Olympus OMD

Creative Renewal

One of the great things about taking the annual photo weekend trip to Colorado is not just spending time with good friends, but also having the opportunity to focus on being creative for me. On the drive out to Estes we stopped at Monument Rocks about 20 miles from Oakley Kansas to get some sunrise shots of the rock formations that grow out of the Kansas Prairie unlike anything else in the state. These were shot with the Olympus OMD EM-1 Taking full advantage of the world-class image stabilization built into the camera. Tonight some experiments with “Live Composite” mode for night time shooting… provided the clouds hold off and we can see the night sky.

The Coyotes Are Hunting

One of the things I love about staying at Tim’s place in Estes Park, Colorado is the abundance of wildlife so close to the property. The image below was taken just a half mile from his house, South of the Lumpy Ridge Trail Head. I was testing out the 150 to 300mm (300 to 600 on a full frame DSLR) with the OMD.

The camera did a solid job of stabilizing the shot, but I need practice with the lens though. Especially at maximum focal length. The shot below has the lens all the way out. The coyote is about 75 yards away.

What I noticed was all the grass seems sharp, as well as the coyotes face. The mid section of his body seems a bit soft though. I think I need to increase shutter speed and find the sweet spot on an f-stop that renders sharpness across the depth of the frame.

RMNP

I’m going on vacation for a few days starting tomorrow so my concentration is blown. For the next 6 days I’ll be hiking around in Rocky Mountain National Park taking photos and enjoying the emerging spring in Colorado. Last week PetaPixel posted a link to a Phelarn video on tips and tricks for improving landscape photographs. I’ve been using Photoshop since version 1. Since before Adobe even owned the software. The thing that is great about Photoshop and sites like Phlearn is, you can always learn something new, or remember a technique you might have forgotten along the way. The image below is something I shot last year, and used some of the Phlearn tricks from the video below it to enhance my image. RMNP is going to be fun. I’ll be posting images from the trip over the next few days. I hope I don’t bore everyone to death.

Old School meets New School. Vintage Lenses on the OMD.

A few weeks back I purchased a vintage Olympus OM 2N with 4 lenses on eBay. The purchase while sort of sentimental in nature, did have a couple of real world purposes. I wanted those vintage manual lenses to mount on my Olympus OMD EM-5. Using a Bower adapter, I did just that and the early results show promise. Taking some test shots with the 28mm f 3.5, the 50mm f 1.8, and the 35 to 70mm f 4.0 lenses over the last couple of days have turned out some OK results. Shooting in full manual mode all three lenses produced sharp, bright images with a creamy bokeh and when wide open a shallow depth of field that looks really nice. As I use these vintage lenses more, I’ll post more images and a more thorough review of the Bower adapter and any tips about shooting with these older lenses.