Morning at Hollybank Reserve

About 10 minutes out of Launceston is an old tennis racket factory, tree reserve, called Hollybank. The factory is long gone, but the regimented trees have been “parkified”, making it a beautiful and soothing place to be.

I have been going there for most of my life, sometimes regularly, such as over the last few years for photography, but always at least once a year or so for picnics etc.

Plenty of regular landscape compositions (if the light is kind). The lack of autumn colour surprised me, as Hollybank often goes off before town, being a little cooler, but not this year.

We chose it today as for our latest photo-group get together for landscape shooters, looking at tele lenses, wide lenses for low near-far techniques and for macro. It can be a tough place to get the perfect shot. The light can be harsh, fickle even, but with a little experimentation, there is lots of potential.

All images 12-100 pro and Pen F.

Haiku #67 Imperial Palace

The Things We Have In Common

Mis identified as a Western Australian tree image, this one was a detail shot from a temple in Japan.

EM5 25mm

More Semi Macro or "Drifting".

All of the above were taken in 5 minutes and within 3-4 feet of each other. The great thing about (semi) macro photography is how much there is easily at hand. Technique is easy. Set the camera to manual focus (usually the closest focussing distance), a wide aperture and “drift” in to focus, shooting as you find something with the right balance of sharpness and blur.

The camera was the Em1, with the 12-40 wide open. This lens has sweeter Bokeh than the 12-100, but is less powerful, giving me 1:3 at half the working distance. With this lens the Bokeh tends to become a part of the image rather than just lost detail.

All of the images are jpeg’s with minimal processing simply because the RAW files I took at the same time, did not offer me anything more than the jpegs except more processing needs. The depth of colour comes from under exposing most of the files by -1 to -1.5 stops, bringing out the rich colour in the highlights at the cost of the shadow areas (expanded dynamic range is often cited as the “cure” for this, but creatively, I like the negative space).

Grrrr. Apple's Sloppy Bokeh Ad

A little grumpy rant here.

If you are a multi billion dollar company, pushing a new (and exciting) bit of photo hardware, then I feel it is incumbent on you to get your basic, basic, basic facts straight.

“Bokeh” is pronounced “Bow” as in bone - “Keh” as in kettle, not “Bokker” as your current Iphone add implies and, while we are on it, it is a term used for the quality of all of the semi or fully out of focus areas of an image not as a term to describe the quantity of blur is applied.

Apparently the phone companies have more people in camera R & D than the camera companies, so you think that someone in this vast network could have taken a tiny peak at the origins of a word before accepting the common “slang” version of it. It is actually a quite recent Anglicising (An American translation to boot, like the ad) of a Japanese language term (Boke Aji), so double bad Apple for not finding either form.

I feel sorry for the women in the ad, they are just doing what they are told, but are now the faces of this stuff-up.

Oh and they use it like a verb also. Bad, bad, bad.

So Apple or Orange or who ever you are, how about you try a little harder.

P.S. I wonder if they stuffed up the Japanese ad?!

Japan Looming

Not long now.

The draw of Japan for my wife and I after so many trips, is the fine balance of excitement of exploring the exotic and a deep feeling of comfort. never somewhere we could tire of, or even feel we fully understand, Japan offers us a sense of familiarity mixed with habitual perfectionism, cleanliness, consideration and generosity.

A Deeper Beauty

I have never considered myself a macro photographer.

Having said that I have almost always owned a dedicated macro lens, whichever format or brand I have been using over the years. Without doubt, macro lenses are generally the best tool for true macro work and often double up a workable portrait lens, so finding justification to own one has never been too hard.

The reality is I am actually a “very non scientific, obsessed with abstraction, looking for something deeper and less literal” photographer. I don’t think they make a specific lens for that.

EM1 12-100

My current weapon(s) of choice are the 12-40 and 12-100 Olympus zooms. These give me 1:3 to life size which it turns out is enough. This once was loosely called “macro”, especially when printed on telephoto zoom lenses, but is really not true macro, not even close (true macro is where you are producing an image on your sensor or film that is true to life size to the subject, which is to say, if you placed your sensor quite literally on the subject they would be the same size).

The question I suppose is, “do you do scientific macro or just artistic macro?”.

EM1 12-100. The silence of the camera in electronic shutter mode adds to the gentle experience.

Scientific macro is tough and unforgiving. It requires often closer than life size magnification, perfect focus, often extended depth of field, which requires special techniques and balanced (read “boring”) light. Science is not interested in beauty unless it for measurement or understanding.

Artistic macro on the other hand is loose and fun. It is not looking to create a scientifically accurate image, nor even a fully identifiable subject, but something deeper. Magnification is anything strong enough to take you out of the world of the real and into a place filled with mystery and emotion. Too much attention to accuracy is the true enemy of this technique. Looseness of style is where the real gems hide.

EM1 12-100. It is hard to express how uninspiring the subject was (a grape vine in cold shaded light, dry, dusty and tired of summer). Getting in low and close, and shooting into the sunlit underside have revealed a gentle beauty. The lens was used wide open at f4, requiring attention to the very thin focus area, but even the mistakes can come to life.

I have vague memories of a childhood filled with a desire to explore these quiet, dark, hidden and often small places. My early, almost forgotten inspiration comes from films like “The Water Babies” or books like “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie” (very Australian), filled with miniaturised and often environmentally exotic protagonists. Modern takes on these themes have little effect, so it was obviously a first impression thing, although when watching films like “Avatar”, there is a longing that stirs in me for forgotten places and times.

How deep does this influence go? When I re-discover it, often triggered by happenstance, there is a feeling of coming home, so I guess pretty deep.

Hands

Handy.

Worship of the Aphid God

Strong light, alternate angles and the wonder of bugs on the roses.

I am getting the hang of the EM1.

The secret is a simple mix of strong processing preferences and a desire to get the best out of the image.

Haiku #63 Eyes

Push and Pull

Looking at drastic recovery from intentionally stuffed up SF jpeg files from the EM1.

The top row is recovered form +2.5 stops. The colour shift (CA from the 25mm?) is ugly in the original, but fixable and the file is clean.

The bottom row is interesting though. Nice recovery from -2.5 and very little noise (ISO 400 exposed at I guess about 1250)

Closer detail of the shadow recovered one. Again the sharpness is pleasantly natural, not over done.

At about 700x600 px or “not big enough to fill a post card” size. Impressive clarity, noise control and recovery. Sure it is a bit crunchy, but those are actual pixels you are looking at.

A Checklist for Sanity

Just going over the basic checklist of what matters in photography. The things that fight frustration and low productivity.

This is not the gear list, or even about work flow, but more about the things to keep in mind when hunting out images sitting on the couch talking yourself out of looking for them.

1) Light is everything. The quality, quantity, what you do with it, how you treat it and how you see it. Light is everything. Everything.

2) Doing is always better than not doing even when the stars are not aligned. You never know what will happen if you try, but guess what your success rate will be if you do not.

3) Take for you, not for what you think others will like or how they will judge you. If you are not true to yourself, then what are you doing it for?

4) Accept the bad days, learn from your mistakes, be patient, be persistent.

5) Learn to see your work how other see it (not the same as shooting for others, see point 3). As photographers we can all spend too much time thinking about our gear, technique and processes. This is necessary at a basic level, but remember, no one else cares about the effort you go to. The rest of the world just wants to see the end product and they don’t care how you got it. This is one of the advantages of printing, it gives you a more critical eye for your own work before and after.

The one “winner “ from of a frustrating morning in beautiful light and a lovely spot. Heavily cropped, sloppily taken (hand held with the 75-300 zoom maxed out), this image is the one and only that really spoke to me out of 180 odd, but that is a better success rate than some days.

Mono JPEG comparison

Mono conversions seem to much the same dynamic as the colour ones I previously posted about.

The 45mm lens used previously is a little stressed here with a high contrast subject, high magnification (1200 pixels square) and set wide open at f1.8.

I can pick the jpeg straight away (the left one) because of the well controlled hazing flare around the loose hair strand. The fine detail in the cushion is about the same and the grain is smoother. The jpeg noise reduction is set to low and without experimenting, it looks better than the NR sliders set on 33 mono/50 detail and 25 colour/50 detail in Lightroom.

There is very little sharpness added to the jpeg, but significant sharpness and clarity added to the RAW as well as a touch of de-hazing. The balance between smoothness, detail, flare/haze reduction and contrast is quite excellent from the jpeg and it is a hell of a lot quicker to work with. Ironically a good amount of processing is taking out the aggressive settings from my RAW pre-sets.

I suppose the real question is, does Adobe serve the EM1’s sensor well enough (it is a little less sharp on DP review’s image comparison tool compared to the GX9, G9 and Pen F). If not, then the jpegs are closer to the designers intent and hopefully another programme or improved Adobe settings will get more out of it.

If Adobe are on track, as has generally been the case in the past, then Olympus has created a sensor and processor combination that is very good at their desired intent (low noise with good sharpness), and they are still doing a better job than Adobe at extracting that quality.

The Power of (Some) JPEG's

The EM1 has come as a bit of a revelation for me.

Struggling as I ever do with a new camera/lens/printer, it has resisted more than usual, my attempts to get the best out of it, making me spend too much time looking at useless* and hair splitting comparison charts and mixed field results.

The thing that has jumped out from all of this though is the quality of the jpegs*. Time and time again, I see better results from camera processed files than my efforts with Lightroom.

At first, I put this down to poor Lightroom settings. The usual mix of an unfamiliar camera and incompatible recycling of previous techniques. On (very) close examination though, I am finding more and more to like.

The images above are the jpeg (left) and processed RAW. The camera’s jpeg settings are a little more aggressive than mine, but that is part of the point. The camera seems to be able to push harder than I can, holding delicate detail without the usual artefacts or falseness common with in camera processing. This maybe a short coming of Lightroom with this camera, but eve if not, the work required seems tedious when the jpeg is sitting there staring at me. Previously only Fuji had managed to deliver seemingly “flawless” jpegs, but that was sometimes at the cost of some colour naturalness and lost post processing flexibility.

The original for scale.

The EM1 super fine jpegs seem to have a semi RAW quality threshold, allowing reasonable recovery from rare errors and subtle, but powerful enough processing to give me full, but natural looking control. RAW files always have a gentler, more realistic look to them up close, but the SF jpegs from the Em1 can be eased off for much the same effect. More importantly, I feel they will print ideally, which is probably the intent of any of the engineers when creating jpegs.

It is getting to the stage where I feel really undecided when clearing out my duplicates as the jpegs are really all that is needed.

Top left jpeg at about 1300x900 pxl. Second to bottom row is at the same dimensions and the bottom row at 500x400 pxl? I will let you decide. If you cannot tell at this distance, then it does not matter!

Not a proper test of +2.5 stop shadow and -2.5 stop highlight recovery (Raw on the left), the jpegs are not as ‘twitchy” or loose as the RAW’s, and they seem to have enough room to fix most minor stuff-ups and show very nice noise control and detail retention. There is a slight colour shift to magenta in the top right jpeg, but this has since been fixed in camera.

Apparently the compression of super fine jpegs is 1:2.7 rather than 1:4 normally. This means they are still closer to regular jpegs than RAW files, but it looks to make all the difference.

it is a shame they do not offer a MSF setting (similar in thinking to Canons M and S Raw) as often lower res files are sharper and less noisy than full sized ones. This would give me a decent 8-9mp, low light sport setting.

Advantages as I see it are;

In camera corrections, that seem to fix most CA, “blooming” or haze softness wide open and most distortions as well as diffraction at small apertures.

In camera special effects such as high res at 50mp, HDR, stacking etc. without processing hassles.

Storage and processing reduction.

None of this is new, but it has really not been viable in the past. Fuji almost got me, but unsettled feelings of “plastic” images put me off, as well as the difficulty of applying a RAW safety net in Adobe. Previous Olympus cameras were close, especially the Pen F, but I was still not fully sold on switching.

With the EM1 it actually seems to be the logical approach. In the age of self driving cars, is it too much to expect a company with 100+ years in the business does not know how to set their cameras up for the best results? After all we are all just trying to make a good jpeg in the end, so what if the camera gets us closer to the ideal than before.

My thinking is to set the camera to my large super fine jpeg preferences (a little cooler and less magenta, low (but some) noise reduction, average sharpening and saturation, which is a little lower than default, but set the lower front panel button to RAW+jpeg for when I need the extreme recovery option or just feel safer.

The Pen F and older OMD’s are still RAW only machines, but their roles are different now also. The EM1 as the general purpose and travel camera, as well as the sports and events where file quantities can be extreme, is likely better suited to jpeg.

The only thing I am concerned about is mono conversions.

Sensor comparison test are flawed from the beginning as they are the equivalent to testing a car engine without any context to all other aspects of handling and drive experience. The Em1 mk2 for example does not match the newer G9 Panasonic superficially** in many criteria and even the Pen F in look, but it feels good in the hand, is a better match to my lenses and I have it, so end of story.

*This applies to the SFL jpegs not LF. The SFL are a little hard to find (as usual) in the menu, but are worth the look.

** The year or so it gives up to the G9 has slight indicators in quality and performance. DPreview shows mixed results on a hair splitting level for image quality (be sure to check the “print/comp” quality comparison options) and it has less sophisticated and I think less sure footed focussing, but it is so close it really does not matter as much as “knowing thy camera”.