Monday 31 July 2017

EVF on Olympus micro 4/3

No not IVF, EVF for electronic viewfinder. Years ago with my Olympus EP2 I was glad there was one on a camera I bought mainly for holidays. It meant I could use the camera the way I am used to when taking portraits. At the time it was not that clear, didn’t refresh quickly and blacked out between shots making moving objects a challenge. Move forward to 2017 and the EVF is nearly as clear as an optical viewfinder, can track action shots ( the OMD-M1mk2 can shoot up to 60 frames a second ) and has an imperceptible blackout. These used to be my second cameras but now my traditional DSLRs sit on the shelf more and more.

The main reason reasons are that the image quality is excellent and creates comparable images while having the advantage in ambient light that what you see in the viewfinder is the shot the way it will be captured. This is incredibly useful in situations where the light is rapidly changing. Once you try it it’s hard to go back.





Monday 17 July 2017

mental image


CC0 public domain pixabay



I have a retired neighbour who walks by the house walking his dog every day. He is a philosopher so needless to say we rarely talk about the weather. Yesterday was poetry and by extension songs.

He asked first if I liked poetry then why. I said recently I haven't read much poetry, (time and distractions) but do hear songs. 

The conversation on poetry, and by extension songs, took many turns. things like rhyme and rhythm helping us remember accurately or how some are encrypted and hard to figure out like a cryptic crossword. I'm not so into the tricky ones myself. What I said I like most is the way a writer can convey a sense of things that is both exact and inexact at the same time. A thought, a description or an emotion is painted in words that we see and feel in our own way. 

As a creative photographer also you start with a mental image and then try to make and images that convey the subtleties of your vision through signs, symbols and significations.

entering client's selections in Capture 1 (or LR)

This is a little technical tip I wanted to pass on since many others may have the issue of receiving a long list of client selections from a big shoot and you then need to manually scroll through your images to select and mark the selected ones. This is made even worse if your clients have written the numbers out of numerical order.

Once you have a list:

In C1  edit menu > Select by > File name list

Here you paste in your list and select whether the names are separated by spaces as in vertical list of numbers or by commas in a comma delimited list. Click ignore extension so that if your client has chosen from jpg and you want to find RAW it will find them. Once selected you can choose to either 'move to selects folder' or 'make new album from selection' to isolate them.

I have some clients like ad agencies who are very tech savvy and provide ordered lists but also some non tech savvy clients who if not given a better option will send you selected images back with filenames chanced to something like coverimage.jpg which makes searching impossible except visually by date and time.

For this I have started using shootproof.com which provides and easy interface for clients with no image software and provides me with a list of their selections I can paste into C1 and save hours of my life.