amipal photography

Due to some recent building work, I'm been stuck working from home for the last four weeks. Which is both a blessing and a curse - being stuck in the same room for days at a time with little human contact makes one a little stir crazy. Cabin fever is real, people. Anyway, this has led me to heading out for a walk after dinner of an evening; for exercise, for fresh air, for something other than the constant four walls. I have the benefit of both the South Downs and English Channel being a five minute walk from my house, depending on the direction I walk in, both of which are an ideal prescription for being stuck indoors for days on end. On a recent walk along the clifftop to Rottingdean, the sun was getting low and heading towards setting. Currently, there's a lot of long dry grass up there, and this created a wonderful contrast where tall bright stalks rose up above the heavily shaded undergrowth. I'd actually gone along there with my camera and a superzoom lens expecting...

In a prior post, I mentioned trying to find the perfect lens for flower photography . And how I was going to do some tests with the lenses mentioned within said post. Well, this isn't that test. It's another test. A test with very similar focal-length lenses, and with similar apertures. This is the Battle of the 50mm or Thereabouts Lenses for Photographing Clematis ! What are the contenders in today's test? Well, we have a trio of legacy 50mm lenses from a variety of mounts. And also an auto-focus lens specifically designed for Micro Four Thirds. Jupiter-8 f/2 50mm - m39-mount Helios-44 f/1.8 50mm - m42-mount Voigtlander Color-Ultron f/1.8 50mm - Q-mount Lumix f/1.7 42.5mm - Micro Four Thirds mount All lenses were shot wide-open, and all from the "same" distance from the flower. This distance was calculated based on the closest focusing distance of the lenses with the longest closest focusing distance, the Jupiter-8. Jupiter-8 f/2 50mm Helios-44...

A couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for bluebells to photograph. Native bluebells, not the invasive Spanish species which are threatening British woodland. Although the Olympus f/1.8 45mm was very good for getting a nice blurred background, the close-focus distance of the lens was a disappointment. In addition, shooting wide-open usually meant focusing issues: either mis-focus or not enough of the subject in focus. Picture info: Lumix GH4, Olympus f/1.8 45mm, ISO200, f/1.8, 1/1600 sec I soon found that the Lumix 14-140mm Mk2 at 140mm was very good for these types of shot. A minimum aperture of f/5.6 means that you're getting a large chunk of the plant in-focus, and the extra focal-length usually produces a relatively pleasing bokeh despite the slow-aperture and zoom. Picture info: Lumix GH4, Lumix G VARIO 14-140mm @ 130mm, ISO800, f/5.6, 1/200 sec The travel-zoom has effective in-lens stabilisation, yet despite this it can still be tricky to get sharp hand-held ...

For a while now, I've been thinking of images I could submit for the next camera club set subject print competition - "liquid" is the theme, and entries due in tomorrow. Going through my LR catalogue metadata, I found plenty of shots of the sea - well, I do live right next to the English Channel! But this seems like a bit of a cop-out for the theme, and particularly if the sea itself is only part of the subject, as it would be in a landscape. A stroke of luck presented itself one evening after work, when I glanced out of the kitchen and saw a single iris had bloomed in the rockery outside the back door. It had been drizzling most of the day, and a delicate pattern of droplets had formed on the petals. However, I wasn't able to get outside to shoot it until much later in the evening, by which point the sun had long since set. Which meant a tripod, a flash, and my Raynox 150 macro adapter on the end of the Lumix 14-140 Mk2. A variety of compositions, apertures a...