Tag Archives: olympus

I Really Want…

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Dangerous words for a photographer. Gear Acquisition Syndrome, as some call it, is a catalyst for stifled creativity.

I can’t shoot x because I don’t have y and z. Yes that’s zipped around my mind a few times and it’s never healthy.

At the moment it has entered my consciousness a little because this month’s photo club subject is ‘Unposed People’ and suddenly NONE of my cameras are suitable for street photography.

The Trip 35 isn’t accurate enough at focusing.
The Panasonic GF1 doesn’t have a decent viewfinder.
The D40 isn’t discreet enough.
I wouldn’t be able to focus quick enough on my FE.
The FM2n is manual exposure and I’ll miss loads of shots.
The Canon S95 is too slow.

All true statements but also utter bollocks. I ran two rolls of Superia 200 through the Trip on Saturday and it was perfectly acceptable. I’m obviously just looking for excuses.

I would however quite like a rangefinder camera. A Leica is way out of my price range but I would be more than happy with a Voigtlander R4A (*cough* it’s my birthday in June *cough*) and a 35mm lens.

For those that don’t know, a rangefinder camera has a small body, no internal mirror box and uses a focusing method unlike an SLR in that you don’t look through the lens. In the viewfinder there is a small patch in the middle which essentially has two images on top of each other. When you focus with the lens one moves across the other and when they are aligned the image is correctly focused.

Having no mirror box means that the camera can be smaller than an SLR and also allows for a shorter lens to film/sensor distance which in turn makes for smaller lenses.

Rangefinders can be a bit weird if you’re used to SLRs. Composing through a viewfinder which doesn’t show the actual framing of a shot that will appear on the film/sensor is disconcerting. There are frame lines in the viewfinder which give an approximation of your composition but if you use a lens for which there is no frame line, you’ll also need an external viewfinder. You could end up having to look through one finder to compose and one to focus. Not very fast then!

That said, pre-focusing can help for street photography and with a wide lens like a 21mm or 18mm the depth of field would be fairly huge – enough not to worry about focusing too carefully.

If I had the cash I would get a Voigtlander R4A, a 12mm and a 35mm and go shooting. As that would set me back a couple of grand I think I’ll make do with my £49 Olympus Trip!

Revitalised

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A new year, lots of new resolutions that last mere days. I didn’t bother with any as I don’t see an arbitrary point in time as the catalyst to start afresh.

Having trudged through January,

always the darkest and dankest month, and fought off bronchitis during February, now is the time to get back into my photography in a big way.

Whilst idle with bronchitis I did muster the energy to have a look through my camera kit and give some of the more used bodies a bit of a clean. Nothing major, just a few cotton buds to lift the dust buried in the cracks and grooves. My black FM2n bodies look clean and sleek whilst the FE is bright and shiny. The FE is still missing a screw, but then aren’t we all?

So what’s next? Well I’m going up to Nottingham in a couple of weeks so will no doubt take my FE and possibly an FM2n as well, so I can use two lenses without having to swap. The 50mm f/1.8 on the FE and the 24mm f/2 on the FM2n ought to do it. I shall probably stick with Ilford XP2 400 black and white film as it’s what I’ve got the most of.

I said I’d be getting back into it in a big way, didn’t I? Well maybe not that big, using just two SLRs and a few rolls of film, but it’s been so long since I did any proper shoots that this will feel big by comparison.

I also need to get back into street photography. The Olympus Trip 35 I have is perfect for that. It’s small, easy to use, discreet and super fast to shoot with. I’m thinking Trafalgar Square, the South Bank and the intermediary areas for some reasonably good shots to get me back in to the swing of things.

Normally this is a time where I would be pining for new kit, but who wants a Nikon D800 with hundreds of annoying menu items, buttons and far too many megapixels when an FE, a 50mm and a roll of film will more than suffice?

The death of the DSLR

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Well not quite, but we’re not a million miles from it. It’s only a matter of time.

In the early days of digital SLRs they weren’t targeted, let alone priced, at the consumer market and if you wanted digital it would have been a compact of some sort. Canon’s 300D (Digital Rebel in the US) was the first sub-$1000 DSLR and set about a shift in the market, where suddenly your average Joe could just about afford a digital SLR.

Since then all manner of DSLRs have been made available for as little as £300-400 new. Of the traditional camera companies, Nikon, Pentax, and Olympus joined Canon in marketing quality and affordable DSLRs for the consumer and were soon joined by other electronics companies such as Samsung (in partnership with Pentax) and Sony (using the Minolta SLR framework).

Compact cameras have been nowhere near the usability or quality of DSLRs primarily due to the poor quality of small sensors. However, Panasonic, Olympus, Samsung, Sony, Pentax and even Nikon have all released mirror-less interchangeable lens camera systems to challenge the status quo. Panasonic and Olympus have become champions of the Micro Four Thirds system whilst Samsung and Sony have stepped sideways and produced a hybrid of a hybrid. Their NX and NEX systems, respectively, have no mirrors/prisms but retain an APS-C sensor and use lenses smaller than that of their full size DSLR counterparts.

Micro Four Thirds (aka M4/3) took the industry by storm and their cameras sold very well. Panasonic have three tiers of M4/3 bodies whilst Olympus have many variations of their original EP-1, which all appear to be very similar. (I have to admit to not being a fan of Olympus aside of their Trip 35).

The beauty of the mirror-less system is that the lenses are smaller than on full size DSLRs, there is no mirror or prism to bulk out the camera body and since the flange distance (between the sensor and the mount) is a lot shorter than other systems, all manner of adapters are available to use virtually any lens.

All of a sudden people who would have stepped up from a compact to a DSLR are not jumping so far and are grabbing small interchangeable lens systems with both hands. Incredibly there are even those who are trading in their top of the range DSLR systems for smaller mirror-less cameras. Prior to the introduction of the M9, Leica fans were picking up mirror-less cameras and using their Leica lenses as a cheap way to go digital with M-mount lenses without paying over the odds for an M8.

Mirror-less camera systems look like they are the future. Most are reasonably priced, they all allow for the use of third-party lenses of all ages and types and they are the perfect ‘bridge’ between DSLRs and compacts.

My hope is that whether DSLRs or Compact System Cameras end up as the most popular choice, photographers are sure of what they actually need and not what they think they want. The financial pain of buying what you ‘want’ and then switching to what you actually need lasts a long time.

If I could go back to August 2008, I would have bought a Nikon FM3a, a Nikon
50mm f/1.2 AI lens and a bucket load of film.

Don’t do what I did.