Thanksgiving Photos Through An Underwhelming Lens

We had a nice big group of family for Thanksgiving at our house. Its no longer possible to have four generations present, and there’s some sadness in that.  But three generations were well represented, and the youngest generation is gaining in numbers!  

The 20 pound Butterball turkey was cooked (as always) on a charcoal Weber, and it was its usual success.  And with everyone contributing their favorite recipes (Laurie prepared a signup sheet earlier in the month), you can imagine the assortment of good food we had.  Not the least of which were the four desert pies!

[By the way, one advantage of cooking the turkey on the grill is that it frees up the oven!]

Turkey day photography:

In preparation for the day, I put together three combinations of cameras. 

Left to right: In my opinion, the best quality images can be expected to come from the Olympus E-M1 and 12-40 F2.8 zoom.  Next in image quality would be, arguably, the Sony A6000 with 28-70 full frame kit F3.5-F5.6 zoom.  And bringing up the rear (on the right) is definitely the Sony NEX 5R with the very compact and marginally sharp 16-50mm F3.5-F5.6 kit lens. All were equipped with flashes capable of bouncing.  (If a flash doesn’t bounce I won’t use it indoors.)

I mention all of this about the cameras, because in spite of having my best gear available, I nevertheless always picked up the last one on the list, the Sony NEX 5 with kit lens.  Looking back to Thursday, I can only conclude that all things considered at the time it was the best combo for the job.

That might be hard to imagine, but clearly getting the best image quality was not an overriding concern.  All these cameras and lenses take images that are “good enough” to document our Thanksgiving celebration. The Olympus and a6000 would have given better image quality, but who cares.  The Olympus with the F2.8 lens could have given me the shallowest DOF, but who cares.  The Olympus flash can bounce left or right, or rearward; but I didn’t want to think about that.  You see, I was just making snapshots. The results will be viewed on computer screens, or on cell phones or tablets… or, on this blog at no bigger than 750 x 600 pixels! I suppose I could have just used my iPhone camera but I felt its equivalent 30mm wide angle lens was too limiting.

So, because image quality was not my number one priority, I went with the smallest and least intrusive of the three combos.  I find even with family members that the smallest camera keeps things informal and casual. This is especially true when using a flash.  Keeping the camera and waist or chest level also helps, as people these days are accustomed to that sort of photography.  

It would have been nice to avoid a flash altogether, but I needed the extra light.  It allowed me to get the ISO down from 3200 (ambient light) to 1600, generally.  I could have increased the flash output further to decrease ISO further, but at that point things start to look a bit unnatural (i.e. the deer in the headlights effect). Neither of my Sony’s have a silent shutter.  The Olympus does.  But since I was using a flash, a silent shutter would not have helped me be stealthy.

Again, the images below are all snapshots.  These shots and a bunch more I haven’t shown here will help us remember who was with us this year and what we ate. (Always take a lot of food closeups... so you can easily recall the menu items from prior years.)

The first image below is my favorite.  

Car photography: My new interest - Part 1

The last few weekends I have been attending automobile "lawn events" at the Larz Anderson Automobile Museum in Brookline, MA.  Each Sunday for six months there is a different theme; for example, "Swedish Day" or "Triumph Day".  At each of the four events I have attended so far this year, by the time you walk in the gate at 10 a.m. ($10 admission fee or $30 annual membership) perhaps 50 cars are parked and "displayed" on the lawn in front of the museum.

The museum doesn't own the cars.  They are privately owned and come from all over.  I saw one car with Ontario plates.  Many of them are show cars.  For example, last weekend I saw a 1959 Mercedes 190SL with 230 original miles on it.  Others, like some of the muscle cars I saw on another weekend, are definitely "driving" cars.  This was made obvious at the end of the show as muscle cars drove off into the sunset to the sound of screeching tires and deep-throated engines.

Anyway... I knew very little about car photography when I attended my first event.  I still don't know much.  I do recall starting out by taking documentation or record shots using my Sony NEX camera and the 16-50mm kit lens.  I was taking wide angle shots of the entire lawn area and images of single cars.  But I soon thought it would be more interesting to take pictures of people looking at cars (I secretly want to be a "street" photographer) or pictures isolating small closeup pieces of cars, like a wheel or name plate.

Starting with the second show, I added my Olympus to my gear and affixed a long lens with fast aperture.  The shallow depth of field pictures I was then able to take will be included in my next post, Part 2.

Wide angle shots at the top; closeups at the bottom

Sony NEX 6 with 16-50mm

 

My favorite NEX-6 image from Maine (with the 16-50 kit lens)

In my post yesterday I shared a few of the images I took on vacation, showing the extremes of the 16-50 E-mount kit lens.  What I mean by extremes is the 16mm and 50mm ends of the zoom range.

The picture below, taken in the center of Castine, Maine, is one of my favorite pictures from this trip.  I'm not much of a "street" photographer, so I felt very anxious as I lined up this shot, all-the-while thinking the man on the bench would turn and look at me, causing me to be completely embarrassed.  Well, even standing in the middle of the street, I got away with it.  I took the shot and quickly turned around.

I got what I wanted. On the left I wanted the gold lettered bank sign and entry door, and on the right side I wanted the one way sign.  I thought it was neat the way the man on the bench was looking to the right and at the empty bench, and the one way street sign was aiming to the left.

I don't think anyone I've shown this to noticed the reflection of at least one automobile in the bank window; it looks to me like a white Honda CRV.  I would have preferred that no cars be reflected in the window.  Oh, well.

This image didn't come up in Lightroom yesterday when I filtered for 16mm and 50mm images.  The exif file shows 46mm.

1/100th second, F6.3, ISO 100, 46mm (69mm-e)

Sony NEX-6 and Olympus E-M5 return from a Maine vacation

In a post I wrote before our week-long vacation on the coast of Maine, I remarked how my NEX-6 (with Jim Buchanan accessory grip) just feels more comfortable and fun to use than does my Olympus E-M5.  This preference for the NEX is in spite of the  higher spec (IMO) of the Olympus.

With this preference in the back of my mind, I selected the NEX with kit 16-50 to be my go-to setup for the vacation.  I completely dismissed the thrashing this lens has received on the Internet.

I took the Olympus E-M5, too, and snapped on the reg43 70-300 for long shots. You will see in boat, yacht, and schooner images below why a reach of 300mm (600mm equivalent when mounted on an Olympus) is beneficial.  The Olympus reg43 70-300 is a very useful lens, as it not only has a long reach but excellent close-up capabilities.

These pictures demonstrate the 70-300's flexibility.  (I don't know if the same is true for the Olympus m43 75-300.)  That being said, it is very slow and noisy to focus on the E-M5.

Olympus E-M5 with reg43 70-300

Coneflower shot at 149mm (298mm equiv.)

Focus was on the eyes. Shot at 202mm (404mm equiv.)

Crab spider stalking prey.  149mm (248mm equiv.)

Shot at 158mm focal length (316mm equiv.)

Shot at 300mm (600mm equiv.)

Shot at 239mm (478mm equiv.)

Shot at 239mm (478 equiv.)

 Sony NEX-6 with kit 16-50mm

As I wrote at the top of the post, the NEX-6 and kit lens was my go-to combo.  Other than the few shots above with the Olympus, the NEX was used for all the usual travel and landscape stuff.  I am very happy with the much maligned 16-50 E-mount zoom, though admittedly all but one or two will never be printed.  To me, if just viewing on a HD TV or computer screen is all you are looking for, just about any lens made today will be sufficient.

The 16-50 turned out to be a perfect range 3x zoom for my travel needs.  25% of my images were taken fully zoomed in at 16mm (24mm-equiv) and 25% were taken fully zoomed out at 50mm (75mm-equiv).  Everything else was spread out pretty equally throughout the range.

[If I could design a 5x zoom it would be a 16-80.  Others might prefer a wider angle instead of more telephoto capabilities, but I think a little bit of extra reach (60-80mm range) would be good for all the candid portraits I like to do of my grandchildren.  I am actually very excited about the newly announced (expensive) Zeiss 16-70 F4.]

Below are samples of the kind of compositions you get at 16mm (24mm equiv) and 50mm (75mm equivalent). Note that I tend to compose "loosely", which requires a bit of more exacting cropping in post-processing.

16mm (24mm equiv.)

Bass Harbor Lighthouse

Castine, Maine Post Office

Near Surrey, Maine

50mm (75mm equiv.)

The 16-50 performs nicely for closeups at 50mm.
Do you see the caterpillar camouflaged against
the lichen on the rock?

Sony NEX does blue awesomely

I am a big fan of blue.  In the 1950's I fell in love with my Dad's Kodachromes.  Most of the ones I remember where taken in the American West as we drove through the National Parks on our way to his new job on the West Coast. I remember nothing but sunny days. Ever since viewing his slides from Yellowstone, Bryce, Death Valley and Yosemite, I have loved deep blue sky and puffy clouds.  He never did use Velvia, but when using Kodachrome he taught me to under expose by about 1/3 (or was it 2/3) stop to bring out the richness of the sky.  Of course, the rest of the slide looked underexposed, but I don't think I really noticed.  Today, with digital, I am more likely to ignore his advise and to "expose to the right".

I am very picky about the color blue.  If you swing blue one way you get a magenta cast.  If you swing it the other way, it gets a bit green.  I don't like either.

On this day, I was thrilled with the results I got from the NEX.  For the images in this post, I used the NEX5r with the 16-50 kit lens. I used no filters. I own the NEX6 also, but as far as I can tell the results are identical.  I used the Lightroom landscape sharpening preset for each of them, and the first image (the only vertical image)  has a +.4 EV lightroom exposure adjustment.  I used the default color profile (Adobe Standard).  Some of the images have been cropped.  On several I used the shadows slider to brighten up the dark areas.  Other than that I did nothing in post processing.

There's nothing great about any of these images.  They were all taken yesterday along the highway while doing a day trip to Vermont to see our brand spanking new grandson.  The weather here in New England has been terrible in my view.  We are in a heat wave and the humidity is torturous.  So spending the day in an air-conditioned car and an air-conditioned hospital was a good coping strategy.  Obviously I had a camera with me for the baby, but I just couldn't help taking a "sky shot" whenever we stopped.

I am looking forward (not today) to comparing these results with what I get from my Olympus E-M5.  I know there is an entire cult of Olympus jpeg fans who say the Olympus blue is unique and spectacular.  However, I shoot RAW, and as far as I know Olympus has never shared its color profile with Adobe.  So, I am left with what I can do in Lightroom and Photoshop.  I have created my own color profile using ColorChecker Passport, but it is almost identical to Adobe Standard.

By the way, like many, I have found viewing online photos with Internet Explorer yields poor results.  On my monitor (which is calibrated), Internet Explorer makes the sky too green.  It is too saturated.  Others have said that this phenomenon occurs only when the viewer has a high gamut monitor (which I do.)  But regardless, I find that Chrome gives results that are color-accurate.

So... BEST VIEWED IN CHROME AND NOT IN INTERNET EXPLORER

As the saying goes, "your mileage may vary".  But to me, this is what blue should look like.  No green tint.  No magenta tint.