Lancaster Bomber in Black And White

 

The museum is located about an hour south of Calgary in Nanton. The plane is painted black, and of course is old and has a lovely patina. I'm planning to revisit till I'm sure I've squeezed out all I can from this fascinating relic of WWII.

Bomber Museum Nanton

 

The EM1i was a delight to use in my first serious shoot with the camera. Almost all the images were made with the 40-150 and as expected, it reulted in a lot less lens swapping than I'm used to with either the Pentax 645z or the Fuji 50s. Resolution on the high res mode was great - though for convenience I opted for jpeg 50 MP. As I also opted for low ISO of 64, I'm thinking I might have short changed myself on highlight room.

I even did a 7 image focus blend (for later processing) that worked well. Switching from vertical to horizontal and back was of course painless because of the lens collar. I'd purchased the RRS L bracket but as they did warn, the L part of the bracket does interefere with full movement of the LCD screen so took it off for today. The bottom Arca bracket that contours the shape of the body of the em1ii was perfect for providing support for my little finger, right hand so I don't begrudge the extra height of the bracket and body combined.

 Is high res mode as good as the Fuji 50s? No way. Is it sufficient for the size of prints I'm making - for critical inspection - yes. I'd say that up to 20X24 prints will be fine, but not 30X40.

Is that a problem - well, I don't have a 30 inch printer (max. 17 wide is what I have). Is my wife about to let me hang a bunch of 30+ inch prints in the house - no.

So, given how much fun it is to use, how little hassle, and how it solves all of the issues I had with previous cameras, I'm so far more than prepared to accept this quality.

 

Weaselhead Bridge

Shot with the Rx10iii, minor cropping of skyline, darkened the green in the black and white conversion, used my browntoblack action to tone, then adjusted the sliders in blending so that the blacks were more neutral, the whites creamy but not sepia.

Begonia In Colour

Begonia

Shot with the Olympus 60 macro, from about 4 inches away, hand held, ISO 5000. I even added some additional blurring to the stamens which were already a bit blurred anyway. I remember Fred Picker saying - take things the way they want to go - instead of opening shadows, make them richer an deeper, make highlights glow off the paper. It can be hard not keep detail while driving towards the limits.

40-150 f2.8 and high res mode EM1ii

Wind picked up as storm was blowing in - so we see artifacts and blurring in the high res image that isn't there with a single exposure. Again, don't compare till you click to see them at full res.

Pay attention to the amount of detail in the roof shingles, in the plant below the window, and the detail in the blind, and lack of grain in the high res image.

Of course, I don't need to persuade you, only satisfy myself. It takes a few minutes to load the 80 MP raw file, sharpen it, reduce it to a more manageable size and save it. No one, even Olympus, is trying to tell you there is a full 80 megapixels of information in these files. - more like 40 mp.

We saw the same thing with images from Foveon cameras. They had full information at every pixel and initially tried to persuade us this was equivalent to a bayer pattern sensor of 3 times the size - it wasn't - but the images were unusually good for their native size - each pixel full colour, no bayer algorithm guessing at colours and detail.

You don't get the normal aliasing moire in patterned details, noise is significantly lower, resolution is more than half again better than standard shooting mode - not bad for a minor effort on our part - using a tripod - which I'd do anyway for my landscape and industrial work, and a little delay in processing the image.

I'll set up an action in Photoshop for any high res images I'm interested in working on.

High Res Mode Test - 8-18 mm. Panasonic

Be sure to click on the images to see them at original resolution so you can compare - in the blog as is they are sig. reduced in size and you won't see the difference.

Olympus em1ii

Can you believe it - I own a Fuji 50s and am about to replace it with the Olympus - huh?

Well, it's like this - I'd always liked the idea of the small camera and even had a Panasonic gh2 that I liked very much but felt image quality lacked.

Recently with using the rx10 I was amazed at the image quality with a very small sensor and had to wonder about modern 20 mp micro four thirds.

I read mixed reviews of the high res mode - only with primes, more often than not not offering anything more than native single shot quality.

I'll be offering evidence soon but can tell you that high res with the Panasonic 8-18 and with the Olympus 40-150 are fantastic and this is going to be great.

Is with this camera is simply amazing. In single focus I have made some great shots of the dog - even indoors - which previous cameras have frankly sucked at.

Today at the off leash park I struggled mostly because as son as I lay down to get a low angle Sophie would bolt towards me and be within five feet by the time I got camera and telephoto to my eye  - hardly the cameras fault but I did have some success as she ran towards me standing so there's hope.

You might ask why buy the 40-150 2.8 when it weighs exactly the same as my canon 70-200 f4.

Well, I was using my Pentax lenses with the Fuji and this 40-150 will cover my 120, 200, and 300 and even gets close to the 75 so that's one lens instead of four.

A lot is made of lens equivalence - double both focal length and f stop to get an idea of what the lens does in full frame terms.

But remember that exposure and matching shutter speed are based on the actual f stop, not some equivalent number so my 2.8 40-150 will need half the ISO compared to my canon lens.

Still, I'd be kidding myself if I thought that even with high res mode I'd be able to print as big.

Know what -my printer only does 17X22 and my garage stores half a dozen large canvas prints -too big to hang in the house. I even bought a pack of 8.5X11 paper so I can make hand holdable prints.

is it possible this micro four thirds will disappoint? Possibly, but it will be fine for now and I'm definitely having fun. Someone who does need 40X60 inch prints can buy my 50s and be happy with it.

Back with images to support this position in the next few days.

Tools

Shot this with the Velvet 56 - the idea being that with an f 1.6 macro lens with flare, one could concentrate on shape and tone almost entirely. Photographed on my north facing back deck so that the soft north light (I was in the shade) would come from behind the object.

Waterton Driftwood

Sometimes there's a large selection of driftwood on the eastern shore of Middle Waterton Lake but the pickings were slim this year. I did find this interesting bug eaten stump half buried and was able to rest it against some other logs. I shot two images, one wide open to blur the background, and a second stopped down for maximum depth of field in the main subject, then blended them together.

Camera was the Fuji GFX 50S with Pentax 120 macro lens via Fotodiox Adapter.

Near Full Moon

The fun of having a 600 mm. lens equiv. in a modestly sized and affordable package.  Even 600 mm. needs a crop to about one quarter size.

More From Writing On Stone

Writing On Stone 2017

Fuji GFX 50s, 35 mm. lens, f11, ISO 100

Sony RX10iii

 Early Spring - not a lot of green yet.  Shot at 60 mm. which with a 2.8X crop factor is equiv. to about 175 mm., ISO 250, 1/500 at f4. this will print very nicely to 13X19.  A fun camera to use, and with results I can be happy with. Yesterday I shot with the Fuji GFX, today with the Rx10iii - horses for courses. For best assessment of the crop, click on it to see at 100%

Jets

 

From the Military Museums, Calgary

 

 

 

Vancouver

I'm not a street photographer but then, this wasn't the street. Camera is Sony RX10iii, purchased as an all-in-one travel camera. ISO 4000. Haven't printed it yet though 'grain' pattern isn't objectionable and sharpness is excellent. Sure had fun. A heavy and fairly large camera, but nice to operate.

 OK, now I've had a chance to print the image and I'm most impressed. I reduced noise a little in Lightroom and it makes a very good 13X19.

More Experience with Fuji GFX

First, understand where I'm coming from - 99% of my work is on tripod, 99% of my subjects only move in the wind, not by themselves, and image quality is important to me and sometimes I'm required to make big prints. My standard for quality printing is 300 pixels per inch which even with 51.4 MP is only28 inches on the long side, not that huge a print. Of course larger prints get viewed from further away so really big prints look just fine thank you.

All cameras have flaws - that's what makes deciding on what to buy so difficult, and of course, if we wait long enough, something better will come along, often just after you purchase the camera of your dreams.

The Pentax 645 has been my working camera for the last three years and it has worked very well, mostly. Shutter shake limited the use of long lenses, sp. the 200 and 300.

Fuji electronic first curtain fixes this entirely.

I used it in live view almost all the time, and the lcd does tilt upwards, but not when the camera is vertical.

Between the rotating viewfinder (unique to the GFX, and the tilt and swinging LCD, the Fuji is fantastic.

IN using live view, I need to magnify - that's easy, but I also often need to do a focus blend, and that often involves the nearest part of the subject at one of the image edges. Getting the magnified spot to the corner is painfully slow, and once it gets moving, it likes to continue drifting past where you wanted to stop if it isn't exactly on the edge.

the Fuji GFX is much faster to move focus spot, uses either the joy stick (great) or double touch to magnify - awesome. This makes taking every photograph easier.

I can't comment on autofocus as I have no native lenses yet - not even sure I'll rush into getting any. The Pentax lenses are remarkably good, and even the 35 that I had some concerns about is better than most good zooms.

The Pentax sometimes lied about exposure, the histogram not reflecting reality - a but in the firmware I suspect, no such issue with the Fuji and swiping to bring up the histogram is so nice so my exposures are noticeably more accurate.

Of course, reviewing images on a camera with a good touch screen is great, and checking focus by quickly enlarging and moving round the image very helpful.

For the work I do, the camera is great, with no significant flaws. That might not be your mileage.

I wouldn't try to photograph the dog at the off-leash park with it - and for the amount I'd save on not buying a full set of Fuji lenses, I could easily afford almost any other sports oriented camera for those tasks.

Battery life is excellent. So far, I've never even got close to losing power though eventually I'll get a back up battery to be safe.

What are the problems with using the Pentax lenses - well, I don't miss auto focus - as I always used them in manual mode on the Pentax anyway. I do miss the camera not recording the focal length of the lens as I need that information when stitching. Fortunately I usually remember, and am looking at the voice recording facility of the camera to jog my memory.

People make a lot of the shallow depth of field of larger than full frame formats. That's true, but the difference in magnification between full frame 35 and the Fuji GFX isn't that much and so far hasn't been an issue - I focus blend where I did before.

More Ships Screw

 

I think I prefer the upper image in colour, the lower in black and white (the image from the last post)

Ships Screw - Military Museums Calgary

ZFuji GFX 50s, 200 mm. lens, two image stitch.

Bomber Museum Nanton