This Old Blog

Good shoes are more important than a good camera. It's better to have the same brand of camera as the people around you in your life than to have whatever is momentarily latest and greatest. "More Zoom" is never the correct answer to any question. If you're an aspiring Canon camera owner, it's important to know that "2.8L" is not a measure of volume. Spending money on new gear means getting less use from what you've already paid for. One lens will do most of the work. A second lens will do most of the rest. A third lens will do very little at all. Start simply and add complexity as necessary. Extra batteries and memory cards are cheap. Flip-out screens work. Ken Rockwell is a troll. Never associate with a photographer who doesn't realize this. Factor in the price of a small fast prime when budgeting for a superzoom lens. A 50mm prime is the original all-purpose lens. Leave the bandolier camera s...

Sunday 9 September Evening after Dinnir Saturday 8 September at Honest Ed's Yes, you're looking at your's truly in Toronto, taken by Matthew Robertson and posted on his Five Thousand Photos project here and here . The photo at the top shows me with my one week old beard and shooting with the E-PL2. The bottom shows my hands and my walking stick to help compensate for my gimpy left knee. In both instances I am holding my camera in what one Austin wag refers to as the "stinky diaper" method. I find the large LCD on the back something of a boon, especially with my aging and heavily corrected eyesight. So what Pulitzer quality photos did I take? Feast your eyes... Inside Honest Ed's , Olympus E-PL2 w/M.Zuiko 14-42mm II tiff vendor, Olympus E-PL2 w/Panasonic Lumix 20mm What's interesting (to me) is I was waiting for the Canon photographer to back up and take his photograph so I could photograph him photographing, much in the same way that M...

This time I linked to a photograph I fell in love with. I wonder if that means the MPAA funded jack-booted government goon squad will shut down my blog? Original origin:  http://5kphoto.blogspot.com/2012/04/31153117.html

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...

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...

Samsung NX11 with 18-55 standard zoom lens. Just a few days ago Bill wrote down his thoughts on the future of photography , and in one of those quirks of timing, we now know more about what the market will look like in a few years. What changed is the " Nikon 1 ". Nikon calls their new mirrorless camera system revolutionary, and while they may be right it's far too soon to believe them. Steve Jobs, who's certainly no dummy, called both the iPad and the Segway revolutionary, and he was only right about one of them. The biggest noise about the new Nikon format is the smaller sensor. I'm reserving judgement about what the image quality will be, because photosite size really isn't everything – the Olympus E-1 has bigger pixels than the Canon 5DmkII. While the magnification factor and deep depth of field of the 1.16 cm 2 sensor won't disappoint the hypothetical purchaser who's looking to upgrade from a compact camera, it's something that enth...

This is, so far, my most favorite bestest photograph of Matthew's that Matthew Robertson has created for his five thousand photos . If you sit back the proper distance from the photograph the art patron on the right becomes an almost abstract far eastern-style dry brush painting at the edge. Who said black and white is dead? Cool beans.

Cameras are curious things: they're simultaneously indispensable and secondary to photography. An unavoidable fact about cameras and lenses is that there's always something better out there. Some people take that as a challenge, and lust after gear that's sharper, faster, or bigger; I choose to see it as permission to use whatever I like without coveting my neighbour's glass. If it's not a question of having that unobtainable best camera, then it's a matter of choosing the right camera. Like a sculptor who can create art in a stack of rocks, not all photographers need elaborate equipment. But having the appropriate tools matters immensely – just try to find a woodcarver who exercises her craft using putty knives. The key is to not let the tools dominate the art, either in execution or in conversation. At its best, picking new camera equipment isn't something that someone else can do for you. While a technical review may show capabilities and anecdote...

Part one  of the "Buying Cameras" series was about narrowing down the choices when buying a first camera; for part two we're looking beyond that to some of the decisions that go into building a camera system. This is a slightly more involved process because more factors need to be considered, and there are even more possible options. Here are some suggestions to use as a guide when deciding what's important, and when to take the next steps. Start simply and add complexity later. It's always easier to learn the capabilities of your equipment with fewer options and variables to consider, and technique can make a bigger difference than gear. But sometimes it helps to start planning for the future early. If flexibility is important then nothing beats a camera that's designed for interchangeable lenses. Canon cameras are the best for this, followed closely by Nikon, whose entry-level cameras won't autofocus with some of their older lenses. (While new co...

Starting in photography has never been easier than it is now. There's a huge amount of great resources that are available for free, lots of books in any bookstore, and plenty of classes and clubs to join. Yet at the same time the recent surge of interest in photography means that it has never been more difficult to buy that first camera. There's simply too many models out there, and it's hard to sort out the differences between them and know what actually matters. With that in mind, here are some practical suggestions to guide your process. Buy the biggest camera that you'll actually use. Photography is a series of compromises, and larger cameras will typically have better controls, more features, and larger image sensors. So the bigger the camera, the better the results – but only if you have it with you. A monster SLR with exotic lenses is useless if it's sitting at home, while a mediocre cell phone camera might be worth a fortune if the right celebrity stum...

I would like to thank Bill for letting me be a guest writer on his excellent site. My name's Matthew, and I'm both a photographer and a camera enthusiast. I can normally be found idly writing reviews , but Bill has kindly offered me the opportunity to add my thoughts to his discussion of the future of the E-series cameras. While I'm certainly a friend of Olympus, using both an E-1 and E-3, my primary cameras are a D700 for 'serious' and a GH1 for 'fun' photography. Those two have shaped a lot of my thinking about what works and what's important, and what I want to see in the next top-level E-series SLR. Three Things: There's currently a division between those who insist on optical viewfinders and those who think that the migration to electronic finders is inevitable. Put another way, it's between those who haven't used the EVF on a G1, GH1, or E-P2, and those who have. Having an optical finder as good as the E-3's is hardly a tragedy, bu...