The new UK magazine, Advanced Photographer, has reached Issue 3. There has definitely been a gap in the English-language market for such a magazine - filling a niche which is filled in various ways in the French & German markets, for example - and it was going to be interesting to see if they could pull it off.

The UK mainstream photographic magazine market has been full of bland, formulaic, repetitive dross for ages, with hordes of identikit publications endlessly recycling the same shallow, bland and mind numbingly predictable stuff, half-disguised advertising, pointless “reviews”, and with weak attempts at comedy apparently more valued than worthwhile content. And it isn’t helped by padding out with inane trash from the usual rent-an-experts like Andy Rouse.  For example. The only exception (which does actually feature said prat) is Amateur Photographer, which is pretty much unique as a weekly, and does still maintain high standards.

So there were reasons to be skeptical. However, since Will Cheung is the editor, and during his time as editor of Practical Photographer it was actually worth reading, there were also reasons to be hopeful.

Having subscribed “blind”, I’m happy to say that it was worth it. After three issues, which I haven’t even had time to finish yet, I’d say Will Cheung is doing a great job. A good sign is that I even read, and enjoy, articles on topics I have zero actually interest in - studio lighting for example.  Everything is well written, with genuine depth, and a sense of pushing some boundaries. I’d say there is little, or no, fluff or filling, and the equipment reviews are comparable in quality and worth to the best of the continental magazines.

In general I’d rate Advanced Photographer at the same level as the “expert-level” content of Reponses Photo, which puts it at a very high standard.  It will be interesting to see if they can keep it up, but so far the signs are good.

If you’re a voracious reader like me, or if you’re looking for something beyond the patronising, advertiser-friendly stuff you find in most magazines, give Advanced Photographer a try.

I’ve been meaning to write more about the Olympus EP-2 for a while, but for various reasons I didn’t get around to it. One of these is that I wanted to compare with the E-3, but I haven’t got a lens adaptor for the EP-2 yet, and in any case, I’m not really into doing “tests”. Anyway, there’s little point: it is glaringly obvious that in terms of image quality, the EP-2 is way ahead, even with the 14-42mm kit lens.  I say “even with” ... to be honest, I seriously doubt that the vast majority of web chattering about lens quality is based on any sort of objective evaluation of real-world use. This lens certainly isn’t limiting my photography.

Oh, and it’s great fun to use.

An EP-2 photo using the Fake Hasselblad preset

There are a few things I don’t like so much about the camera, and all of them are concerned with handling and the user interface.  The control dial is pretty horrible to use. You have to be very, very careful to not completely change the setup when you were intending to dial in +0.3EV. The various ways of changing settings, through the menu, the super control panel, or the info layer (if that’s what it’s called) are just too confusing. At least one of them should go, and actually, although I’m very familiar with it, my choice would be to deep-six the super control panel. As I get used to the info method I’m finding I hardly ever use the control panel. I wonder if it has made it through to the E-5, or if Olympus consider it to be a “consumer” feature ?

Another pretty picture

There are a lot of things I do like. First of all, in my experience so far this camera has by far the most accurate auto-exposure of any Olympus E-System camera I’ve used. Very good and very consistent, unlike the E-3 which frankly seems to use random guesstimation as it’s baseline method. Second, dynamic range is also much better. The photo above would have caused my all sorts of problems with the E-3. With the EP-2, it’s just routine. The EVF is excellent, and without it the camera would not be anywhere near as useful or enjoyable. It would be nice if it were orientable in two axes, like the E-3’s screen. The general feel and construction of the camera is very good, and personally I love the design. It is so much easier to carry this camera around than a DSLR, although it is notable that it is only slightly smaller than the E-400. I like the shutter sound, although it would be nicer if it were a touch quieter. Oh, and I really like the AF-C Tracking Mode - this is fantastic when combined with “focus and recompose” shooting, although I suppose that wasn’t quite what it was meant for! It might not be quite so hot with fast moving targets - I don’t know, I haven’t tried - but it works fine for motionless inanimate objects. 

I’m not quite so keen on manual focus.  I’m still not entirely sure how to pre-set the focus point: I found out once, and then forgot (manual ? what manual). And moving the focus point while zoomed in in MF mode is probably the most frustrating and curse-inducing activity I’ve encountered on a camera in many years. But then again, who cares when you’ve got AF-C Tracking Mode ?

So, I won’t be selling it. In fact, since I bought it, I haven’t picked up the E-3 (or E-400) once. Obviously in some cases the E-3 will still be the better tool, but in general I can see it settling on a quiet semi-retirement.

I’ve just added a Svalbard panorama gallery to the photography section.

This includes 16 photos taken from the 8.5 rolls of film I managed to salvage after my XPan disaster. Inevitably there’s a little too much overlap in location, but I thought they were worth sharing.

Looking out of 14th July Bay towards Kross Fjord

There are a few glitches in the layout of the gallery pages. I need to fix these. And some other stuff ... time fades away.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently wondering about what type of film to take to Svalbard next month. The arguments about the subjective qualities of different types rage across the internet (yes, still), with no end of “expert”, dogmatic opinions (as well as the odd voice of reason).

I won’t go into the arguments here, but I did remember an interesting experience from a few years back.

During a photographic trip around Iceland in March 2008 with Daniel Bergmann, we were driving towards the town of Vik while a storm front was approaching from the south, making a very dramatic contrast between thick, dense cloud reflect dark sand and sea, and snow covered dunes.

We stopped to take a few photos. I was using my XPan loaded with Fuji Velvia 100F, Daniel was using his Canon EOS 1Ds Mk whatever.

When I got the processed film, it looked like this:

uncorrected scan

Not at ALL what I remembered!  No, I remember a leaden gray sky and pure white snow, so after some fairly drastic Photoshoppery (the slide has very low contrast, which should have given me a clue) I ended up with this:

the Truth ... is out there ?

Daniel meanwhile worked on his RAW file, without any idea or sight of what I had done, and some later mailed me this (cropped by me from his 35mm FF format):

Daniel Bergmann’s view (© Daniel Bergmann)

Interestingly, he’s ended up with much more blue, pretty much as the Velvia 100F slide suggested, and a lot lower contrast: I think he’s believed the camera, as opposed to me trying to recreate whatever I could remember of my impression.

The point of all this is this: with such a range of subjectivity, which can give results which are neither “right” nor “wrong” (even removing a colour cast is subjective), what characteristics of film can really be so important ? In the digital age, the main issue surely is to capture a neutral image which will give as much latitude as possible for subjective interpretation.

Which pretty much rules out Velvia 50, the great favourite of landscape photographers since Noah launched the Ark…

In April of this year I spent 3 weeks traveling around Costa Rica. Although it was not specifically for photography, quite a lot of photography got done - both by myself, and my long-suffering better half.

Costa Rica came on my radar thanks to one of Michael Reichmann’s video journals, and it has been high on my wish list for quite a while.  I’d never really photographed in sub-tropical conditions before, apart from a trip 10 years ago to Venezuela, but that doesn’t really count. Costa Rica is challenging in a number of ways. First, there’s the heat and humidity - although sometimes it’s not so hot, and sometimes the humidity gives way to torrential rain. Then there’s the sheer range of subject matter, with fast and slow moving wildlife of all sizes, landscapes, people, and all of these in often tricky lighting situations, especially in rainforests. And of course there’s only so much you can fly with and cart around.

Hummingbird: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f/3.5, 1/250sec, ISO 400, tripod

After a lot of indecision, my final inventory was as follows: Olympus E-3 body, Zuiko Digital 50mm, 12-60 SWD and 50-200 lenses, 1.4 Teleconverter, FL-36 flash with Better Beamer, an assortment of filters, including little used UV for protection and coping with condensation, a Gitzo Traveller lightweight tripod, and Ricoh GRD II compact. Remarkably this all fitted comfortably into the lower section of my new Kata backpack. In turned out that the vast majority of the time I used the E-3 / 50-200 / teleconverter combination. The tripod was rarely used.

Lizard on palm: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f/4.5, 1/1250sec, ISO 800

Clearly a big issue here was going to be the (lack of) high ISO performance of the E-3, but this has to be considered against the versatility of the lens combos, the very good in body stabilisation, very effective dust shaker and highly dependable weather proofing. And actually, the high ISO performance isn’t so bad as web forum armchair experts would have you believe.

Rainforest photography is tricky, as light levels are wildly variable, but generally low on the forest floor. This meant that handheld I was at very best at 800 ISO, more often at 1250 or 1600 with an absolute maximum aperture of f/8 with the 50-200 / 1.4TC combination. This is one of those times when the claimed “lack of depth of field” - by which critics claim the 4/3rds system cameras have too much DoF - turns into a major advantage, because when you’re trying to capture wildlife using a focal length of 280mm you need all the DoF you can get.

Forest detail: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f2.8, 1/100sec, ISO 800

At 1600 ISO, noise clears up nicely using Nik DFine 2.0, at fairly subdued settings. Below that, if the exposure is ok, noise really doesn’t tend to be much of an issue, especially in prints.

In most cases, missed shots are my own fault, but I did lose a few, including one which would have been a 5-star, due to the 50-200 refusing to autofocus. Sometimes it just gives up, and only kicking it back into life with a twist of the focus ring, or in extreme cases, power on-off, gets it going again. It can be really frustrating. It isn’t the camera, as it does the same thing on the E-1, and I don’t think it is a fault specifically with this copy. I’m considering trading it in for the SWD version, hopefully that will be better. One thing that I would like to see on the 50-200 is a focus range lock, but I guess at the price that’s a bit too much to expect.

Young capuchin monkey: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f3.5, 1/60sec, ISO 1600

I’m not a fanboy for any brand in any field, and I’d be the first to switch to a different make if there was a good reason, and I could afford it. But I have no reason to. So called “full frame” systems - Sony especially, for me - are kind of attractive, but honestly, if I’m going to get into that, I’d rather hold out for something like a Pentax 645D. Even while people are expressing doubts about the future of Four Thirds, it seems that with the maturing of sensor technologies it really is coming into its own. Actually it really occupies its own niche, way above small sensor cameras, way below full frame, and distinct from the sort of in-between, neither one nor the other APS-C systems. With Olympus Four Thirds you get beautifully built camera bodies packed with - in general - features that are actually useful for photography, and you get access to world-class lenses, and very high quality optics even at the entry level. And you get remarkable versatility.  If you really get hung up on these things, yeah, you get more noise than larger sensor cameras, but honestly, if you are going to fret about that stuff, you’re probably not principally concerned about making photos.  It is notable that there are considerably more “pro” or “serious” photographers using Olympus than is generally believed. The thing is they tend to just get on with photography and stay away from the fanboy-dominated gear forums (for example, Neil Gaudet, who’s blog I’ve just discovered).

Juvenile green iguana: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f4.9, 1/320sec, ISO 800

I hope Olympus do release an upgrade to the E-3 - there certainly is scope for it, although beyond that I do wonder if we’ve reached a bit of a peak. The camera industry in general, at least at the DSLR level, seems to be coming out of the rapid obsolescence cycle it has been in in the last 6 or 7 years.

I’m sure I could have taken equally good (or rather “average”) photos with a different camera system, but I really doubt if it would have been quite so trouble-free and flexible.

Basilisk: Olympus E-3, Zuiko 50-200, f4.9, 1/320sec, ISO 800