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.

Behind the Scene: Yellow Crab Spider

I was thrilled when I captured this scene, a crap spider and its prey. 



Olympus E-M5, 14-54mm zoom, 1/640th, F7.1, ISO400

What was so cool about this is that my wife and I were on our way south into Montana from Alberta, Canada.  The provincial flower of Alberta is the wild rose!  While I don't believe this is a rose,  the fly might very well have landed expecting the yellow center found on wild roses when in fact the center was a yellow spider in-wait.  Or, at least that is how I envision this all unfolding.



Note the yellow center of a wild rose



For the prior week in the Rockies of Canada it seemed I had my 70-300 zoom on my camera at nearly all times, as the wildlife we saw was big and usually far away.  That included mountain goats, long horned sheep, elk, grizzly bears and black bears. I wasn't prepared for photographing wildlife as small and close as this spider!

Just before crossing the border we stopped at a rest area to use the facilities.  I was walking back to the car and saw a patch of pink flowers blowing in the wind.  The spider seemed like a yellow light flashing back and forth on the flower in the breeze. 

I was surprised that something this small could hold on, not only to the spider but to the flower, because it was very gusty and breezy.  My guess is that this little spider is stronger for its weight than a human.

I grabbed my camera from the back seat of the camera and put on the 14-54mm zoom, which has a reasonable closeup feature.  It was actually quite funny watching me move from left to right trying to follow the spider in the wind.  I took what I thought were hit or miss shots, and I worked quickly as I expected the spider and fly to blow off into the wind at any moment.  Fortunately, I ended up with a good selection of sharp images.

Taken 20 minutes after the spider event.

Update 2013-Feb-28:  I just received and email from the son of one of my fishing buddies that has added more light on the subject.  Thank you Ryan Bridge!

The wasp that the Crab Spider has is a Braconid wasp. They're small in size (maybe 1" average).

They typically are a parasitoid upon caterpillars. A good example is the Tomato Hornworm and the little, white cocoons that people find on them (many people think they're eggs). The female wasp deposits 100's of eggs into the living larva. The eggs hatch and the tiny wasp larva feed on the larva from the inside, often after the larva pupates. In most cases, the pupa is totally consumed from within and the wasp larva build cocoons within the confines of the pupa (inside the cocoon in the case of most moths). They'll over winter if necessary and nearly all 100 or so, will emerge in the Spring as adult wasps. Adult Broconid wasps are predatory and typically feed on caterpillars. They do not build nests or hives, but remain solitary.

Therefore, it's not uncommon for the small wasps to be crawling among the plants and flowers, searching for food. Coming in contact with a Crab Spider and thus, becoming a lunch for that spider, isn't all that rare. Crab Spiders have some of the best camouflage of all spiders, as they will patiently sit and wait for an unsuspecting bug of any kind to get within reach. They commonly feed on pollinators, and use the center of a flower as their "hunting blind". Crab Spiders rarely bite humans, but again are somewhat small and usually go unnoticed due to their size and camouflage.

Hope this helps to explain that pic a little better.

-Ryan Bridge

www.RyanTheBugMan.com.

Black and White:Nik Silver Efex Pro:The Bow River

This image has been growing on me.  It is one of several black and whites (actually all were color images converted to black and white after the fact) that I captured one day in June, 2012 while driving south from Jasper, Alberta to Lake Louise.  The day was dark and dreary and the original color image was really rather drab... so it was perfect for experimenting with a black and white conversion.

 

The image above is the black and white as it was first created within Lightroom.  It was just a matter of clicking the button labeled "black and white". I liked it enough to submit it as a 10" x 15" print to my photo club for our February salon.  It received a nice score from the salon judge, Don Toothaker, so maybe that's why the image is growing on me!

However, always helpful, Don did suggest that I play a bit with the sky and background mountains to try to get more detail from that area of the image.  I thought it would be hard to do, because my recollection was that it was quite misty in the distance.  But when I got home from the salon, I opened the image in Lightroom and saw that I had never really done anything to the picture except click on the black and white button, and everything else was set at the usual Lightroom defaults.  I do own Nik filters and was surprised I hadn't tried any of them.  So, before going to bed, I exported the RAW file to Nik Silver Efex Pro as a 16-bit TIFF file and simply clicked on several of the 20 or so presets to find one I liked.  The presets are great.  You can start with any one preset and then make adjustments using a number of sliders. In this case I chose "high key", hit the "okay" button, and the image file popped back into Lightroom.  Simple and sweet.

I'm not sure whether this is what Don had in mind or not, but I absolutely love the result, and I thank him for his suggestion. 



Photoshop CS5 "Content Aware": Sunwapta Falls Revisited

In my last post I showed the following image and lamented about how unfortunate it was that the top tree across the gorge ran right through the middle of the image.  This is Sunwapta Falls in Alberta, Canada.



Of course, it is not the tree's fault that it bisects the image.  Unfortunately, it also runs right through the bottom of the waterfall.

My solution in the last post was to try a bit of cropping off the bottom so as to move the trees down from the middle of the image.  This was accomplished by cropping with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 3:2.  But the fact remains that the top tree runs through the bottom of the waterfall.

Since I have little proficiency in photoshop, I figured this was the best I could do.  But I tried using "Content Aware" in PS5.  It was amazing.  In a total of 10 minutes I was able to remove the tree in question plus another small fallen tree on the right, near the top of the waterfall.  I even removed much of the chain link fence that is at the top of the waterfall on the left.

I like the result much better:



Now I need to decide if cropping at the bottom as shown in the image below, strengthens the image. 

What do you think?