A Quick Look At The Olympus EP-1

 Photography  No Responses »
Jul 282009
 

There are many other places you can find technical information on the Olympus EP-1 – this is merely the first impressions from someone who has only just unboxed one, and taken it out for a quick spin.

It’s small. It is not a point and shoot, and so it is quite a bit bigger, but it sure beats my Canon 1DS for size, and even my Epson RD-1. Providing you are not wearing tight jeans, you can certainly slip it into a roomy pocket with the 17mm pancake lens. The 14-42mm zoom lens increases the size enough that you would need a jacket pocket to be comfortable.

The included camera strap is far too short. Admittedly I’m tall and I like my cameras to hang low, but this really is titchy. The camera itself feels good and solid – whilst it is no tank, it should survive a few knocks and bumps.

After charging the battery (why do the suppliers not charge these up themselves?), the first thing most of us will do is to dive into the menus to see what things can be fiddled with. Well the answer is a lot. In fact at first it is a little scary how many options there are to fiddle with even before you turn on the “customize” menu item. But after you get used to the idea that the menus are complex because there is a great deal to customise before you go out, then it becomes a little less scary. After all any camera that allows you to move the focus button from a half-press of the shutter (which I really hate) to an alternate is going to have lots of options. And I’ll put up with a lot of complexity if I am allowed to move the focus button!

54493

Out and about, the camera is reasonably comfortable in the hand. The lack of a “proper” viewfinder is a little distracting at first, but the key thing to remember is that this is a view camera which do not have small viewfinders. Sure holding the camera out to look at the LCD preview screen is somewhat problematic in terms of steadiness, but in practice it is perfectly possible to get used to it.

In fact I do happen to have the optical viewfinder for the EP-1 (for the 17mm pancake lens), but I have not used it in anger.

This is not a camera to replace a “proper” DSLR, but is a good choice for someone who finds the current crop of P&S cameras to be a little too small and limiting. I will probably find myself lugging a big DSLR just as much as I have done in the past, but I will also have a decent camera with me for those times when I would not normally carry a “proper” camera.

Digital Is Better Than Film??

 Photography  No Responses »
Jul 152009
 

Every so often I encounter a discussion on whether film is better than digital or digital is better than film, which usually degenerates into someone mentioning large format film and someone else mentioning the convenience of digital (or even the convenience of film). It’s all balderdash (and I wrote this post just to use that word … not!). More or less.

When making images (which is what photography is all about after all) it does not matter whether you use film or digital, because using either you can just occasionally produce jaw droppingly good images. Indeed for many such images, the quality of the source does not matter too much as you will be concentrating on the subject rather than the relatively minor “issues” with the image quality such as film grain, ISO noise, chromatic aberration, etc.

What does matter is using whatever makes you comfortable. I cannot shoot film because the thought of actually paying money per shot makes me freeze up. Exposure bracketing ? Forget it. Others cannot shoot digital because computers fill them with horror (and I can certainly understand that!!).

For me, digital is better. For those others film is better.

What counts is the final production – the image, and not the mechanics of how it came about.

Back To The Shutter

 Photography  No Responses »
Nov 112008
 

It has been a while since my urge to photograph random scenes, and the time available to do so actually met comfortably, but I managed a short session at the weekend wandering around Southsea. Nothing especially interesting – apart from anything else I’m obviously a bit rusty.

But to give this place something a little more interesting than just random noise :-

#0: Two-Wheeled Partyers

Two-Wheeled Partiers

It looks like they arrived a little late.

#1: Giving The Sky The Finger

Giving The Sky The Finger

Photography: B&W vs Colour

 Photography  No Responses »
Nov 182007
 

As someone who has a preference for making black and white images, but frequently gets asked ‘what does that look like in colour’, and likes colour images, I sometimes wonder about the differences between B&W and colour. In addition I also recently saw an episode of the BBC’s “Genius Of Photography” where it was commented that in the 1970s, colour photography was not taken seriously in the art photography world.

Personally I think it is up to the photographer to decide what kind of image to make … B&W or colour. It is their choice of how to make the image to draw attention to those aspects of the image the photographer wants to draw attention to.

B&W images are supposedly more artistic and colour images are supposedly more realistic. The first is ridiculous … does anyone criticise painters for their ‘unartistic’ use of colour ? And the second is almost as silly … sure the real world is in colour, but it is not frozen in time.

B&W images do tend to make it easier for me to see the geometry and patterns in an image, and give a different slant to the light in the image. But images in colour let you see the colour which is just as important; or more so in some images.

Both are equally valid.

 Newer Entries