19th November 2010 North Hobart

A couple more shots from the exhibition hosted at The Friends’ School.

Inspired by the amazing art and good wine I was in a creative frenzy snapping shots randomly at everything. Wiebke’s infectious giggling and laughing did nothing to curb my enthusiasm.

I was surprised in the cold light of a sober and later day to see that some of the shots looked OK

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19th November 2010 Nth Hobart

The Friends’ School in North Hobart hosted an exhibition of students’ art work.

Above is a photo of part of the display that Wiebke’s daughter Hannah exhibited.

Wiebke and I were both slightly sloshed and laughing a lot. I was mostly occupied with taking photos, at strange angles and in macro of the art works. I was impressed with the exhibits and the student artists (that is, artists who happen to be students); we talked with several of them.

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12th September 2010 Creekton Falls

This is the face behind Poohduck – or the face that you will rarely see because it is mostly at the business end of the camera.

I took these photos on a bushwalk we did together. Andrew asked me if I could write something about them for his website.

We share two of the same hobbies:  bush walking and photography. These hobbies are a great blend – or so it seems.

Sometimes we don’t get a lot of walking done, because we get caught up taking photos, then we run out of daylight, and have to turn back.

The good thing about this is that we always have a reason to do the same walk over and over again

Andrew lives in the beautiful Huon Valley in Tasmania, where there are lots of temperate rainforest and waterfalls.

We both love water and don’t mind getting wet. Andrew tries to keep his camera dry, but the camera spends most of its time on a tripod drying out after walks. You can see water spots on my lens in both these shots.

He will get into tricky places to get a good shot.

Once he was perched on a log over a rushing waterfall, and he slipped into the water up to his neck. He managed to keep his camera held high and dry over his head.

When Andrew stops to photograph something, I will look around and find something to photograph myself. When I don’t find anything, I start taking pictures of Andrew.

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23rd October 2010 Adamsons Peak

The photo is actually from near the summit of Mt Hartz from a walk there on the 29th August, but it will serve for this post. I have some photos from the walk we did yesterday (23rd October), but no landscape type shots. Why? Because it was a white out. Visibility was flat white

I’d attempted to get to Adamsons Peak a few times, but always left too late and found too much to photograph along the way. This time my adventure / photography partner Wiebke came along, and we only had a couple of photography stops.

I wore shorts – the forecast was 17 and fine.

It rained.

It snowed.

It hailed.

There were periods of beautiful sunshine, when a hole would suddenly appear in the seemingly impenetrable cloud cover.

We spent most of the walk with our feet in water. The tracks were like little creeks; while we were walking up, the water was running down.

It is beautiful. We plan to go back there and set up camp at the ruins of a hut; there is a formiddable rock wall that provides protection against the prevailing wind (gail ). It looks a good area for further exploration.

Beneath the penultimate summit, we found a huge rock jutting out from the side of the mountain. We had lunch beneath this and watched the curtains of falling sleet being formed into a myriad of flowing patterns by competing winds. Before we finished lunch, all this cleared and we had an uninterrupted view of the Huon Valley and the distant sea.

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21st November 2009, Sullivan’s Cove

These were taken a while ago, but today is Christmas day.

Wiebke took the one of me above, I took the one of her below.

I think I was shooting a seagull poking it’s head over the top of the wall.

Wiebke is huddled up on the ground to look through the view finder for a low shot of me taking a low shot of her. One of the advantages of my camera is it has flip out screen

I hope you all enjoy your day.

Popularity: 51% [?]

21st November 2009, Murray St crossing (between the malls).

I am a hypocrite!

I bought a panasonic G1 twin lens kit. This is after I complained buckets loads about how they have made it so that you can’t use the cheaper generic batteries in their cameras.

But, the camera on paper really satisfys  my photographic needs, mostly.

Shortcomings:

Firstly, it is power hungry. I have three batteries; I think I will buy another two. I paid $115 for each of the extra two on ebay – they are about $180 here. There is absolutely no justification for this price. The good news is, I have updated my camera with a version of the 1.4 firmware that apparently lets you continue using the generic batteries. So I will take a gamble and buy a couple of $15 generic batteries and hope they work. Thankyou to Steve from rangefinder forums for supplying the firmware.

Second, this camera has a useless implementation of what Canon calls Flexizone. This is where you can put the focus point wherever you like for the shot. It is so retarded on the Panasonic that I use focus lock instead.

Third, I really miss lack of macro and a narrow depth of field. Both my kit lenses are dark – the 14-45 starts at 3.5, the 45-200 starts at 4. Eventually I will buy a third lens, the 45mm macro f2.8 panasonic / leica lens. This will do for low light shooting, portraiture, and macro. It is about a $1000 au though, and not yet available in Australia.

Fourth, after all the research I did, I bought it online. Then found a review which shows that the subsequent model (GH1) handles noise at high iso much better. Since then there has been a lot of online discussion about this. But the GH1 is $1000 more expensive and it comes with a lens I don’t want (14-140mm). I’m also not interested in video.

Good points (some of them):

I had this camera for about a month sitting on the lounge floor in its box doing nothing. I was disinterested
in my new toy and was still using my powershot. Fortunately, Wiebke (the great looking woman with the camera in the photo above) has also just bought a new camera. She bought a canon eos 450 with the 18-55mm kit lens, a 50mm macro, and a 50mm prime. She has been overflowing with enthusiasm – it is her enthusiasm that finally got me using the new camera.

I haven’t been reading up on the manual or anything like I usually do. I’ve just been trying to do what I want to do, then hitting the manual to find out how to do it.

I do like the image quality. I haven’t even considered using my powershot since. I like focus tracking; this is great for following birds or people that are moving about a bit. It has its limitations, but if something is not moving too fast, it is great.

I use focus lock a lot, so that I can compose the picture how I want. On my powershot I used flexizone most of the time – putting the focus area on one of the four magic composition spots (rule of thirds).

The big zoom! 45-200mm. On a four thirds camera (the G1), this is equivalent to 90-400mm. I theorised long ago about using a long zoom for street photography, to go against the common trend of fast wide angle or prime lenses. I love it. When I’m walking around town I have the big zoom on. The shot above is at full zoom (400mm equiv).

The fold out screen and live view.  Yesterday I was kneeling above my camera photographing seagulls on the ground; Wiebke was contorting herself to get down behind the camera so that she could see to compose.

Unlike slr cameras, this camera uses contrast detection for focussing all the time. So, live view, as in a compact digital, is fast. Also, apparently with contrast detect focussing there are no front or back focus issues.

There is a lot I just haven’t looked at yet with this camera.

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25th July 2009, close to Geeveston.

Wiebke is cold, wet, and hungry.

But, it’s only a problem because she doesn’t have her camera to play with; it’s getting repaired.

The lens guy who had an initial look at the camera said “there’s something pink and sticky in there” (yeah, a pink stick). Wiebke answered “really?” with a concerned look so that the lens guy gets the impression that she is a caring camera owner. Or, was it because if she appeared to be ignorant of how “something pink and sticky” got in there, she wouldn’t have to explain how “something pink and sticky” did get in there?

All good photographers can eat fairy floss while framing a shot with the camera to their eye, fight through the fact that everything looks like a pink mist, and take the shot anyway. Like a seasoned war correspondent this is what Wiebke did. It was only when she went to move the camera that she found the front of it was embedded in the fairy floss, and the lens would no longer close.

So, I’m leaping from slippery slimy log to slippery slimy log like I’m wearing ice skates instead of gum boots, taking photos from various angles with a big grin on my face, while she is trying really really hard to give me the evil eye.

I can’t stop grinning because I’m thinking about the fairy floss in her camera.

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