Categories
Journal Makings

Watch it hover, Fly.

I decided to get my “Flying Bird” shot. It didn’t end well. The birds must have decided to not go out for the day, however, my old friends, the hoverflies were out playing with each other. When I say “with each other”, I really mean it. I try and focus on a hoverfly with full zoom about to get an amazing shot… when another hoverfly comes screaming over playing what appears to be “hover-dodger” and smashes into the one I was about to snap.

This happened a lot. My photo opportunity window with these things were about 5-10 seconds, 15 at max if I was really lucky. Not much time to manual focus (because of the tiny size of the critters) and snap the picture but I managed it, somehow.

A nice touch to these photos, which was completely unintentional, is the dark background. This happened because the sun was beaming directly on them and they were showing up as little white pellets so after I turn the exposure down and speed the shutter speed up, that was the result. This was using the 14-150mm M.ZUIKO lens with the Olympus E-PL1

As always, click the image for a larger version. (opens Flickr in a new window)

Categories
Makings

Nature

I wanted to make a video with the 14-150mm lens because it’s touted as a good video lens due to the near silent auto-focus. I ran into the garden and decided to just film anything. It’s not anything spectacular, but it is a nice demonstration.

Categories
Journal Makings

How to make pigs fly.

I found a mini pig today with the most excitable look on it’s face. Not sure what he’s so happy about but I’m pretty sure the fly is about to find out.

Categories
Journal Makings

The Moon

Seeing as I had the 14-150mm (28-300mm equivalent) lens, I decided to go and get my moon shot! At first I thought, like most night time photography, I had to have a long shutter speed… but no. It came out as a big circular blob of failure. I sped things up a bit and ended up with this cracker.

Categories
Reviews

M.ZUIKO 14-150mm Lens Review with Test Shots

I’ve recently got my hands on the Olympus 14-150mm M.ZUIKO Micro 4/3 camera lens for the Olympus PEN series of cameras. The lens is being used on the Olympus E-PL1 and so all video/photo content will have been produced using this badass camera & lens unless otherwise stated.

To start, I’d like to point out that I’m not a professional photographer (as many of you will know), but I am picking it up quickly as a hobby. With that in mind, I’m not going to get into all the nitty gritty details that only a camera/photography expert will understand but I will talk about it as the general consumer and technology lover.

Categories
Makings

Scrabble: M

So I had a bit of fun with the Scrabble set today after being inspired from a game of… Scrabble! I took a set but this was the best picture so I played around with it in Photoshop, just changing saturation, colours and some other stuff that I won’t bore you with.

EDIT: As you may have noticed (or not), I messed up and spelt “Unusual”, “Unusal”. Never mind. Cheers, Photoshop.

Categories
Inspiration

Dave Hill Photography

Just when I needed a dose of inspiration, it hits me like a kid playing on the train tracks! Dave Hill is a fantastic photographer, but more than that is his heavy use of post processing that makes his photos so astounding. After watching a couple of his “Behind The Scene” videos on Vimeo, I can kind of grasp the way he does his shoots, shooting each element separately from each other, cutting them out and then manipulating them together along with some other post processing techniques.

I love Photoshop and I’m getting into this Photography lark quite a bit so I may take try to make some pieces like this. It doesn’t compare, but my Self Portrait attempt, it seems (due to the cutting out of elements and heavy post processing photo manipulation) is a very small scale version of this manipulative photography. I have tried this before for a few things, but half the techniques I know now, I didn’t back then. All I need is some more equipment and an idea for a shoot, then maybe people will be blogging about my photography too!

Check out more of his work here, or click the images above.

Categories
Inspiration

Short: Your Lucky Day

An amazingly shot and edited piece of film/art. Directed by Dan and features a cameo of “Boy Meets World” actor Rider Strong. Everything about this is pretty intense and the calming music only adds to it.

Categories
Makings

Self Portrait: Who Needs Lights?!

I’ve recently been wanting a super cool, awesomely epic and badass self portrait. Tonight I tried my hand at it. This, from the start, was obvious that it wasn’t going to be my prize and glory, but I thought fuck it; I’ll give it a go.

Of course, with no natural or studio lights, I could only hope to learn technique rather than be left with a kick-ass final image. I had a tripod, a chair, a blank wall, a standard lamp (which you can see in my glasses) and the room’s ordinary ceiling light. I also had my trusty Olympus PEN.

This is the image I captured with manual focus and the 2 second timer:

This is what using some basic and intermediate photoshopping techniques achieved:

But then I got bored of being on the computer so I went and hung out with some girls. I was excluded.

Categories
Journal

Results: The Big Personality Test

I’ve just had a go at the BBC’s “The Big Personality Test” that reveals your top 5 personality traits and what that actually means in your life according to the answers you have given.

I’m pretty happy with my results so I’m going to publish my scores here.