Behind the Scene: The Leopard Lacewing Butterfly

Over the last several years I have been collecting quite a number of butterfly images.  This is thanks to a nearby butterfly house.  This does feel a little bit like cheating, however.  Sort of like visiting a zoo to get photographs of African animals.  On the other hand, the local butterfly house is quite a bit cheaper than traveling to exotic butterfly havens like Costa Rica. 

One of my new projects is to identify and label my collection of images.  A favorite of mine is called the Leopard Lacewing.  In doing some research online, one Web site called this one of the seven most beautiful butterflies in the world.  Who am I to argue with that!

What I like so much about the Lacewing butterfly is the ornate underside.  This is a bold pattern with lots of dots and bars, and many colors. With a little bit of "fill flash" from a flash with diffuser mounted on my camera's hot shoe, the colors come out very nicely

This is my most recent image, taken a couple of weeks ago. I think this specimen
stands out nicely against an all-green foreground and background.
As I recall, the flip-out display on my Olympus E-M5 made it easy to hold the camera
at waist height to capture the butterfly at this angle.
1/200th; F8, ISO400 and a touch of fill flash.



Topsides the Lacewing is also beautiful and I have posted an image below showing the vibrant top of the wings.  The bright orange indicates that this is a male.  Apparently the female is a bit drab, with gray instead of orange.  I don't seem to have a picture of a female. I'll have to keep my eye open for one next time.

The Leopard Lacewing is found in India and Southern China, down through the Malay Peninsula and Singapore.

1/650th; F8, ISO400 and a touch of fill flash.
(If I were doing it all over, I'd drop it to ISO200 and 1/325th)



Favorite Stuff: Duluth Trading Company's "Working Man's Vest"

I'm a big fan of Duluth Trading Company. At Christmas time, it's my primary source for useful gifts. It's not well known but their stuff is excellent, and like many classy online stores they unconditionally guarantee their products.

Last year at this time, in preparation for a two week adventure to the Canadian Rockies, I purchased a "working man's vest" on the recommendation of a colleague. I was/am very happy with this purchase. This garment has pockets everywhere, both inside and outside. There is mesh on the sides and in the back, so it feels very light and comfortable even in summer.  (Warning: they do run big.)

What prompted this post is that I received an email this week (I'm on their email list for special sale items) showing the vest for $10 off. I have no idea how long this sale runs.

Below is a screenshot from the email.

No coupon code is needed. But the $10 off only seems to work if you go to this link:

http://www.duluthtrading.com/store/mens/mens-collections/top-mens-picks/82014.aspx

If you can afford it, I recommend ordering two sizes and returning one after you try them both on.

Sony NEX-5R deal of the century

I have never bought something more quickly than when I saw the following deal on Amazon, thanks to a post from another photographer on one of the Sony online forums.  In fact I ordered it so quickly that I forgot to change the default postage to the "free" shipping option.

The screenshot below is what I bought.  This is Sony's latest NEX-5 series camera.  For $328 I wonder if this was a misprint?  Regardless, they honored the price. 



This second screenshot is the same thing, as advertised the next day! This second price is pretty good, too, if you find some of the filler items in the box to be beneficial.  For me, only the second battery (a generic worth about $15) and the 32gb memory card (worth about $22) are worth keeping.

This really is one small camera.  And to think it has the Sony 16mp APS-C sensor in it!  I am not too sure I am happy with the sharpness of the 18-55mm kit lens but I can easily sell it on Amazon or EBay.  I may keep it, I may not keep it.  I'm not sure yet.

What I have done is put the "pancake" 16-50mm zoom on it, which I already own.  This makes a wonderful alternative to a compact camera.  I've tested the 16-50mm lens against my go-to compact camera, the Panasonic LX5 and found that the 16-50 outperformed the LX5 at all common focal lengths and F-stops.  This testing was done on another Sony camera, the NEX-6; however the sensor is the same on both the NEX-6 and NEX-5R.

How will I use this camera? 

At least for now, the NEX-5R and 16-50mm pancake zoom will be slotted as my "grab" camera.  I have a small padded fanny pack that is a perfect size for the camera with lens attached, spare battery, and the auxillary flash.  I do have one concern ... if any of my kids see me wearing a fanny pack, I'll never hear the last of it.  haha.

Butterflies with the E-M5 plus kit 40-150mm plus Metz 50 AF-1 flash plus deflector

In April I made two trips to Westford's Butterfly Place.  I have been there quite a few times over the last few years, but find that I am still able to "capture" new varieties.  Hopefully, too, I can get better and better images of some of the varieties I already have in my growing "collection" of tropical butterfly photos.

Earlier this year I acquired for $100 a brand spanking new Olympus 40-150mm zoom for m43.  It works rather nicely with a 3 foot focusing distance when zoomed to 100mm to 150mm.  At 150mm I can fill the screen with a composition 4" across.  I usually start with the lens at 150mm and zoom out if I want to add more environment to the image.  Of course, I can always back up.

My standard lens for flower and butterflies had been the 70-300mm designed for reg43 bodies.  But on the m43 body it focuses slowly and noisily.  That's okay for flowers but not so much for things that move. The 70-300 is sharpest when zoomed to 100-150mm, and focuses at about 3 feet.  But it has slightly more magnification than the 40-150.  At 150mm I can fill the screen with a composition that is 3" across.

Nevertheless, I think the 40-150 for m43 is a better choice for me.  It focuses fast and quietly and is very lightweight, which I notice after my (typically) two hour butterfly sessions.  By the way, the 40-150 is light because it is all plastic, even the lens mount.  I'd rather have a metal lens mount, but for $100 I have nothing to complain about.  As far as I can tell the optics are excellent in the range I am using for butterflies and at my preferred aperture setting of F8.  Though I don't get quite the magnification I have with the 70-300, a bit of cropping isn't particularly problematic with the 16 megapixel sensor of the E-M5.  When I started with the 70-300, it was on the Olympus E-520 which was a 10 megapixel sensor.

I used a flash during both April sessions.  The flash is a Metz 50 AF-1 to which I attached a cheap deflector.  I also have some other deflectors I expect to experiment with.

I used manual exposure settings.  Almost always I shoot at 1/250 and F8 and whatever ISO is required to provide underexposure of about one stop.  I then set the flash at TTL.  I use flash exposure compensation if adjustments need to be made.

Below are my two favs from April.  Neither specie was in my collection so I was happy to have seen these specimens and also to have found them in perfect condition.

Emerald Swallowtail

White Peacock

The rest of the images from my two April outtings can be viewed on my Web site, here:

9 images from April 7 at

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p581355731

9 images from April 20 at

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p689652059

Behind the Scene: Back-lit Tulips and Crocuses

During the last weekend of March I made my first 2013 spring visit to Tower Hill Botanic Gardens.  This is where I get most of my flower photos. 

They have beautiful indoor displays of container planted flowers during the cold months.  Some of the containers are two feet in diameter and contain plants that are 10 to 15 feet high.  Outside, the gardens are vast but there were just a few crocuses popping through while I was there.



A fresh Crocus with a second
one ready to follow suit





So, this was an in between time of year. Outside, the snow was barely gone and there really was not much to photograph.  In addition the sun was bright and the sky cloudless, resulting in very harsh and unattractive lighting.

Inside, I was attracted to a few tulips in containers.  But because the light was very bright and harsh, I just didn't get the shots I wanted; there were too many dark shadows.

But tulips do well as back-lit subjects.  Too, because the colors are often soft, I think they look good in pictures when areas are purposely left out-of-focus.

To get the tulip pictures displayed below, I got down low and aimed upwards into the back sides of a few tulips.  The tiltable LCD of my Olympus E-M5 made it easy to get the camera low and aimed upward, without me having to crawl around on the ground.

The lens I used was the kit 40-150mm lens.  The first image was shot at 123mm and the other two at 150mm.  At 150mm this lens focuses at about 3 feet and will zoom out to capture a 4"- 5"object.  I usually shoot my flowers at F8 and at this lens setting I find the lens to be very sharp.  The price was good, too.  I paid $100 brand new during a one-day "gold box" sale at Amazon.  It's has a plastic lens barrell and plastic lens mount, so is obviously a consumer level lens.  But I find the sharpness to be outstanding and the lens weighs only 5 ounces.

These were my favorites from my March visit to Tower Hill:

The focus point on this image is about 1/3 down from the top and 1/3 in from the right.

 

 



Behind the Scene: Nubble Lighthouse in full daylight

As a serious photographer I am well aware of many of the "rules" of photography.  One of them is that there are two good times to make outdoor images: at sunrise and at sunset, during what are called the golden hours and which include the 30 minutes before and after sunrise and sunset.

I am all in favor of the golden hours, but on this day I decided to follow my rule of photography:  the best time to take a picture is when you are there.

In this case, we were at the lighthouse parking lot at 11:30 am and the sun was as high as it was going to get all day.  This made for dark shadows, but by using the new "shadows" slider in Lightroom 4.0 I was able to brighten up some of the rocks.

Mid-day images can have some advantages on clear days if, like me, you love blue sky and puffy clouds. A polarizer would have been nice, but I didn't have one with me.


This first image is a single image taken with a 28mm-e lens. I cropped a little 
on the left and right and a lot on the top and bottom 
to create an HD aspect ratio of 16:9. 

I've kept this version at a 3:2 aspect ratio so I could keep the rocky foreground
in the picture.  The lighthouse is on an island which is so very close to the mainland,
and this image lets you know that.

This is a 2 shot panorama cropped to HD proportions.
My 28mm-e lens didn't quite cover the area so I overlapped two images.
The main subject is a lot smaller in this composition,
but I like this version the best of the three.
Some may object to placing the buildings in the center,
but there is a certain symmetry in this picture that makes we want to keep the island and
the buildings in the center.  I think the snow draws your eye to the lighthouse first,
which is what I want. I think this images screams for a big print.



Behind the Scene: Nubble Lighthouse at Day's End

 

This has been cropped from the 3 shot 35 megpixel panorama  (seen further below)
that I merged with the help of photoshop.

What I really like about the above scene is that it punctuated a wonderful day of skiing at Sunday River in Bethel, Maine with my daughter.  Thanks to daylight savings, after leaving Bethel at 4pm, I was able to arrive at Nubble Lighthouse on Cape Neddick, Maine by about 6:30.  This was 30 minutes before sunset. 

It was so awesome that I could spend the day skiing (a token picture below) and then hit the coast for a sunset drive.  There are not a lot of places on this earth (I don't imagine) where you can ski a major ski area and then be at the ocean photographing a lighthouse 2 1/2 hours later.



The drive was easy.  I had checked this all out with mapquest before driving from Massachusetts to Maine where my daughter lives.  From exit 7 on the Maine Turnpike (the York exit) it is only a 12 minute drive to the parking lot at the tip of Cape Neddick.  That is where this picture was taken.  The lighthouse itself is separated from the mainland by a narrow spit of water.  I'm not sure, but perhaps at low tide one can walk across.

I wasn't sure I would get a good picture. Though the sky over Sunday River Ski Area had been blue all day long, there were thick high clouds along the coast.  It was very dark when I arrived at the Cape Neddick parking lot.  But it's good to be patient.  With 15 minutes to go until sunset, the sun dropped below the cloud cover in the west and gave 5 minutes of bright light (the sides of the lighthouse and buildings seen here are facing west) before hitting more thick clouds near the horizon.

Taken 7 minutes before the "golden" opportunity seen below.

 

This lighting lasted no more than 5 minutes.
3 shot panorama, hand held, Olympus E-M5, 14-54II lens, F4, 1/125, ISO200



Larger images of all of these can be seen on my Web site here:

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p85652418



Why are the new Olympus primes ugly?

I am not sure what kind of master plan they have at Olympus for the physical appearance of their higher-grade micro 4/3 lenses.  I have no complaints about the optics. I have three of them: 45mm F1.8, 60mm F2.8 macro, and 75mm F1.8.  All these lenses are certainly sharper than I am, and I am sure the same is true for the 12mm F2 and 17mm F1.8. 

But I want my lenses to look good too!

The several lenses I have from my older reg4/3 system were neither attractive nor ugly.  They look like most of the other digital lenses around.  Below, and from left to right they are the 50 F2, 11-22, 70-300 and 14-54II. They aren't exactly identical but they could pass for brothers and sisters.  The 70-300 shows different branding.  It is generally understood that this lens was built for Olympus by Sigma but with Olympus glass. 

Neither ugly nor pretty: 50mm f2, 11-22mm  f2.8-f3.5, 70-300mm f4-f5.6 and 14-54mm II f2.8-3.5



But the new micro 4/3 lenses are a different story, or least when it comes to the lenses I own:  the very nice 45mm, 75mm and 60mm primes.  They are wonderfully sharp lenses and I am happy to own all of them. 

(Having said that, I am not really sure I need all three.  I think I am primarily a zoom guy and as such my main lens for travel and landscapes remains the relatively fast 14-54II F2.8-F3.5, albeit weighing in at over 16 ounces when attached with a lens adapter to my E-M5).

All three are different and look way out of balance (visually that is...IMHO) on the E-M5.  I don't find them attractive. In my view an all-black finish on the 45 and 75 would have gone a long way toward improving the appearance. 

The 45 and 75 are even different shades of silver.  What's up with that.

 

Ugly: 45mm f1.8, 75mm f1.8 and 60mm macro f2.8



Personally, I think these lenses look like poo on the Olympus flagship E-M5

 

What do I think is a  good looking lens? 

Well, I am partial to the design of the old metal lenses.   The Nikkor 58mm F1.4 pictured below is over 50 years old according to my  research using the serial number.  It's been with me since about 1975 after my dad inherited it from a friend, good 'ole Mr. Mason.  On an Olympus (see the Nikkor-to-m4/3 adapter in the picture) this lens equates to a 116mm field of view on a full frame camera.  I've enjoyed this lens taking pictures of my grandchildren in relatively passive settings, especially candid portraits.  I will certainly switch to an autofocus lens for their soccer games.

 

Handsome: Nikon Nikkor 58mm f1.4 from the 1960s.  Very nice for portraits
due to the effective 116mm field of view and sharp center.
The corners are a little soft, but I like the effect.



Behind the Scene: Granddaughter pictures

Until the last year or two I didn't take much interest in "people" shots, other than to use a point-n-shoot to document events like birthdays.  But when I added a 50 year old nikkor lens to a Panasonic GH2 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera some 18 months ago I was amazed at the control of depth of field that a bigger sensor can provide.  And now, with the Sony NEX6 with a sensor that is bigger still, it is really easy to blur the background.

50 year old Nikkor 58mm F1.4 attached to the Sony NEX-6 body via cheap lens adapter





I have much to learn about people photography.  Regardless, I am having fun.

All of these were all taken last November with available light only, in a room with red wallpaper, but I am now finding fun and challenge in using bounce techniques with a single flash (the Metz 50 AF-1).  And of course, when it comes to practice, what can be more fun than photographing your granddaughter.  How can you go wrong with the subject material!



On the NEX6, with its APS-C sized sensor, the old Nikkor 58mm provides an equivalent field of view of 87mm.  Just about perfect for this kind of thing.

 



Since the f-stop is set on the aperature ring of the old Nikkor lens and there is no electrical connection between Nikon lens and the Sony body, I have no exif information to provide me with the aperature used.  Likely it was F2.8.  I'm not sure that was the right choice.  It blurs the background, and I like the way it isolates our granddaughter from her grandmother in the picture of the two of them reading a bit of Curious George. 

But I also see in the bottom image that only one eye is in focus.  Fortunately it is the nearest eye. This may not be a depth of field issue so much as a focusing issue.  Though the NEX system is blessed with "focus peaking" to help in manual focusing, it is still easy to miss focus when shooting at F2.8.  F4 might have been a better choice, but I would have had to bump the ISO to maintain my shutter speed of 1/100th second.  As it was, AutoISO in these images ranged from 640 to 2000 as the shutter speed and f-stop were fixed.



Olympus E-M5: Eyecup is a build quality weakpoint

I know I'm not the first one to lose the eyecup off the Olympus E-M5.  After all, when I called OlympusAmerica to order a replacement, they were out of stock of this $16 item. [It's still out of stock now, a month later.]  Fortunately, I found it at Adorama Camera for $10.  I ordered two.





The first time I lost the eyecup I was on vacation and taking lots of pictures, many of which were in bright sunshine in the middle of the day.  With the sun high in the sky (in was June) I would have to put my hand over my forehead to keep the sun from getting between my eye and the viewfinder.  And after trying that a few times, I switched over to my second camera, a Panasonic GH2.  I didn't view that as a downgrade, as my plan had been to alternate days with these two cameras.

Two days later I found the eyecup, in the bottom of my camera bag.  After losing it again in the camera bag I realized that because the eyecup slides down on two rails on the side of the viewfinder, like a double hung window, it easily snapped up/off if you pull the camera out of your bag with the shoulder strap.  The strap would sometimes slide up over the camera body as you pulled and this would snapped the eyecup upward and off its tracks.

Since both times that I lost the eyecup I soon found it, I didn't think much more about this camera "fault" until this winter when I realized that although the eyecup was intact, I had nevertheless lost the rubber gasket that surrounds the eyecup on three sides.  This again is a weak design.  The rubber gasket was held on with three points of glue.  I think the rubber gasket should be designed to surround the eyepiece, else it be torn off easily.

Eyecup without the rubber gasket.  Usable but I don't want
to scratch my glasses.



Eyecup slides off with upward motion



Anyway, I have now replaced the eyecup with a fresh new one, and I have one more in reserve for the next time I (inevitably) lose it.

Ah, replacement eyecup installed!  Thankfully
Adorama had this item in stock ($10).



By the way, when I called OlympusAmerica they informed me that this was not covered under the warranty and that my problem was not viewed as a manufacturing defect.  (Of course, I feel the manufacturing of the part was just fine; the real problem is the engineering).

... I still love this camera.