The cacophony of seagulls just spiralling around the lake front because we were throwing bread to the swans.

The more elegant swans just swimming around and looking so prim.

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It’s 5am and I’m tired but wide awake. Tried to sleep but I wanted to do some photo editing. Hours earlier I was at a friend’s place having a sort of Chinese New Year gathering. It was a fun experience, good food and catching up with old friends.

The GF1 and 20mm f/1.7 combo plus a Nikon flash can pretty much be my arsenal for a casual event shoot. The autofocus and shutter release time is quick enough that I rarely miss the shot (heh, I know back when I complained otherwise but that’s more user error than anything these days).

Just recapping the day while the memory is still fresh. The camera was pretty much on manual the whole time and I was shooting at maximum sync speed of 1/160th of a second. Interestingly enough, the camera maxed out shutter speed when the flash was stuck on the hot shoe and it prevented me from speeding it up any further. Adjusted the flash a bit but got comfortable with 1/32 power and pretty much just bouncing off things to get the desired effect. There were times I had to remember to focus on the available light and play with shadows

I warmed up with photographing my friends’ daughter and after that I just stealthily moved around and capturing scenes as I saw them. This was probably the first time I’ve managed to transition the settings quickly from outdoors to indoors and back again, switching all 3 components of shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I’m better at estimating settings these days so that helped me get setup quickly to capture the next bit of action.

I know I can get better photo quality with my high end gear, but this setup allows me to be candid and not imposing. The screen helps with quick framing and even allows me to capture pictures like below by extending my arms and still seeing the composition (although I do admit that the screen sucks when I have to shoot in full daylight).

I had some issues with burnt highlights and with the better gear, you have a larger margin of dynamic range to compensate for these problems. It’s been a long while since I’ve pushed any of my equipment to the limit of what it can achieve, so overall I have a smug satisfaction of getting images that I’m happy with even with said setbacks.

Alfie is always a good available subject to test camera techniques on and he always ‘smiles’ for the camera. Heh.

* * *

Have started running again. Or rather, trying to get back into it. Did a 10 minute jog the other day, and am doing runs in the park with Alfie and I can feel my body not liking the sudden surge in exercise. There’s a few aches in the upper body muscles and tightness in the hamstrings, but otherwise, I’m feeling a little more energetic out of bed these days.

* * *

Testing out Ken’s Sony NEX-5 with my manual lenses. This all started from reading a blog post of the NEX-7 and skimming the comments to find this video. Pretty impressive stuff with the video, which is also something I’ve started taking an interest in after seeing what modern cameras can do.

The allure of the NEX series is the quality of the images you can get from the size of the camera. It is something that is pretty portable but with the larger sensor format, you need larger lenses to cover the image frame, which pretty much negates the portability of the camera. The new feature that was added in a firmware update that I absolutely love is the focus peak function, and you can pretty much get things in focus on the first try (it’s been pretty hit or miss trying manual lenses on my GF1).

Like the above photo, Alfie’s eyes are in focus and the picture below is shot with a 50mm f/1.2 wide open. I generally don’t get the focusing accuracy with one try and this is what I managed while using the NEX-5.

So far the pictures are pretty much of static objects, and I’d really like to take the NEX-5 out as a regular camera just to test it out in far more challenging situations.

Seems like I’m smitten with the Sony camera, but the GF1 offers a few other items up its sleeve. The hot shoe for attaching an external flash unit to light subjects gives off a better image than pushing a sensor to ISO3200 or some silly number and getting flat contrast. The Panasonic pancake lenses also have decent quality plus autofocus in a very small package. Sometimes versatility trumps absolute image quality, and you note this with the millions of camera phone pictures taken that are shared around the world. Heh, my balance of preference to what I like to do with my equipment favours the micro 4/3 system in this respect.

Heh, I might eat my words down the road but unless there’s substantial usage, it would be hard to see which works better for me.

* * *

So the Nikon D4 has been announced. Lots of improvements, probably great for professionals and gear heads swooning over the specifications. Heh, I still think the D3 sensor from 2007 is amazing and it starts to dawn on you that it’s using the individual parts of a system together coherently that makes for great images. In the end, what I like about photography is just making images and sharing it around to retain the memories of interesting moments.