Focus Peaking on Olympus Digital Cameras

On the search for a second body for my m4/3 system, I came along some hints on how to simulate focus peaking of Olympus cameras not being provided with said feature.

Research on the wides of the interwebs revealed that apparently a contract between Sony and Olympus prohibited the latter to include focus peaking on sensors made by the other party... remains to be confirmed actually.

However, there are clever people out there, which figured out ways of using "focus peaking" with Olympus' cameras. As a straight RAW-shooter, personally I would never been able to come across such a simple solution!

Olympus added some nifty "art modes" for JPEG images.
Here is a video making use of one of said filters for pseudo focus peaking: click! Amin explains how an OM-D can be set to perform this function. However, there is one thing I would like to point out, before you follow Amin's instructions, set the camera to MF (manual focus), otherwise, AF (auto focus) will be assigned to the function button.

When moving towards a slightly different camera, the PEN Mini2 (E-PM2), things change slightly.
Here is what I did, which should work on most Olympus cameras.

• put the camera into manual focus - not required when using legacy glass
• set the camera to record in RAW and low resolution JPEG
• engage the art mode 11 - "Key Line" (filter 2)

All you got to do is focus such that black lines will maximize at the intended focus area and snap a shot. Chimping your shot, you will see the artsy stuff only. Don't worry, on the memory card, there will be 2 files, one artsy fartsy JPEG image and a RAW file, the latter containing the image you wanted.

This is the very famous "filthy apple keyboard" image, used for similar purposes by so many others... Mine is taken with an Olympus PEN E-PM2 and a Cosina COSINON 55mm (@ f/1.4). Have a look:

Key Line art filter image saved as JPEG

Filthy Apple Keyboard image saved as RAW

The art filter enabled, the camera's live view, back screen of EVL, will show the art filter, thereby imitating focus peaking.
Concerning file sizes, the artsy auxiliary file is 292KB, while the RAW image file is 13.7MB.

There you have it, focus peaking with the E-PM2.

To Infinity and Beyond

Again in a adventure using really cheap lenses. This time I went CCTV-style, using very a very in-expensive C-mount Bokeh-monster.

Concerning the title, this lens, mounted on a m4/3-camera, using the appropriate adapter, will actually focus at infinity, and even beyond (which is of no use what so ever).

Setup
Have a look, here is my Olympus PEN E-PM2 with a 25mm f1.4 CCTV-lens

Olympus w/ VF2 and 25mm f1.4 CCTV lens

Yes, this does look ridiculous, I agree, however, the EV (electronic view-finder) make focusing so much easier... highly recommended! And yes, the lens look kinda out of proportions.

CCTV-lens on Olympus E-PM2

Some words about the 25mm lens. There are several models available for cheap from the Far East. When browsing evil-Bay, you want to make sure to get a good one, or let's say, the one you really want. On youtube "Blunty" reviewed a CCTV-lens with a rather poor iris, which went from odd to square when stopped down. It seems that this lens employs an iris having 6 blades.

Contrary to Bluty's lens, I ordered one, on Evil-Bay, which was mentioned to have an 12 blades iris. And guess what, the lens that was sent to me got 12 blades in the iris! So, if you are looking for consistent bokeh, pay attention to which lens to order...

Pics

Now, let's dive into some pictorial goodness...
Very much like the lensbaby stuff, the CCTV-lens has some sort of a sweet-spot, which can be controlled by the iris, hence the importance of having a homogeneous iris in the first place.

25mm @ f1.4

25mm @ f4.0

25mm - closed as much as possible

Right, technical stuff done, what about real files?
Don't know what drove me to take picture of moving subjects... the manual focusing with this lens is really sublime, i.e. very slow. Good for getting the focus on stationary subjects.
Although sheep are not belonging to the group of fastest creatures of the world, they gave me a hard time getting focus, lens wide open.

sheep running - f1.4

This little fellow was storming towards me from meters away... no chance getting a picture.
Then, close to the fence, he started to browse, however, he was moving is head sideways in a very fast pace, making it nearly impossible to get a good shot. Below, that's the best I could do... with a fully manual lens.

f1.4

Moving to more stationary subjects, what about some flowers?

Flowers @ f1.4

The shot above clearly shows the sweet spot effect of the CCTV lens. Still, this is just a regular shot.
In the next photo, I went a close as I possibly can, i.e. some sort of "closest up possible".

Minimum focus distance, f1.4

The following 2 images are HDR... for all you haters. For taking 3 shots, I had to stop the lens down, since it was impossible to get an underexposed frame with the lens wide open... and there is not ND-filter in the PEN-Mini2.
And yes, I used photomatix, for styling too. Argh! Should be a no-go, according to many photographers.
Anyway, here is what the results are:

Sundown HDR, stopped down CCTV lens

Sundown HDR, stopped down CCTV lens

Summary
CCTV-lenses are interesting, inexpensive alternatives to rather expensive micro-4/3 system lenses.

There are some down-points to such lenses:

• Those lenses look really quirky on an actual m4/3-camera.
• They create severe vignetting, when stopped down entirely the vignetting is beyond being acceptable. 
• Wide open the focus falls into a sweet spot rather than a decent focus plane.
• f8 seems to be the limit of stopping down the lens decently.

On the positive:

• Those lenses are really inexpensive.
• The Bokeh, using the right lens, is beyond any available pro-grade (D)SLR-lens.
• The low-light performance is exceptional.
• C-mount lenses are really small, not filling up the bag.
• Focus action is really slow, making it easy to focus w/ the aperture wide open, provided the subject is not moving too fast.

Summing up, C-mount lenses are worth the consideration. There are some legacy specialty lenses available for this format... certainly worth to have a look at.

Selective Focus Photography

The majority of my latest posts were quite techy. Now, to something completely different!
Let's get artsy!

You have seeing me experimenting with pinholes, creating not only creamy focus with infinite depth of field, but also weird colors.

Today, I would like to show the opposite, going selective with very shallow depth of field. The name of the game "selective focus", the mother of it all, the Lensbaby system (mama!).

Actually, when you open the box, the first you see is a manual leaflet with the friendly imprint "mama!" on it. Nearly as comforting as the words "don't panic" printed in friendly letters of a very important guide book.

Back to Lensbabies! The basic idea behind this system is to give artistic freedom to photographers beyond the commonly used better than the rest lenses everyone uses.
Usually, objective lenses aim for creating a perfectly flat focus plane. Not so the basic lenses of the lensbaby system, which create more like a focus-sphere, resulting in what lensbaby calls a "sweet-spot".
Let's stay at idea of the sweet-spot for the moment (other stuff to follow). Said sweet-spot can be moved across the image plane of your (d)SLR or mirror-less camera. Depending on what aperture is used, various depths of field can be selected... of course you want to go really shallow, right?!
Selecting the aperture is somewhat manual, at least in the system that I got. Changing aperture means literally changing disks with an aperture. The benefit of this is that at all stops have a perfectly round shape, for beautiful bokeh-balls!

Interesting about the system Lensbaby is the availability of different optical units to be placed in a lens body allowing for tilt in all directions. There are mechanical and manual options to perform such tilting action. Things of course come with 2 sides, as medals... Mechanical tilt operation, which is slow, allows for mechanical focusing, which is precise. Manual tilt operation, really fast and hence good for street photography, comes with manual focusing, i.e. using fingers of both hands to achieve focus at the desired tilt.

Presently I own 2 different lens-bodies, the "Spark" for my trusty Digital Rebel Xt and the "Composer with Tilt Transformer" for the micro-4/3 system (Olympus PEN E-PM2). The Spark is a pure manual system, while the Composer is a fully mechanical system.

The optics of lensbaby are said to have a focal distance of 50mm. On a full-frame (d)SLR, that would be a normal objective.
The 350D (Rebel Xt) carries an APSC sensor, resulting the lens to be 80mm equivalent, i.e. a short telephoto lens.
The micro-4/3 system has a crop-factor of 2, 50mm is therefore equivalent to a telephoto lens of 100mm.

Right... techy again... let's get artsy and look at some pictures!


Lensbaby Spark @ Canon EOS-350D

Hoofvijfer, Den Haag

Tuning violin player (Gevangenenpoort, Den Haag)

As said before, the Spark is a lens with is focused and pointed with the might of fingers. These are first experiments. It is clear that this type of photography requires a lot of practicing.
The fountain and island of the Hoofvijfer are pretty much in the sweet spot. Although I like the photo of the violinist, the sweet spot is behind him at the wall. As a lame excuse I claim that I was walking, trying to not bump into tourists, while trying to get the sweet-spot on the guy...


Lensbaby Composer w/ Tilt Transformer @ Olympus E-PM2

This combo, although being much more precise, is a lot slower. I missed (blew!) quite some shots due to the mechanics.
First of all, there are 2 very different activities going on. The lens body, which is held by a ball hinge, has to be tilt into the desired direction. Then, the focus ring of the body is used to bring the optics into the desired focus.
It seems the Composer is more for studio work... maybe architecture... something that does not move, or at least not too quickly.

Here's a lesson to learn have a look:

Composer w/ double glass @ f2.8

This guy, sitting about 1m apart from me on the same bench, was very very patient with me! I took 3 shots, this is the last of the series. Yep, the sweet-spot is on his claw, not on his eye... I tried to correct, which created some weird noise... and he was gone! Note: for close-up wildlife, better use manual action Lensbabies, such as the Spark or the Muse!
Don't know why the bokeh is so crappy....

One learns from mistakes. (Mind you, this was the very first day I was in possession of the composer.) Hence, I adopted my workflow to first determine where in the frame the sweet-spot is, contrary what lensbaby.com tells in their manual.

This is what I do:

• point the camera right to the ground, as parallel as possible
• find the focus of the sweet-spot
• now: slightly de-focus towards infinity, the creates a sharp ring around the sweet-spot (*)
• move the ring to circle around some feature in the live-view, e.g. a crossing of golden ratio lines
• lock the ball-joint
• move your "subject" (I hate that word) into the region of the sweet-spot
• focus
• shoot!

There are a lot of helper lines available in modern cameras, e.g. rule of thirds or golden ratio, which btw. are not the same!
Now that you now where the sweet-spot is located, it is surprisingly simple to focus, since the focus-action of the composer is super-smooth.
Have a look at result obtained by this technique

Family Supper - LB Composer @ Olympus E-PM2 (f2.8)

(*) The trick of finding the sweet-spot easily is by making use of the fact that focus is formed on a sphere, rather than a plane. Cut trough a sphere, and you will get a circle... In this case, a circle of focus around the center which will be the sweet-spot when focused upon.

Sheep are slow moving domestic animals. But what about wildlife, well, as wild as it gets in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, if not the World.

Speaking of wildlife, it seems that selective focus defies the lack of a long telephoto lens.

Takeoff! (f2.8)

Here is some Fulica atra, who had enough of being stalked by a bloody human with a camera... so, he took off. I had arranged the sweet-spot and focus was achieved easily.

Interestingly enough, in the photo of the sheep family and the taking off coot, the selective focus seems to be substituting a really long lens.

The selective focus seems to be pulling the viewer into the image, which seems to be more natural than pushing the subject into the viewer's face by a long lens!
Also, the selective focus automatically provides context to the image.
The last example shows that even a center placed subject can look somewhat interesting, provided blur gives sufficient guidance to the eye.
The last example also shows how the focus-sphere works. The branch in the upper left golden ratio is similarly in focus like the waves in the center, although there are several meters between the two items. You will feel, that, now that I said it, the branch will actually disturb you... Yep, that's how difficult is it to get a decent shot with selective focus. Nevertheless fun, I promise!

Haul the World Through a Pin ...

... aaah, guess I got that all wrong.

Well, it is all about pinhole photography, seeing the word through a hole, a very very very tiny hole, aka a pinhole.

You have seen me experimenting with this before. Yet, I am still on the lower end of the learning curve.
BTW, picture shown here are taken with an Olympus PEN mini2 (E-PM2) using a Pinwide.

More of less the original shot (I increased the exposure digitally in UFRaw)

Yes, a pinhole is very very dark. Not only is it very dark, it challenges the photographer in 2 more ways:

1. Due to the heavy vignetting of the pinhole, the framing has to be spot on. Any attempt to crop will be clearly visible, in particular when using color.
2. There is a no Bokeh whatsoever, isolating the subject has to be done by framing.

Here, the highlights a dropped, the shadows brought up, whites a bit up and blacks a tad down

After bringing up the shadows, everything changes. Of course, we want to maintain contrast, hence, the blacks went down, etc. etc. ... you know all about this.
Now it is clear what kind of color vignetting we are dealing with. Some may like this effect, I am personally not so sure about it!
+

Strong color adjustments

What is really disturbing is the overruling purple fringing. In the image above, I desaturated purple entirely. To bring up the colors inside the flowers, I had to increase orange and yellow. I also lowered magenta a bit.

Well, I am still not convinced!
Therefore, it all had to go into black and white.

Converted the above to B&W

Although the last color image was sort of OK, I like the B&W much more.

And now to the strength on the pinhole. The general softness of such an objective set aside, everything in this photo is in focus. Even the branches of the trees in the far background are clearly visible, just like the details in the foreground.

There is a lot potential for artistic photography in pinholes. To get it out is just another story and hard work in post-processing.

The Perfect Portrait Lens for MFT?

About this lens, you have seen me writing previously, the Cosina COSINON f=55 F=1.4 M42 screw-mount lens. These lenses are presently on Ebay for really really cheap. I wonder if people actually know what they are selling. Actually I bought 2, just because... well, not really, one for photography, one for astro-photography (check out my bellow-cam, somewhere in this blog).

So, this is how the lens looks like:

Cosina COSINON 55/1.4

You're probably not so much interested in how the lens look , but rather what the importance of such a lens is in the digital motorized auto-focus zoom era.
Well, with some cameras, manual focus can actually be quicker than auto-focus. As to zoom, walking back and forth, given the environment allows for this, is of course slower. Additionally, to compress the background, a lens change has to happen.

On the positive, this lens set me back about €30,- only. For an f/1.4, that is nothing! Right, to make it work, e.g. on the Olympus E-PM2, I had to invest some more dough to get myself an adapter. However, those adapters can be found on Ebay too, where they are shipped from the Far East for free (provided one is patient enough).
The adapter M42-MFT (micro four-thirds) came by mail today. Hence, the possibility to mount the COSINON lens on the Olympus PEN mini2 for the first time.

Due to the lack of a model, I took a portrait of a brick in a wall of my house.

 

scaled brick portrait @ f/1.4

Nothing done to the image other than converting from RAW to PNG and scaling it down.
Have a look at the nice bokeh in both, the foreground and the background... and this very shallow island of sharpness cutting through the frame.

Speaking of, this is a crop of the center line, in original resolution.

center of the image, original resolution

Yes, there is some color fringing going on. As I said, there is no "correction" applied whatsoever.


Now to some technical details, some of my readers are potentially interested in.

The focal length of about 55mm would be referred to as a "normal" when used on a full frame camera (36mm x 24mm), since this is essentially how we see.
The MFT's (micro 4/3) sensor size has a crop factor of about 2. Meaning the field of view on such a sensor would be equivalent to a field of view of a 110mm lens on a full frame sensor.
110mm equivalent falls spot on the realm of portrait lenses, because such a focal length gives enough background compression and still allows to be relatively close to the "subject".

In terms of brightness, we loose two stops! Meaning, mounted in front of an MFT sensor, the lens is now acting as a 110/2.8, relative to full frame gear.

However, there still is a difference between a 110/2.8 used on full frame and a 55/1.4 used on MFT, and an important difference that is! The depth of field!
The depth of field is only dependent on the distance between the lens and the sensor, i.e. the focus distance. Although less of the light that went into the lens from the object side is actually falling onto the sensor (essentially a fourth only), the focal condition did not change at all! The ratio of the distances between the object and the sensor are identical, disrespectfully of how much light falls onto the sensor integrally.

It seems there is a disadvantage of loosing two stops of light.
I don't think so! In portrait photography, we have control over all our light(s). In a studio, we will just have our (three) speedlites at full power rather than quarter power. OK, some recycle time is lost here...
In bright sunlight, there is even an advantage. How often did you experience that you had to use a 3 stop neutral density filter to be able to shoot wide open (depth of field)?! You might have even missed the shot, due to a lack of a neutral density filter, when metering resulted in s/2000 @ f/11 when using ISO 50. There goes your Bokeh! OK, in this example, loosing 2 stops will get us to f/5.6 only, still a little on the deep side, in terms of depth of field. However, adding a 3 stops ND-filter here, will enable us to open to f/2.

Yep, that was a little technical... I admit!

Confused?!

Maybe mathematics will help. Photography has a lot to do with mathematics! I will backup the following statements by suggestions to experiment you can perform with your very own DSRL.

When the focal length of the objective is doubled, the subject's image will be twice as tall/wide on the sensing surface.
Experiment: Set the zoom of your camera to 25mm and place yourself such than an object fills the viewfinder left to right. Now change your zoom to 50mm. You will see that one half of the object now fills the viewfinder left to right. => a factor of 2 in zoom leads to a factor 1/2 in one dimension of the field of view.
That means that the same amount of light is now spread on twice the width.
That also means that the same amount of light is spread on twice the height!
Therefore, a single pixel of a sensor will only receive 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4 the amount of light, i.e. 2 stops of light.

What the depth of field is concerned, this is a 1-demensional entity, since this is only determined by the ratios of lengths along the optical axis. This dimension, however, is perpendicular to the dimensions (width and height) of the sensor. Thereby, not being influenced by the crop size whatsoever.
You may want to perform a boring experiment with focal distances, object distances and f-numbers... I would not recommend this. It's linear, hence, the changes are less visible and the entire exercise seems a bit boring to be honest.


There you have it. A very cheap legacy lens, bough from the interwebs, can be very convenient when used with modern digital cameras.

In a Dilemma

Street photography is a genre I am really intrigued by, but still new with. It creates a very strange tension between doing something illegal and/or intruding into a persons privacy. Both is untrue. It's the street, whatever is in public space belongs to the public. Still, the feeling remains.
It happened often that I wanted to take a shot of a scene, covertly, which I was hindered from doing, for one or the other reason. The reservations of going back and take the shot, up to now, were stronger than the wish to get the picture.

So far so good, I am a failure in the genre street, it seems, due to a lack of courage.

However, I found a way around this problem. If someone addresses you, this person took the initiative to make contact. Although such a person might not feel to happy about you taking a photo, adverse feelings can't be shown either (motto: I got you!). Yep, that would be mean... and therefore, I do not suggest this technique.
However, once someone addressed you, you have a chance to react! Crack a joke or at least, say something weird or funny. This will create a contact between you and your "subject". Such a contact will directly lead to eye contact. Keep this eye contact, twinkle if necessary and take a hop shot with you camera. A person laughing out loud (hence the joke), will not able to hear the sound created by your camera's shutter.

As long as you keep eye-contact, in order to distract from the camera, keep making noise as to disguise the shutter's noise.

Here is an example (mind you,  I am new to this and a such cannot point my camera well; neither of the photos is cropped).

This lady addressed me about something, I had time to estimate the frame (hip shot)

I said something which made her laugh... and messed up the framing...

In both photos, I had the lady looking into my eyes, the camera low down at waist level, the shutter was actually triggered by my thumb.
Right... that sort of worked... some cropping and post-pro and I will actually be able to deliver something.

Earlier that day, I tried a very similar thing, and really spoiled. Yep, this went totally wrong! It went so wrong, that I even cannot be bothered to process those files. I messed up! I messed up in my acting and in my photo-skillz... framing sucks too!
Lets have a look at a failure!

I was addressed by a young lady... although I understand Dutch pretty well, I could not follow her immediately. (Oh, that's a chance!) ... Wadd 'dya say? Ey doun understain'!
 

"I am a tourist, I am here to take photos, see.... click!" Well, it's a photo!

And of course, I had my lens set to the wrong focal distance and also I moved too much... The resulting image is of course good for the bin only.

Yeah right!

Realizing my mistake, I came up with some more acting to adjust my focus, which worked for her, but made the surrounding spectators quite suspicious. And, in the flow of acting, I got my framing totally wrong!

Look at the ladies in the reflection of the window...

As I said, that did not work out at all.

What did I learn today? Keep eye contact, don't fiddle with the camera... if the settings are not right, just forgot about the shot.
I also learned that people like to have a laugh, say something nice and light... you may not got a photo, but you potentially will be remembered as a short anonymous amusement.

A New Arrival - Going Old Skool - Hol(e)y Goodness

Don't be fooled by the title, being single, I still have no kids, ladies, anyone?!
Yeah, right... that's the platform for this...

Back to business, i.e. photography.
After a relatively short, wait, which felt like an eternity of course, the Pinwide by wanderlustcameras.com fell through my "brievenbus" (in Holland that is a slot in your front-door, not a box outside the house, very convenient in bad weather!).
Right, back to the Pinwide. Some would call it a "lens", but it is not. Some would call it a "photographic objective", which it eventually is. The Pinwide just does not use any optical lenses, i.e. bubbles of glass where light is pushed through.
As the name suggests, the Pinwide is just a pinhole, a very very very small hole. That's it!

To be honest, I though the price on "glass" without glass was pretty stiff in the first place. But going old skool should be priceless anyway. Hence, the $US40 for the camera objective plus $US10 shipping just had to be spent. Speaking money, you may ask if it is worth spending this amount for a very small amount of round nothing? Hell yes it is!

Mail came late today, hence, I made my first shots with the Pinwide during dusk.
Never the less, I took a tripod, the Olympus E-PM2 and the Pinwide... and got out! Of course, people came along asking stupid questions... arghhhh, haven't you seen a guy with a camera on a tripod before?!!!!

There are essentially two options to use the pin-hole: 1) on a tripod or 2) with very high ISO.

Here are test with both. Let's start with the second option, high ISO, actually ISO 25600, the highest the E-PM2 can go.

s/15 @ ISO 25600 scaled to 640x480

s/15 @ ISO 25600, original resolution, cropped

That look old skool, doesn't it?!
As said before, this is dusk, at s/15 this shot could have been done handheld, hands down, so to speak.

Now, lets look at the other end of the scale, the first option. My Olympus E-PM2 goes down to ISO 200 only. Mind you, the Panasonic LX's lowest ISO is 80!
OK, here it comes, sorry, I changed my position due to people coming up again, nagging about, socializing they call this...

15s @ ISO 200 scaled to 640x480

15s @ ISO 200, original resolution, cropped

Alright, this is old skool. At the days of pinhole cameras, i.e. camera obscura, color film did not exist. Ups, mistake on my side, to the time of "camera obscura" film did not exist, neither color, nor black&white. We are hence talking about pinhole cameras. A certain David Brewster took the first photograph ever with such a camera. Yep, old skool! This will be subject to an experiment in the future, stay tuned (in my very own youth, I experimented with making paper light-sensitive by soaking in a saline solution).

Back to modern days possibilities. The images shown above did not receive any treatment. Other than converted from RAW into 100% quality JPG and either scaled or cropped.
Lets look at one that actually was treated, not much though.

converted to B&W, scaled, brightness and contrast adjusted

The 15s @ ISO 200 image was converted into black&white using GIMP by means of desaturation based on luminosity.


Physics live! The side effect of the Pinwide... very cool!

As you can see in the color images, diffraction kicks in, so small is the pinhole. You get actually color-vignetting.
In the center of the images, all wavelengths are essentially following the laws of geometric optics.
At the very edges, diffraction kicks in, meaning that light depending on the wavelength gets more around the corners at sharper or shallower angles. From the color distribution of the images one could actually determine the diameter of the pinhole.
For full benefit of a pinhole camera objective, i.e. a very very very deep field of focus w/o any adverse effects, I am looking for a "Pinlong" to be made. Actually, I will contact the guy at wanderlustcameras about that. Such an objective will stay in the region of geometric optics, thereby not introducing all that diffractive delusion.
In that context, a Pinportrait would be quite nice to have too ;-)


Ophthalmology live!

Probably not even the makers of the Pinwide have thought about this. If you hold the Pinwide to either one of your eyes, no camera attached of course, and pointing it towards a homogenous source of illumination, preferably placing the object side of the Pinwide towards your eye(s), you will actually see shadows of the interior parts, such as veins, of your very own eye(s)! How cool is that?!
Why does this happen? Because the light entering your eye is extremely hard, in photography terms.

Again the question, was the Pinwide worth the money? Ohhh yesss! Every single penny!

Possibilities of HDR

Ah, here he goes again... high dynamic range... hated by so many. And yes, I agree, HDR images can look really horrible!
Besides creating the final image, HDR techniques can be interesting tools to get to an image one was aiming for when shooting.

Let's start with a normal single frame photo of the scene. This is the middle frame, i.e. the normal exposure image, of my HDR shot:

Single shot @ -2/3 Ev

Just in case, here is a link to the photo.
It was a nice sunny day, contrasts running up pretty good! In such a situation, there is just so much one can do in post processing... saturation in both, the whites and the blacks. A picture essentially unusable. This shot is already 2/3 of a stop under-exposed, but still, the whites blow out. Of course, all the detail inside the depot is lost.

When using HDR as an intermediate tool, you will try to only compress the dynamic range and leave the rest essentially alone. The result will be a very very bad looking picture, but this is a good thing!
Have a look at the result of a 3 frames HDR (not cropped, just scaled down):

3 frames HDR

Of course, blogger will "improve" this image, so please have a click on the link below.
LINK!

No, this was not a mistake, this was made that dull on purpose. Looks pretty odd to, like if there was fog. Fog would create very soft light, but the light is not soft at all, in fact, it is pretty hard, as you see from the sharpness of the shadows.
However, all of a sudden, in the lights, a tree is visible behind the building. At the same time the trusses inside the depot make an appearance too.

My picture shows the old tram depot of The Hague with ... old trams! Ideal to shoot an "old" photo.
Here, HDR can give me all the details, in inside the depot and outside it in bright sunlight.

Of course, conversion to black and white is the first step in the process.
The second step is to drop the highlights and raise the shadows, both to personal likings of course.
As a third step, the whites are driven up, just 'til the first regions saturate, the same with the blacks, of course downwards this time.
The second and third step is why HDR was used in the first place.

Optionally, noise reduction and sharpening could now be additional steps in such a workflow.

The result is a clinically clean black and white image. By far to crisp to be "old". To make a picture old, we need to add grain, as in the good old chemical photography times.
But, grain is not all, old lenses, I mean really old lenses, showed some distinct vignetting, which has to be added for the effect.
Actually, before vignetting, I cropped the photo a bit, as to fill the frame. I like the tracks, but not so much the bike stand. The bits of sky are not really adding much either.

The final image is that:

Old tram depot The Hague

And again, you may want to click this link, just in case blogger improved my image again.

A little bit of self-critique: I might have been a little heavy handed on the vignetting and the sepia color may be a little off. However, all in all, the image came out as envisaged.

Technical info:

• Olympus PEN E-PM2
• Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm II @ f/9 f=42mm
• ISO 200
• middel image: t=1s/200
• shot in RAW
• HDR: -3/0/+3 @ -2/3Ev

The BCL Arrived!

Having the wallet already open, further desires resulted in ordering more fun stuff for EVIL MFT (MFT=micro four thirds) cameras.

To match my LoFi-photo needs, I could not resist to order

• a "Body Cap Lens" (15mm f/8) and 
• a Wanderlust Pinwide (MFT pine-hole).

The BCL (Body Cap Lens) was delivered today. Of course, first thing to do was put it on the camera!
The quality provided by the 15mm 1:8.0 is fair, even better than fair. Some call it the worst lens ever... I kinda disagree, respectfully.
First of all, you have to watch bang for bug.
Additionally, you need to understand what this lens is good for, in order to appreciate its existence.
This lens is essentially fixed focus. OK, one can tweak the focus from narrow to infinity a bit, however, the lens also is designed as a f/8.0, thereby resembling an "F eight an be there" lens!
This means, the is no time to wait for auto-focus at all! If, as a street-photographer, you want to be sure to have your frame sharp, just put the lever somewhere between close and infinity, and you will be fine.
Of course such a simple lens has got its shortcomings. There is some severe vignetting going on.
Have a look at a photo I shot with the BCL-1580:

Olympus BCL-1850 / Olympus E-PM2

Here comes the nice thing about this lens. It can be used as a very quick shooting street lens on cameras recording in RAW. Who cares about vignetting? In RAW, we can so easily get rid of it by applying lens corrections.

A very quick fix with RawTherapee can correct a lot... with some more care, one may get much further:

treated in RawTherapee as to remove vignetting

Actually, I am so excited about the Body Cap Lens 15mm that I ordered a Body Cap Lens 9mm fish-eye at the local photo-gear dealer.

The PINWIDE will certainly take a little longer to arrive at my place. I am really curious about using a pin-hole with a modern high-res image sensor. I can't wait to test the "live bulb" mode with said pin-hole!

I hope to receive the ordered stuff over the next 2 weeks (±).
Of course I will obtain an M42-adapter, for using my legacy glass with the MFT-system.

A new era started, the era of me using EVIL IBIS cameras!

New System: the EVIL IBIS

No, this is not about the quality of a budget hotel chain! This is about EVIL IBIS cameras!
EVIL = Electronic View-finder Interchangeable Lens
IBIS = I Body Image Stabilization
In other words, cameras able to stabilize images by legacy glass, despite lacking a mirror equipped with an eyepiece.

CSC, i.e. Compact System Cameras, put me off for quite a while. Why would you want to buy a camera having the worst of both worlds, the price of a decent SLR set and the cumbersome composing of a picture using a small close-by screen unfit for bright light?!
For a long time, it did not make any sense to me, why people would actually like those CSCs. Cameras like the Canon G15 (which I really love using) have the resort of an optical view-finder, helping out in certain situations. Furthermore, looking at a small screen, which requires a close distance, puts a lot of strain to the eyes. Using a cheap point'n shoot for a while causes me problems with my eyes. (this may just be me...)
As I wrote above, the hype about CSCs does not make any sense to me.

However, there is an exception to this! The solution of which will follow downstream the text... I promise!

There is a P&S camera, which I love a lot and therefore frequently use, the Panasonic Lumix LX7. The camera sports a brilliant lens (f/1.4 by Leica!) and some very outstanding electronic features, e.g. AE-bracketing@11fps. However, there is no view-finder coming with the camera, causing the problem stated above.

Have I mentioned Leica above?! Leica and Panasonic together make photographic equipment onder the brand Lumix. Panasonic and Olympus are in close collaboration with Epson. Epson is making EVFs (Electronic View Finders) for both, Olympus and Panasonic. Some of said EVFs actually fit on Leica digital cameras. Knowing all that, I made a mistake (or was it)!

I bought an Olympus VF-2 via ebay (the VF-2 is discontinued!) since it was mentioned to be compatible with the Leica cameras, and also since it was discussed as the superior EVF for Olympus PEN cameras (cf. youtube for both those statements).
The VF-2 came, all the way from Japan.... and did not fit onto my Lumix LX7... (bugger!)

I am not religious in any way, I think. Also, I do not believe in karma... But maybe there is some to the last mentioned... be it fate...

What to do with the best EVF Olympus created, not fitting any camera? Sell it? No, not really! In the future (and this I experienced a lot) things one really wants, may be harder to get!

Hence, I decided to go back to my original digital-photography roots and bought an Olympus camera! The E-PM2 (an EVIL IBIS!), w/ 2 lenses and an external flash. Of course there is a story behind selecting the PEN Mini 2, and not the E-PL5, but this wont be discussed here.

There may even be a point in time were I will discard any other system, following the example of David Thorpe.
My EVIL IBIS is an Olympus E-PM2, which, without the EVF (VF-2), I would have never considered in the first place. Karma made me buying a discontinued thing, which wont fit my gear, so that I could find out, how cool cameras w/o a flipping mirror are (not putting any strain on my eyes when operating it!).