Know your Rights

Our ever growing nanny state and the interference by our Big Brother Government is one of the most annoying things in my life. Especially when they start interfering with our hobbies and passtimes.

Taking Photographs is enjoyed by millions of people in the UK. Whether as a casual snapper photographing a birthday party or a skilled amateur who enjoys their hobby, photography is a wonderfully creative passtime. And absolutely harmless.

Why, therefore, has Big Brother and their relative, The Bill'', decided that we can no longer enjoy this passtime with the freedom we should?

Under the thinly guised act referred to as Section 44 (of the terrorism act 2000 ) 'The Bill' seem to want to stop us taking photographs of public place, monuments and even our children.

I could rant on for ages about this one but all I want to say is

'Get to know your rights'

From what I can establish, and many others have supported; In the UK, you are free to take a photograph of anything that you can see with your eye. If you are stopped and told by The Bill, or another no good doer trying to exercise 'their rights' gently, but firmly remind them of yours.

Wow! I can't believe the resolution.

I previously posted that I'm testing a 30 yr old Zuiko 1.2 lens on a new Olympus 500 digital camera body. After a few test shots last week, I went out this week to see what could be achieved in real life.

I wasn't expecting much with a £10 adaptor off ebay and I knew there were limitations with focusing at infinity but i decided to test a few things out and was really plesantly surprised by the results.

To start with, here's a very general scenic shot (take in the rain!). Both images were handheld at the same ideal exposure..



this was taken at full aperture, f1.2, focused at infinity and, in theory, shouldn't focus at infinity. You can quite clearly see that everything beyond a few feet is out of focus. Theory is true in this case..



However, keeping the focus point at infinity and changing the aperture to f8, yields a completely different picture. All points in view are completely sharp! Magnificent. Not only in focus but pin sharp also.

The resolution is difficult to see in these images so i snapped a few images of our dog at closer range. Manual focus, manual exposure (but shot in black and white mode) and got this shot. Just look at the detail on the hairs. and this is a 4.5Mpixel jpeg resized to 800 pixels wide and optimised for web! just imagine how much detail's in the original.

I have to say that this has given my photography a bit of a kick. The modern day auto everything may simplify things for the starter photographer but, compare to the enjoyment of manual focus and exposure, it's like comparing decaf-capuccino against a genuine Italian espresso. Watch this space..

Zuiko OM Lens and Digital SLR

More of a technical listing today. My early photography was done with the Olympus OM system for which I collected a number of useful lenses. Moving to digital has rendered many of them obsolete but there is one lens that I loved, the Zuiko 55mm, f1.2. It's a beautiful lens and the f1.2 maximun aperture makes it really useful for low light photography.

As a trial, I purchased an adaptor to fit this lens to the Olympus e500. It was a cheap purchase on ebay and I realised that I would not be able to focus at infinity but that was not the reason for the purchase.

A 'traditional' 55mm focal length lens on an Olympus e500 (or an other 4/3rds system) makes it an equivalent 110mm lens, perfect for portrait work and close-ups where focus at infinity is not a requirement.

The manual focusing takes me back to early photography days and takes a bit of getting used to. The exposure needs a bit more thinking through also as open-aperture exposure is not possible on these old lenses. The quality of the images however are just great. Here's a test card, taken hand-held and at f2/ 1/90th sec.
General resolution is fantastic (this was taken in jpeg mode, medium setting and 1/4 compression) and is more than good enough for general photography work.

I'm going to play a little more over the coming weeks to see how a 25year old lens can get on with modern day digital processing.

Back in studio

Having some free time over Xmas allowed me to get back in a studio and shoot some pics.

My youngest is always the most accommodating model and this is one of my favourites of him.

He's good-looking, open-minded, willing to learn and has a great sense of 'cool'. He's not bad with a camera either and I'll try and get him to publish some of his own pics.