise you to turn away now. OK? The internet photo forums are abuzz with discontinuance of the Hasselblad 503CW, the last of the V series. According to the official Hasselblad press release ; “Everything has its place in time. The veteran 503CW combined with an extensive V System range of interchangeable lenses and accessories, was for seventeen years, the camera of choice for discerning professionals and aspirational amateur photographers. But there has been a substantial decline in demand for this camera over the past five years or so and the time has now come for us to reluctantly consign the V System to history. In so doing we would like to thank all fans and customers for both their loyalty and their enthusiasm for our legacy Hasselblad V System.” The 503CW was and is a dinosaur, even during the fading heyday of film. I remember a close friend of mine who worked with me at Wallis Kamera ...

The Old Watch The Olympus E-PL2 was introduced in late 2010 as the follow-on camera to the E-PL1. It's the slightly down-market version of the E-P2, even though it was introduced about a year after the E-P2. It's smaller and chunkier than the E-P2 (and E-P3) and has a much more distinctive grip, which in spite of its smaller size compared to the E-P2 makes it the easier camera to grasp. With a pancake lens mounted on it (14mm, 15mm, 17mm, or 20mm) the total combination makes for a small nifty package that can challenge anything you care to throw at it, including the fixed prime compacts from Fuji and Ricoh. For my plebeian tastes the E-PL2 and Panasonic 14mm makes for a quite satisfying e28mm class camera. I've been back to tinkering with the internal settings of the camera. I've set the Custom tone (Menu - First Camera - Picture Mode - Custom) to Monochrome (Picture Mode), Contrast to +2, Sharpness to +1, B&W Filter to Green, Picture Tone to Sepia, and Gradat...

Near Kohls, Gainesville, Florida I drove to Gainesville Florida today to visit my oldest daughter and drop some items off for her. We stayed long enough in Gainesville to do a quick visit, a quick round of hugs, some very brief conversation, and return a pair of Crocs (shoes) at a local Kohls before heading back to Orlando. It's a two hour trip one way; we'd left the Labs back at the house (this, after their morning walk, feed and water, and a final trip out to the back yard). So we had to get back home at a reasonable time. While I was waiting for my wife to return the shoes I walked around the Kohls' parking lot grabbing some environmental/architectural photos of the store and its immediate environs. I was using the Olympus E-PL2, Panasonic 14mm, and the E-PL2's dramatic tone art filter. Today's lens setting was f/4, two stops down from the 15mm body cap lens. Looking in from the outside, Kohls, Gainesville, Florida Shadow play, Kohls, Gainesville, Fl...

"Classic style" Burger King, John Young Parkway I have been living in interesting times for the past few weeks. I'll get into more details in a later post, but suffice it to say I'm no longer in Kansas, at least career-wise. And so I've been working quietly but extensively in the background, coming up with a plan for what to do next with the rest of my life. Today I went out on a shutter therapy break, using an Olympus E-PL2 and the f/8 15mm body cap lens. I'm still enamored with the dramatic tone art filter, which is what I set the E-PL2 to use. I also turned off autofocus (it's certainly not needed) and turned off "autochimp mode" by turning REC VIEW off in the menu (Menu -> Wrench (or Spanner for you Brits) -> REC VIEW and then turn down the time to briefly display until it's zero). With all of that the E-PL2 executes as quickly as a film camera. It becomes a true point-and-shoot but with a nice big sensor. Most of the photos...

For whatever reason there's been a spate of articles published on the Internets about digital camera self portraits, or selfies, and What It All Means. There is in particular a recent essay published on Luminous Landscape (LuLa to those of us In The Know) titled " The Age of Narcissism – Digitized, Homogenized ." It's the kind of essay I might have been assigned in a freshman college English course. It's an earnest attempt to show how narcissistic we've become in this digital domain, aided and abetted by the twin devil spawn of Facebook and Instagram. So here's my nominal addition this culture's "narcissistic pandemic." If there's any saving grace to these photos, it's that they aren't on Facebook and they haven't been produced by Instagram. Technical Produced over the years with Olympus Pens. The top was produced with the Olympus E-PL2 and the Panasonic Leica 25mm, the middle with the Olympus E-P2 and the Panasoni...