Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life.”—Sidney Sheldon
In recent weeks, I’ve been wanting to take a short PhotoWalk and finally the high temperatures and cloudy, rainy days abated enough for me to think about giving it a go, Then I needed to return a book to the library and if you want to know more about the book, tomorrow’s Joe’s Book Club post has a review off John Grisham’s Camino Ghosts.
How I Made this photograph: Shooting in Discovery Park is hard because there’s so much going on in and around it, what with an outdoor amphitheater, Town Hall, Library and in the winter, an ice rink. I think it’s more of a challenge to photograph in color in color because everything seems so real, which is not the case when shooting in monochrome. For this PhotoWalk I chose the Olympus 25mm f/1.8 lens because it has the equivalent field-of-view of a 50mm or classic “Nifty Fifty” that’s a good match for the Pen F. The Program mode exposure was 1/640 at f/9 and ISO 320.
But, you say, haven’t you already beaten photographing the Jacks and Ball sculptures that are next to the library to death? Yes that’s true, but I wanted to try again, this time with a more or less standard digital camera, not a film or infrared converted mirrorless camera. My camera for this casual PhotoWalk, actually more of a Photo Stroll if you must know, was my black Olympus Pen F along with a M.Zuiko Digital 25mm f/1.8 lens and the crazy, expensive and plastic ($32.64) Olympus LH-49B lens hood. Both the Pen F and 25mm lens were purchased as refurbs, but the seller kindly included the LH-49B hood at no extra cost.
PhotoWalkin’
The real reason for my Photo Stroll was for exercise. I had to go to the library anyway, so after dropping my book into the return chute, I parked Mary’s Beetle and started walking around the Jacks & Ball. Over recent weeks I’ve been trying to do more photography outdoors for the physical exercise as well as seeing how well I did while shooting while walking with a cane. It was a challenge but I survived and only dropped the cane seven times. With both my hands on the camera, I propped the camera next to my body and sometimes I didn’t do the best possible job of it and the cane would fall onto the ground and occasionally onto my feet. (It’s not that heavy)
How I Made this photograph: This is a SOOC JPEG file that was made in the Pen F’s “Mono” (mode. More about my RAW+JPEG regimen below.) The Program exposure was 1/1000 sec at f/7.1 and ISO 320. I think shooting in black and white simplifies the image while minimizing and distraction and adds more drama to the image.
The best part of the Photo Walk was shooting with the Pen F. Not only is this, I believe, the most beautiful Micro Four-thirds camera ever made, it’s a wonderful picture maker. The ergonomics are perfect and I added a black leather (with red stitching) half-case to mine and the whole package feels comfy in my paws. The controls are mostly analog with less need to dive into Olympus’ legendarily complex menu system. For instance, I initially started shooting in color and after several shots asked myself, “how would this look in black and while” and so I simply twisted a knob on the front of the Pen F from Color to Mono and thought “wow!” and ended up shooting a lot of monochrome images before switching back to color.
When finished, I ended up shooting 128 images during my walk and excitedly took the camera home, yanked out the SD card and loaded the flies onto my hard drive. The Olympus Pen F was in RAW+JPEG mode sometimes giving me a black and white JPEG file with a “preview” of the monochrome image on my LCD screen along with a color .ORF Olympus-format RAW file. Shooting the Pen F left me with a bunch of .ORF Olympus Raw Format files I couldn’t open in Adobe Camera RAW CS6. To fix this impasse, I downloaded Adobe DNG Converter easily converting .ORF’s into more portable DNG files I could use with my older version of Photoshop. No subscriptions required.
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