Olympus vs. Panasonic 4/3 Macro Review

Last week I bought the Panasonic / Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f2.8 Asph. Macro lens for my Panasonic GF-1, mainly to use as a portrait lens, but also to use the macro to shoot details for my eBay auctions. I ordered a used one from B&H Photo for $579.

Yesterday I was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and I picked up an Olympus E-Volt E-300 camera with the Olympus 50mm ED f2.0 Macro, for $100. The camera came sans battery and charger, so I took a chance that everything would be ok. This lens' focus is strictly electric powered, even in manual mode, so there was no way to test it.

Once I got it home, I coupled the Olympus 50mm to my GF-1 via the DMW-MA1 adapter ring (manual focus only), and it seems to work fine. Size-wise, the Olympus is a little fatter, and with the addition of the MA1, feels about twice as heavy. In terms of fit and finish, the Leica design wins over the Olympus like a Porsche vs. Fiat race.

I took a few snaps around the house, wide open and stopped down two stops, and my initial take on it is that the Olympus is better if you shoot it wide open, while the Pano looks better two stops down.

Overall, the MTF charts (see above) indicate that the Panasonic is much sharper, but I'm going to put both of these lenses to some real world tests and see how they match up when I'm actually shooting. Part 2 of this review coming soon.

The Best Filter Is The One That's With You *

Sometimes you're out and about shooting and you wish you had a filter with you, but sadly all you have on you is your trusty Panasonic GF1 and your sunglasses.

Wouldn't it be nice to have something like a Polarizer or maybe a warming filter on you because the day looks sorta boring? Well it's entirely possible that you already have what you need right on you:

 

Just combine your camera with your glasses like the shot above, and you can turn this:

Into this:

Granted you could have done most of this in Lightroom, but if your shades happen to be Polarized, graduated, or have some other interesting optical qualities, then you have something unique that's not possible to duplicate in software. And that's were it gets interesting. Also, there's no reason you can't do the same trick by putting your glasses in front of your iPhone.

*with a tip of the hat to Chase Jarvis.

Open Letter to Camera Manufacturers

Dear Camera Maker,

Due to the overwhelming number of cameras with the letter "D" in the name (used to signify Digital, but since everything is digital these days, it just stands for Duh), you have seen fit to replace it with the letter X (see list below) in the name; some have both "D" and "X" and now we are all really confused. There are many other letters in the alphabet to consider. "Q" is perfectly good for instance, so is "Y", while "U" and "K" are severely underrepresented.

• GX1
• G1X
• X1
• D4X
• 1DX
• NEX
• X-Pro1
• XS1

Leica has owned "M" forever, and Canon has long used "A" for their low end P&S cameras, and although Contax is grandfathered in for the "T", they've been terminated by Kyocera.  Anyway that still leaves at least 20 other letters, so please start using them. All I'm asking for is a little variety in the naming convention.

Warm Regards,

Konstantin Golovchinsky

Lightroom 4 Beta Review / First Look

I've been a big Lightroom fan from the very beginning, so much so that I've virtually stopped using Photoshop CS (despite 17 years of retouching experience). IMO that's how good LR is for photographers. So just this week, Adobe Labs has released the Lightroom 4 Beta, and I thought I'd give it a whirl. The big new features are:

• Changes to the Spot Adjust Brush
• Blurb Books integration
• GPS data integration

In fact the first to are so big, they have their own tabs in with the original 5 modules, making it a total of 7. Lets start with the Spot Adjustment. In oder to demonstrate clearly, this screenshot shows Lightroom 3 on the left, and the same module in Lightroom 4 Beta on the right.

As you can see, there are two important changes to the interface. The first being the very badly needed spot color correction which is now on top of the module; the second, below the standard controls gives you control over local Sharpness, Noise and Moiré.

Next is the Books module which allows export directly to Blurb.com or to PDF. Essentially Lightroom 4 Beta now integrates all of the functions of Blurb's Booksmart® software directly into a Lightroom module that operates very similar to the Web module. Here's a screenshot with some random files from my image library:

If you've used Lightroom 3 (or 2) to make web galleries, or are already familiar with Booksmart, you'll have no problem making your own books in this module, it's quite intuitive.

The last big change is the addition of the Map module. Basically it allows you to read GPS data from your camera and plot it on a Google Maps style interface.

For every selected photo that has a GPS marker, you'll get a small orange square on the map. Clicking on the square will give you a small preview of the photo. Generally I would say this isn't avery useful function for most photographers, especially since most cameras aren't GPS aware. For now it's a fun toy to play with. One camera I do have that does GPS tagging is my iPhone, and since I run all my iPhone photos through Lightroom anyway, I'm going to start tagging everything and see if I can make some sense/use of it in the future. In order to have your photos tagged, you need to go into Settings > Location Services, then enable Location Services and turn on Camera. Looks like this:

In addition, if you have photos that don't have GPS data, you can imbed it manually. Just find the location on the map, select the photo in the strip below, then control-click on the map, you'll get this pop-up menu:

Click on that and Bob's Your Uncle, you've got GPS coordinates added to the metadata of your file!

iPhone 4s with POPA and Olloclip

I've been waiting for this week with breathless anticipation; Tuesday I became eligible for an upgrade with AT&T so I got an iPhone 4s, and today the Red Pop (akak POPA) I backed on Kickstarter finally came in the mail. I also backed the Olloclip, so now my phone/camera kit is complete.

This is pretty much how I envisioned it back in June when I backed both projects:

And the end-user view:

 

I have to say, the Red Pop was well worth the wait, I really love the way this makes the iPhone feel like a real camera. Really good in the hand, makes it feel solid, not like the phone is about to drop from your hand like normal.

Another thing I like is that there is very little lag time, press the button and it snaps. I have a feeling it's because the iPhone uses Focus Priority while POPA uses Shutter Release Priority (meaning it will shoot whether it's in focus or not while the iPhone won't). The app is tasty too, no silly business, just the bare minimal controls needed to make everything work. I do wish it would automatically sync all the taken pics to the Camera Roll without having to transfer them one by one, but it's great that you can send the pics right to Twitter or Facebook from their app (iPhone's native app still lacks Facebook integration).

Moving on to the Olloclip, I love the dual lenses and overall optical quality. The macro gets you in about twice as close as normal. Here the first photo is with Olloclip at minimum focus:

 

 And the same shot with Olloclip removed:

 

 This side-by-side comparison also shows the wider angle and the massive barrel distortion, along with chromatic aberration some vignetting. Overall the flaws aren't that bad, and you can correct for some of them in Lightroom, or if you're shooting non-linear forms, it's not an issue:

Flipped over to the fish-eye side, the Olloclip also performs well, but is a circular fish-eye with black around the edges. My friend and drift photography legend Tram Tran is about 3 feet away across the table, the Olloclip takes in most of the restaurant (I did correct for chromatic aberration in LR):

Overall it's two thumbs up, one each for Olloclip and Red Pop.

Fuji x100 disappointment, Part 2

Apparently I hit a nerve with my previous post scathing the Fujifilm x100. It seems there are many fans who have taken it as a personal insult that I am not happy with their choice of camera. It was even pointed out that the very famous Zack Arias is in love with the x100. I went to his blog to read about about it. Turns out he has encountered many of the same issues that I have; these are direct quotes from his review:

• "Fuji x100 can be a complete pain in the ass to use"
• "You have to get used to it’s quirks (menus, focusing, paralax, start up time, lock ups, etc.)"
• "The x100 can be a complete pain in the ass of a camera."
• "Another massively annoying “feature” of this camera is focusing at close range"
• "The x100 has a manual focusing ring on the lens and let me state for the record that with the first firmware it was the worst manual focusing of any camera ever made in all of the world."

The biggest difference is that he loves the image quality so much that working with a difficult to use camera is worth it, while for me it is not. Although I am nowhere near as accomplished of a photographer as Zach, I have been shooting semi-professionally for over 20 years. In short, I didn't fall off the photography wagon yesterday and start making wild claims today, and my first camera wasn't digital.

What it boils down to for me is the old design adage that form follows function. I think that Fuji engineers spent too much time working on the form, and not enough time talking to photographers. Frankly I would much rather have an ugly camera that's easy to use. Maybe that's why I like the Panasonic GF-1 so much, and why I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing the GX-1 when it comes out. There's obviously a difference, but the Four Thirds chip isn't that much smaller than APS-C.

Below are samples from the GF-1

 

Panoramas are easy enough to do on the GF1, just take a bunch of shots and seam them up in Photoshop, this is 4 horizontal frames stitched together:

Fujifilm x100 is a major disappointment

I've had the Fujifilm x100 for about 6 months now and frankly I seldom use it, to the point where my photography is suffering. The problem I'm having is not the brilliant and huge sensor, because that is the only things I actually like about the camera.

Here's a list of my greivances:

1.  The focus is molasses slow; when it does finally lock on, a good half of the time it's locked on to the wrong spot.
2.  Who thought it was a good idea to limit the shutter speed to 1/4 second?
3.  Exposure is almost 2 stops under from a normal looking image on the screen.
4. Any time you need to access something in a menu, it usually 4-5 button presses.
5. Did I mention that the focus is slow? An EOS-1 from 1996 focuses an order of magnitude faster.
6. Activating Macro focus takes 3 buton pushes, and focusing even slower than regular focusing.
7. Forget about focusing in low light.
8. Lens is either too short or too long, never just right, but that's just my taste for focal lengths.
9. Not very sharp wide open, needs to be at least at 2.8 or 4 to be sharp.

In short it's pretty to look at and impresses others when they see you with it, but other than that it's generally useless. I made a big mistake selling my Panasonic GF-1 and buying this bimbo of a camera. I am going to sell it while it still has some value and buy the new Panasonic GX1. Hopefully that will inspire me to go shooting again, mostly I leave the x100 at home because it frustrates me to no end.