Photography

Micro 4/3rd Print Sizes

People always say the micro four-thirds cameras do not have enough resolution to print photos at “reasonable” sizes. In the good old days, the standard size was 8x10, and a large print was 11x14, while the 11x17 was considered very large.

OM-1 MKII: Third Party Batteries

Most Lithium ion batteries for cameras are made of 2 cells (the round stuff that looks like a AA battery)

As far as I know, there are only 5 manufacturers of these Lithium Ion cells: 4 in China and 1 in Japan. Even Tesla doesn’t manufacture the Lithium Ion cells for its own car batteries, they use cylindrical Panasonic 18650 Lithium Ion cells.

OM-1 MkII: The Long Exposure Noise Reduction

The longer the exposure, the warmer the sensor. The warmer the sensor, the noisier the photo. This is based on physics. There’s no way around it. You like it, you don’t like it, the longer the exposure, the noisier the photo will get. It’s mostly chroma noise (the red dots). This applies to all camera manufacturers: Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Sony… So how do we get around it?

OM-1 MkII: The Right Way of Metering

The OM Systems/Olympus OM1-mkII has 5+ metering modes:

  1. Digital ESP metering aka evaluative/matrix metering
  2. Center-weighted averaging metering
  3. Spot metering metering
  4. Spot metering highlights metering
  5. Spot metering shadows metering

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Mine's bigger than yours

Mine's bigger than yours

The winner of the tele photo wars is the guy in the middle. Gary, the guy between the Canon 500 at the front and the Sony/Minolta 600 at the back, with the small narrow white tube. It’s a 1200mm digiscope. It’s mounted on an Olympus micro 4/3!

Photographers Hunting Snowy Owls

Photographers Hunting Snowy Owls

The previous summer was extremely rich in mice, rodents… in the arctic. The Snowy Owls had many off-springs (the more mice rodent, the more snowy owls offsprings). They (mostly the young) couldn’t deal with the -40° and -50°! (both in Fahrenheit and in Celsius), so some moved south to the Lower Mainland, BC for an easier winter and for finding more food. A grand total of 24 of them!

Blurry Photos

Blurry Photos

I spoke to this lady after she took her ‘blurry’ photos. She was very unhappy with her Canon camera and she was talking about switching to Nikon. She was blaming the camera for taking all these blurry photos.

The main problem with her Canon camera was how she was holding her camera and her lens.

Fujifilm cameras and the Auto-ISO

Digital cameras have changed photography. In the “good old days” you bought a film: either black and white, with an ASA (ASA begat DIN which begat ISO) of 125 or of 400 or a color film with a specific sensitivity with an ASA rating of 50 like the Fuji Velvia 50 or Kodachrome 64… And that was it. For the whole roll/film. You could push the sensitivity a little bit by changing the processing but if not the ISO was fixed.

Texture vs. Clarity vs. Dehaze

Nowadays, in 2024, almost all raw processing software, from Lightroom to Darktable passing through Luminar and Capture One, support these three functions:

  • texture
  • clarity
  • dehaze

They kind of do similar things but they have different effects and different purposes.