amipal photography

The week just gone was competition night at the club. "Man-Made" was the subject which, as you can imagine, can be pretty much anything as long as it isn't natural. This of course meant a lot of head-scratching, as the possible entries were so wide. Today I thought I'd share not only the photos I entered into the competition, but also the issues that I deal with when printing them, as well as the selection process itself. Let's start with selection. I make use of Lightroom's Collections so that I can easily group images without removing them from their original locations. This is simply as case of creating a new collection (in this case called "Man-Made - PRINT1"), and then going through my archives looking for things that may be suitable. Simply selecting the image and hitting the B key adds it to the collection - and then move onto the next image. In the end, I have a "virtual folder" of candidate photos for the competition, some of wh...

I had the luck of getting a ticket to the uk.shooters Halloween Meet in London on 20th October this year. Me and one hundred and ninety nine other photographers (I'm assuming they all attended) descended on London's Leake Street tunnel to shoot a plethora of models who had all been made up by professional make-up artists. Now, previously when I've shot portraits, I've relied on the G9's face-detect auto-focus to acquire perfect focus on the eyes. This has worked very well in the past, and I've had little reason to doubt the capability of the body as a result. But this shoot was different. Not only was the available light low (and I mean really low), but many of the models had make-up the skewed the human face. Or hair that covered large chunks of the face. Ordinarily, if I notice something going wrong, then I'll try to work out what is going wrong, and above all, why it is going wrong. In this case, the camera was struggling to find a face in the co...

Hello all! Despite the long period of inactivity, this blog is still active. I've just been a bit busy. But back to this post. Today I'll be talking about a trip I made up to London for an evening shoot at St. Paul's cathedral. I knew before traveling that I'd need an ultra wide angle lens to do the architecture any sort of justice. I've owned the Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens for many years (checks LR metadata - April 2012!), and it is a compact and light UWA whose performance isn't too shabby. Saying that, I've definitely noticed a diminishing in its capabilities over the years - whether this is down to use or something else, I cannot say. I'm simply not happy with the sharpness of the corners from it anymore. I've looked into replacing the M.Zuiko previously. I can't really justify the ~£1000 GBP price-tag of the Olympus f/2.8 7-14mm, nor the similar price for the Panasonic Leica 8-18mm, as I rarely shoot UWA these days. I shoot manual l...

Last weekend I got up stupidly early to travel half way across the country to attend an airshow. But what an airshow! The Royal International Air Tattoo 2018! A word of warning - this is going to be a looooong post. Grab yourself a cup of tea and settle down... I haven't been to an airshow, or at least shot aircraft flying since the Goodwood Revival in 2015, where they had a number of warbirds from the Second World War flying. My equipment back then was my trusty GH3 with the first-generation Lumix 100-300mm lens, and my GM5 with Lumix 14-140mm as backup. These performed well as a pair, allowing me to grab take off, landing, and formation shots with the surprisingly-capable GM5, and the longer, single aircraft detail shots with the GH3. At the time, AF-S was used on both cameras, as I didn't trust the reliability of the continuous auto-focus offered by either - bare in mind that at this point, Panasonic had yet to introduce their Depth from Defocus technology to assist wit...

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...

This post is a bit preemptive. I've only owned the Lumix G9 for three months (as of June 2018), and most of my other cameras served me well for around two years. So I feel the G9 has a bit more time ahead of it before I reach the true potential offered by it. Panasonic Lumix G9 March 2018 to Now ~2500 shots I'm rather impressed with the G9, as I detailed in my review earlier in the year. It handles my favourite lens, the fully-manual Voigtlander f/0.95 17.5mm, very well indeed - the new sensor brings out some stunning clarity from it, the IBIS makes those low-light shots pin-sharp, and the amazing EVF (has to be seen to be believed) makes focussing a breeze. But it is the continuous auto-focus tracking which is really surprised me. Panasonic have produces a camera which can truly keep a running toddler in-focus, despite not having any phase-detect on-sensor. It rarely misses target, though I will test it properly at RIAT this year - fast-moving jets should prove a nice cha...

I blame peer-pressure and a good deal for my upgrade to the GH4. My GH3 was perfectly fine when I bought the GH4 - I was happy with the photos it took, happy with the ergonomics of the camera, battery life, pretty much everything. The GH3 had traveled with me to many countries, and had shot thousands of frames at airshows in the South East of England. In fact, the GH3 still holds my personal record for most shots taken with a single camera, the 22,500 shutter actuations dwarfing all others. Panasonic Lumix GH4 March 2016 to Now 14000+ shots The GH4, much like the GH2 was to the GH1, was more of an evolution of the previous camera. The body was more of the same - that same ideal-button-placement, that same weather-sealed magnesium-alloy chunkiness - though, internally, Panasonic had introduced the new-fangled 4K video. And in order to do so, had altered the plumbing considerably. This made the GH4 a perfect photographer's camera. It had a large buffer that wrote files to the c...