So why bother, really? Photography, I mean. Spending hours sifting through literally thousands of of globs digital dross in the hope of finding some kind of gem - always assuming I be able to recognise a gem if I found one, and of course ignoring the point that the question should be addressed before pressing the shutter. It often feels more like an obssessive compulsion, this hobby of mine, rather than a source of satisfaction and fulfilment. I do usually enjoy the process of taking the photos, but that may be more to do with place than process. And when it all comes down to it, I’m left feeling that it is all chaotic, purposeless, blindly repetitive: in summary, I just haven’t got a clue. At all.

Successful photography has direction and theme. In my opinion although individual photos may be successful, even greatly so, successful photographers need to demonstrate, repeatedly, that they can assemble a coherent body of work. They need to be able to convince the audience that they have pursued a well formulated intention. Throwing together a few photos after the act just doesn’t cut it. In other words, developing a conscious style is fundamental, and that’s where I really run into the buffers.

I’m pretty sure than any style I might be perceived to have is dictated by the camera. I mean, I’m pretty likely to take 4:3 ratio photos with an Olympus DSLR, and I’m going to tend to go for well lit and/or fairly immobile subjects.  I suppose I could argue that it was a conscious choice, but really, I just like the physical look, feel and style of the E-1 and it just carried on from there.

With the double blows of broadband internet and affordable digital cameras, photography has become very, very competitive, and is becoming much more about the photographer than the photograph. In fact there’s precious little danger of the camera being more important than the photographer these days - the camera is just another prop for the narcissistic. Just take a look at the most popular accounts on the major photography sites, and tell me that it isn’t all about ego and self-promotion. I mean frankly, are Rebekka’s photos that awesome ? Basically, no, they’re pretty average, actually sub-average considering the raw material she’s got to work with. And I don’t have anything against her (well, apart from the fact that she irritates the hell out of me), it’s just an example - but really, her fame has more to do with her, shall we say, personal characteristics, than her photography.

Whatever. Should it bother me? No. Does it? Well, clearly it does, to some degree.

The problem is there is just so much pressure to compete, and the sheer impossibility to stand out, or to do anything unique, or be part of any kind of meaningful community, is just wearing me down.

Of course, I’m starting to ramble. I’m losing the thread. I’m engaging in unwarranted and unfair diatribes against a person I don’t know in any way. I guess it’s symptomatic of the frustration of being unable to progress, unable to get noticed, unable to decide if I want to get noticed, and unable to decide if what I do has any merit.

Hey. Maybe I should buy a new lens.

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.

Hmm…

For reasons that will become clear in a forthcoming post, I’ve been using Iridient RAW Developer quite a lot recently, which is always a pleasure.

Just now out of curiosity I decided to compare IRD’s interpretation of a RAW file with Aperture’s. I was actually more interested in sharpening (and IRD won, easily), but I ended up getting sidetracked by what looked like a pretty large colour shift introduced by levels in Aperture.

This is a crop of the photo I was playing around with (Olympus E-3 RAW, unadjusted):

It looks pretty much identical in both programs at default settings. Well actually if you look closely, IRD has slightly more detail, but that’s not the issue here.

Here’s the image with Level adjustments in the Luminance channel in Aperture:

And here’s the same thing in Raw Developer, or at least an approximation using a Lightness curve:

It looks to me that Raw Developer has nicely retained the color balance, but Aperture has introduced a pretty drastic magenta cast.  It may be that my assumption that Lightness=Luminance is wrong, but I tried the same thing in RGB and got pretty much the same result. And of course my curve is not a perfectly accurate match of Aperture’s levels settings, but still, we’re not talking minor details here. The colour shift is huge.

I guess it’s all down to taste, but even so, it is easier to adjust to taste when you’re starting from an unadulterated baseline…

Addendum: after a bit more investigation, I noticed two things: 1, Aperture doesn’t actually appear to offer level adjustment in the Luminance channel. The Luminance / RGB options just change the underlying histogram display. The fact that the edit points stay the same seems to confirm this, although I could well be talking rubbish. 2, I can replicate the RAW Developer result by sticking to the Exposure and Contrast slider in Aperture. The lesson seems to be to treat Levels with caution.

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.

So I cracked. It’s mainly his fault, but also the ongoing stress of carrying large camera bags through airports and on planes, not to mention on my back, has been getting to me.

This, coupled with a really irresistible price for an Olympus E-P2 with EVF, finally made be think, well, why not ? I can always sell it, quite conceivably at a profit, if I don’t like it.

So far, I’m quite impressed. It was pretty easy to work out how to get to grips with it, since it’s the 4th Olympus digital camera I’ve owned, and the menu logic (or lack thereof) is pretty consistent.

I’m not totally taken with the collapsible 14-45mm lens, especially the “collapsible” bit. It’s just one more thing to get in the way of getting the shot. I’m also quite surprised how loud the shutter is. And I hate, but really hate, the stupid green light around the power button. This camera is supposed to be discrete FFS!! At least Ricoh provided a firmware update to disable the similar light on the GRD2. I can only hope that Olympus will do the same.

As for image quality, well it’s pretty much what I expected. So far I haven’t done any back to back comparisons, but I can’t imagine they will contradict what everybody else says - it’s a bit better than the E-3. I can’t use Aperture for RAW processing, as it doesn’t support the camera, so I’ve returned to Iridient Raw Developer without much regret.

Certainly it is an eminently portable camera, and the kit lens seems quite nice.  I’m not going to add anything else until I get more used to it.  The EVF is ok, I suppose. Apparently it’s the best anybody has ever seen, which is nice, but honestly it can’t hold a candle to the E-3’s 100% OVF.  But it gets the job done.

Early morning grab shot with the E-P2