Am I crazy? or Am I crazy!

…and that my dear friends is the question!

Well, why am I asking this question? Take a look at this

This, my dear friends, is the new E-P2. The newest micro 4/3rd digital camera. Remember, its not an SLR, its not a point and shoot….as Olympus calls it…its digital PEN!

Now, why am I saying all this? That’s because I have a serious desire to buy this, that’s why!

Everybody, including my beautiful wife ask me – Why do I need one more camera?

Today I was talking to my friend and when I told her I am waiting for E-P2 to be released she said “You are going crazy with your photography equipments, you are going over the top – seriously you should control!”

I was taken aback by this reproach and it got me thinking. This blog is an introspection as a result. What this blog is not – an excuse to buy this camera or other equipments.

I have an Olympus E-30 – top of the range DSLR and Evolt-330 – an armature DSLR as a supplementary camera.

Why on earth would I need E-P2 which looks like a point and shoot!

Before I answer that, let me tell you something.

Researching on photography equipments is my serious pastime. This does not mean, I buy anything I happen to like or afford or looks great. My photography gear includes (apart from camera bodies) 7 lenses from 9mm to 300mm range, 2 external flashes, 3 memory cards, filters, light meter, remote and cable release, diffusers, pro-tripod. All these are fruits of huge amount of research I have put in to really understand what I need for the kind of photography I am interested in. I am interested in landscape and indoor photography. So my gear is geared-up, so to say, for that kind of photography. What I don't own, I don't need – because I am not into other kinds of photography - like architecture, fashion, underwater etc.

I can list tons of equipments, which I don't own :-) which I know I don’t need.

Ok, now coming back to the question – Why on earth do I need E-P2? I have 2 DSLR bodies, why do I need this one which looks like another point and shoot.

To reveal the truth folks – This is not a point-and-shoot. It has almost the same spec as my E-30 (not quite, but almost).

But that doesn't answer the question, why do I need it?

Since I bought my second DSLR E-30, I have always felt the need for a very low profile high quality camera. But why? both my DSLRs (although E-330 is lot smaller) are quite big. I have found that this limits my desire and ability to carry them everywhere I want to. For example, I like to carry my camera when I am invited to somebody’s house for a party or when I go to a mall or when I go to my office during festive seasons and more - it gives me opportunity to shoot the moments. However the DSLRs are too “in-your-face” things and are not inconspicuous and I always end-up deciding against taking them with me. I always wanted something very small which I can carry anywhere without people noticing it.

You might say “Ok – that's all fine Puru, but why on earth you need a $1000 camera when you can buys a $200 point-and-shoot which looks the same?”

My reasons are as follows (fruits of my research :-))

1. I did not want a point-and-shoot – I wanted a camera with almost same kind of spec as my DSLRs, but will be so small that I can put it in my pocket.
2. I wanted a camera which will have huge image sensor, an in-body image stabilization and high-ISO capability because I will be shooting a lot in low light without tripod. Image sensor of E-P2 is at least 2 to 4 times normal point-and shoot. It has 6400 ISO capability and has an IS.
3. I needed a camera in which I can change lenses and which can make use of all my existing lenses so that I don't have invest in lenses.
4. A camera which will work with my flashes and cable release so that I don't have to buy them again.
5. A camera which can do everything and yet will be tiny enough.
6. A camera which will have same image quality as my DSLRs

Now I hear another question “Now we understand why you need E-P2, but the why on earth do you need your DSLRs then?”

Well, for the simple reason of control and extendibility– Its much easier to control the DSLR than to control E-P2 in various situations although E-P2 will give me almost same kind of control as DSLR. Second its easier to extend my DSLR to do various kinds of photography like fashion photography with multiple strobes and multiple flash groups or underwater photography with underwater housing or serious wildlife photography or very high-speed photography. E-P2 is a not meant to replace my DSLR nor can it. Its role will be to complement it in situations where DSLR is an over kill.

Now another question – Why did I take that reproach from a friend so seriously that I had to write a blog? Well, I am actually used it, my wife always says I buy too many things for my photography.  I probably don’t take her too seriously because I know her too well and believe she, in her heart, understands why I need my equipments although she is worried about the money I spend.

When a friend told me I am going over the top, it actually got me thinking. Did my friend see something which I am not seeing?

Although I knew I was not going over the top, I had to prove I was not to myself. It gave me an opportunity to introspect and question my own judgments and my hobby as a whole. Is my hobby only as good as my equipments? I don’t think so, but that's for people to judge.

I believe my equipments will ultimately be key factors in the plans I have for the future. So in that sense, I feel I am ok! :-)

But I thank my friend for making me think! :-)

 

CIAO and take care!

How to choose your first DLSR?

Question: What is the the most embarrassing moment in your life?

Answer: Watching yourself talk on the TV!

Well, you may ask “How is this question and the answer is relevant and how is it related to the blog subject?”

Answer to that is – It is not relevant and it is not related to the blog subject :-)

Remember I told you guys in my last blog that I did an exhibition on 10th of October 09? Well, I forgot to mention a minor detail. It so happens that, in that exhibition a local TV crew were roaming about interviewing people. I did not notice them until they came to my stall and then came the most stressful moment for me. I was asked to say a few things about my art, in front of camera and with a mike in my hand! Well, I did say (or blurted out rather) something.

I had completely forgotten what I said and about that unfortunate incident until, that is, I happen to see the recording aired on the local TV station today (28th Oct 09)! Oh Man! That was the most embarrassing moment of my life - listening to myself talking in front of a camera with a mike in my hand!

Such, my dear folks, is life – sooner or later everything comes back to you!! :-)

Well, enough of nonsense -  now for some serious stuff.

How to choose DLSR if you are the first time buyer?.

3 things most important while choosing a DSLR for the first time are.

1. Format i.e. 4/3rd (Olympus, Panasonic etc) or APS-C (Canon, Nikon)
2. Brand
3. Budget and Specs

FORMAT

A format in DSLR world is nothing but the size of the image sensor. Image Sensor is the Film of the DSLR or any digital camera and is the eye of the camera. There are number of Formats. Following figure illustrates the various formats available.

Image Source- Wikipedia

In DLSR the most popular formats are the Four Thirds and the APS-C. Once you select the format you will be married to it. Because all your lenses and accessories will be of that format. So once you choose a format, you will find it extremely expensive to switch to another format. So this will be your most important decision. All decisions from here on will be based on this one particular choice. I chose to go the four thirds way. Now whether that is a good choice or not I do not know. The reason why I chose 4/3rds format is for following reasons.

• Its an Open format, it is not proprietary like APS-C (both Nikon and Canons are APS-C, however Nikon and Canon lenses cannot be interchanged, because  as see in the above image, they implement APS format in their own respective standards so their image sensor sizes are different and hence lenses are different). This mean I can buy lenses from any manufacturer as long as it says 4/3rds without worrying about anything.
• Secondly, its a format which closely resembles the aspect ratio of the physical photograph standard. So the there is lot less cropping.
• Thirdly, the High Grade Pro Lenses are lot less expensive than the APS-C counterparts.

So choose the format carefully. Do research on the net. Read blogs and visit discussion forums. And once you have made up your mind, keep in mind that you will find it very expensive to change it.

BRAND

Brand decision will be born out of format decision. If you select 4/3rds then you will have to go with Olympus or Panasonic (micro four thirds (MFT) a variant of four thirds but all four thirds lenses will fit on MFT with an adapter).

If you select APS-C then Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony etc.

Again – Once you select the brand you will be married to it. You will find it cost prohibitive to change brands, especially if its APS-C brands. With 4/3rds or MFT you can at least switch between 2 brands dealing in 4/3rds lenses and bodies. I chose Olympus for the in-body image stabilization. Which I think is great!

BUDGET and SPECS

These 2 are directly related. More budget you have better DLSR body you can buy. But if you are a beginner what should be your budget?

IMHO (in my humble opinion) you should budget at least $700 to $800 (US dollars) for a decent body and at least 18-55mm and 70-300mm lenses (lens config may be different in different brands). Idea is that you should budget for DSLR body, and at 2 lenses – 1 wide angle zoom and one telephoto zoom. If you have more budget then you can invest in a good external flash.

Based on this you can research which spec of DLSR body fits your budget.

So the bottom Line is

• Research on the format
• Research on the Brand – Most important criteria is abundant availability of lenses and accessories  in your country.
• Choose the DSLR Body spec according to your budget with at least 2 lenses
• Order of the choices should be as above – don't for example fix a budget and then go hunting for the DSLR. Because brand that you choose will decide the budget. You can fix a range on budget though, say from $600 to $800, something like that.
• Do not be overwhelmed by the information.
• Read both pros and cons on format and brands
• You first DLSR will not be and need not be a pro or even advanced armature. You need to understand the basic DSLR beast before you can graduate to higher end models.  You should not buy a higher end model unless you are convinced that you have out grown your current model.
• Most importantly – You should know basic photographic techniques and photography basics, including but restricted to fundamental knowledge on – composition, aperture, shutter, manual control, exposure, white balance etc

I may do an edit on this post to add more – Keep watching!

In the meantime – Enjoy the Fall Colors

CIAO!!

Coming back – What was I doing?

Some of you may be wondering what the heck have I been doing. Why has this guy stopped disturbing us with his weekly mails?
Reasons are as follows

• I entered into 2 competitions (I have already communicated about one to you). I had to do some preparation for those. I will tell you about these in a moment.

• I then had to prepare for my exhibition at Barron Arts Fest. That exhibition was held today (10th Oct 2009) and I will tell you what I sold.

• In between I also did couple of photo shoots, you can see them here
  
  • St James’ Street Fair and Carnival
  • Woodbridge River Watch Environmental Site
  
  

• After coming back from vacations in early September, I had around 1000 pics to process. And this is what took away most of my time. I have already posted the Eastern Point and Mystic Seaport pictures. I will post Cape Cod pictures soon, I promise.

Many people ask – What do I mean by processing the pictures? Aren’t my pictures digital? So isn’t it already processed and I have the JPEGs ready to share straight from the camera?
Well folks, contrary to common assumption, some of you may be surprised to learn that none of the pictures that you see in any good site or magazine is straight from the camera. Almost all pictures need some form of processing (called post processing) in an image editor (such as Photoshop, Photomatix etc) in order to make it appealing or “presentable”. Some of the adjustment photographers do in post processing are;

1. White Balance – To get the proper color temperature for the image i.e to either warm or cool an image
2. Tone – To adjust color tones
3. Exposure – some times when looking into the LCD of you camera, you may not notice if the image is under or over exposed a bit. Photographers need to correct these if there is any issue with the exposure
4. Vibrancy and Saturation – To remove the dullness in color.
5. Fill light – To highlight dark areas
6. Contrast – To adjust the contrast between various colors in the image
7. Sharpness – To soften or sharpen an image or part of it
8. Noise – To reduce or increase noise in an image

This is not a complete list of post processing adjustments, however these are some of the crucial adjustments. In order to gain as much control over each of these adjustments as possible, seasoned photographers generally shoot their images in RAW format. This helps them in having better control over all the above adjustments and more, during post processing.
Post processing is a very time consuming job. And it requires a lot of patience.
Now coming to my competitions
The first competition was held at the New Brunswick Library in collaboration with Alfa Art Gallery. Photographers were required to submit 3 of their best pictures which were shot in New Brunswick. I submitted 3 of mine, but I forgot to read the crucial condition – photographs must be taken in New Brunswick! And none of my 3 photographs were shot in New Brunswick!
However I was not the only one who made the mistake. The judges selected 2 of my photographs to be in top 3!! But at the last moment had to give me just honorary mention for those 2 photographs because I failed to meet that criteria.
These are the 2 pics which one the honorary mention (I got a certificate for these - cool!)
Honorary mention #1
 

Honorary mention #2


The second competition was held in the Woodbridge town hall. The theme was similar. We were asked to provide 3 photographs taken in Woodbridge. This time I did not make any mistakes. I submitted the best 3 pics I had of Woodbridge. The following picture won the 3rd prize in the competition!

This was taken in the Woodbridge farmer’s market!
Now coming to Barron Arts Fest Exhibition. Well, I have been preparing for this for almost 4 weeks. The exhibition was on 10 Oct 09 between 10 AM to 4PM. But on the day of the exhibition, we had slight drizzle until 12PM :-( which meant people did not turn up until 1PM.  Even then there were only a handful and many were just mid-day strollers! So a not so satisfying exhibition. I did manage to sell 5 photos and 2 calendars for about $120 , but I was not completely satisfied with the response to the exhibition itself.

BLOG UPDATE***: Pictures from Award Ceremony @ Alpha Art Gallery

Photographer & Copyright owner: Jim Roselli

Both my pictures on display @ Alpha Art Gallery

Suni and I listening to the Award presentation ceremony

One of my pictures being shown during the presentation ceremony (Presenter and coordinator: Ms. Kavita Pandey)

Receiving certificate for Award#1 :-)

Award #2 :-)

Signing the guest book.

HDR – An “ethical” question

This article will ask for your patience. I apologize for making this a non-photography article. But I feel its important for me answer your questions.

When I posted my first HDR link on flickr.com and sent to my blog group I got this reaction from almost everybody.

“The pics are great, but…”

I knew what was coming :-)

“…they don’t look natural” :-)

There is an ethical question behind this. But before I go into that, I would like to tell you a story. Its my story, as is yours I am sure.

Let me take you about 23 years back, late eighties. I remember I was still in school days. I was in India. I hadn’t yet seen any of the world that I have seen now. We had only one channel on the TV called Doordarshan or DD for short. On this DD channel a program used to be aired called “World This Week” (WTW). It used to be aired every Friday night at 10PM. I used to wait whole week for this program, because this was the only program which showed us (kids in India) the world as it happened. All other news we used to get on national TV was just Indian or what government wanted us see of the world. News was controlled and censored by the government. Although WTW aired on government owned channel and was heavily censored at that time, it still gave us a best possible peek that we could have had to  the outside world.

This was also the time when compact discs (CD) were making a splash as storage media. One Friday night I was watching WTW and, I remember, there was a clip about how CDs can be used to store hundreds of songs as opposed to just 15 or 20 songs on a 2-sided cassette tape. A clip was shown how the CDs store information in 1’s and 0’s rather than continuous magnetic variations as in a tape. At the end of this particular news item, the anchor (Pranoy Roy) asked a question, which is still fresh in my mind “Is it as good as the cassette?” he answered himself “The future will tell”.

As you can see, magnetic tape is all but dead (doesn’t mean it was bad though). And the 1’s and 0’s have triumphed!

So how do I connect this to the HDR issue which I faced with my blog group?

I completely respect my blog group and their comments, for they have encouraged me so much. So I completely understand their predicament when they see an HDR enhanced image, which is;

“I was given a link for photographs, but I am looking at something which resembles painting. Where are the photographs?”

There is an ethical question behind this – which is “Should we use HDR technique to create something more than a mere photograph?”

Answer is – depends on choice, changes in tastes and trends. I grew up with a film camera, up to couple of years back, I completely detested digital cameras, because I could never get my photographs as well I could with a film camera (at least I thought so). Today – I swear by the DSLR and the four-thirds format (which takes me completely away from 35mm film camera). Trend does triumph in the end.

I posted the same flickr HDR link on my LinkedIn groups. One person, Eugene is her name, asked me about HDR technique and how it is done. Mind you, she did not comment at first, but contacted me privately. After I answered her back (privately of course) and explained her about HDR (as much as I know about it). She thanked me and also wrote a public comment on the group post which said;

“Puru very nice work, it has it's place in today's photo trends” and that my dear folks is your answer! :-)

HDR image -

 

Non-HDR Image

 

We decide what we want to like,  until the trend hits us :-) !

CIAO!