DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-5

Sunday was supposed to be good squirrel-spotting weather. Clear and cold, but no wind to speak of (arboreal critters tend to hunker in their drays when the boughs get to whipping around.)

I put the Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm F3.5-5.6 Asph superzoom on the Olympus E-5 for my walk around the neighborhood but mostly came up empty handed.

I'm still looking for a lens hood for this thing, but they're unobtainium.

With an equivalent maximum focal length of 300mm on the Oly's Four Thirds sensor, I had plenty of reach for squirrel snapping, but I lacked for subjects.

At fifteen years old, the E-5 is starting to show its age, but if you keep the ISO at 400 or lower, it still does just fine.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X

It's an example of the weird time dilation of 2020 that I can't believe that the Olympus E-M1X is six years old. It was launched in January of 2019 as a dedicated pro body for the Oly Micro Four Thirds line that was heavily specialized for sports and wildlife, leveraging the greatest strength of the MFT format: Enormous focal length lenses in very small packages.

Lenses I Live By: The Superzoom

They're generally called "superzooms", sometimes "all-in-one" or "vacation" lenses. I call them "zoo lenses" because they cover a wide enough spread of focal lengths to cover any shooting situation at the zoo, whether the critter is big and right in front of you, or small and way off in the back of its enclosure.

They typically have a 7X to 10X focal length range... wait, let me explain something.

Most people see the number followed by an "X" and assume it refers to view magnification, since that's what it signifies with telescopes and microscopes and the like. With cameras, however, it refers to the range of focal lengths.

A 35-70mm zoom lens would be a 2X zoom, going from a wide-ish viewing angle to the very shortest edge of telephoto. A 70-210mm would be a 3X, while a 24-240mm would be a 10X, et cetera.

The 12-200mm on the Olympus E-M1X in the photo above, the equivalent of a 24-400mm lens on a full-frame camera, is at the extreme end of superzoom ranges. It's able to shoot from comfortably wide angles to a very credible long telephoto length suitable for urban wildlife.

One of the first really good superzooms was Nikon's 28-200mm AF-D, which was replaced by the even more compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G in 2003. Now discontinued, those lenses have gotten a little cult-y due to their small size and can fetch a premium on the used market.

Nikon D700, 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G

The superzoom I get the most use out of is for DX Nikons, though: the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II. I've used it on all my crop sensor Nikon DSLR bodies and the only one on which I don't like it is the D7100, as the 24MP sensor reveals its limitations. It's plenty sharp on the older D300S, though.

Nikon D300S, 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II

Basically, any time you're going someplace where you don't want to carry several lenses and have no idea what you're going to be shooting, the Superzoom is your Swiss Army knife lens. Vacation, the zoo, just walking around the neighborhood, it's your one-lens solution.

Quality ones tend to be moderately spendy, because there's a lot of optical jiggery-pokery happening in there to keep image quality reasonably decent, and they're not so hot for indoors or low light because of their fairly slow aperture range, but they're my go-to solution for a sunny day stroll around Broad Ripple if the squirrels are out and about.

DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Nikon D2X

One of the best deals in a high-quality long telephoto zoom for DSLRs is the AF Nikkor Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED VR. You can find them used at BezosMart for under $400, which is really pretty sweet when you consider that they stickered for close to two grand when they debuted back at the turn of the Millennium.

Why are they so inexpensive? Well, they are an older style autofocus Nikon lens, utilizing a focus motor in the camera body to turn a drive screw in the lens body. This means they won't work as an autofocus lens on any of the inexpensive D3xxx or D5xxx Nikon bodies, or with an FTZ adaptor on a newer Nikon mirrorless. This reduces their demand on the used market.

Plus, it's not a very fast-focusing lens, especially on a prosumer type Nikon body. The big single-digit pro bodies, though, have torquey enough focusing motors to spin this lens reasonably quickly.

This is where the Nikon D2X comes in. The D2 series was Nikon's last pro body to use an APS-C size sensor, what Nikon calls "DX format", with the D2X having a 12MP Sony-manufactured CMOS unit, rather than the proprietary Nikon LBCAST sensor used in the D2H. 

Because they're so old, you can find good deals on them used online. I spotted mine for a couple hundred bucks in the showcase at Roberts.

Because of the 1.5X crop factor of the DX sensor, the 80-200mm lens has an effective focal length bump to the equivalent of 120-600mm, letting you get right up in the grille of Mr. Squirrel.

The effective VR system comes in handy with a lens this big and heavy, allowing you to shoot hand-held at much slower shutter speeds than you'd be able to with a non-stabilized lens. (This is one of those lenses that's big and heavy enough to rate a tripod foot.)

Here's the 80-200 mounted on my old Nikon D1X.

This is a great combo for urban wildlife, if a bit slow for birds-in-flight or sports.

Galactic Domination

Probably the first computer strategy game to really eat chunks of my time was Empire. Of course, I also liked the building aspects of Sim City. So when I ran across Civilization for the first time, I was hooked.

Civ was the prototypical "4X" turn-based strategy game, where the X's stand for "EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate". Trying various strategies was endless entertainment for me.

The one that really got me hooked, though, was Master of Orion, which added the fun of designing the starships for your fleet for maximum micromanaging nerdalicious fun.

How tickled was I to get it loaded and up and running on my clamshell iBook last week?

Pretty darn tickled, let me tell you.

Let me conquer this galaxy and then I'll give you a retro book report!

Mirrorless Pics: Broad Ripple, Indianapolis with the Hasselblad Lunar

I know it's just a Sony NEX-7 re-skinned in a funky titanium and carbon fiber shell, but I like it. I mostly shoot it with the Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* 16-70mm f/4, although I also have one of the E-mount 16mm f/2.8 pancake wide angles with the Hassy branding on it.

The Lunar was the first camera I ever had with in-camera HDR and I played with that a bit. The menus on Sony mirrorless cameras back then were clunky and awkward and the light re-skinning they got for Hasselblad duty just made them prettier but no less counterintuitive. The controls and menus on the Sony NEX cameras always felt like they were done by someone who got transferred to Sony Camera Division from Clock Radios or Stereo Remotes two weeks ago.

DSLR Pics: Random shots with the Canon EOS 40D

A liter-sized glass beer mug from Half Liter BBQ in SoBro, Indianapolis.

A happy pooch on the patio of Twenty Tap in SoBro, Indianapolis.

Tulips in SoBro, Indianapolis.

 A Volkswagen New Beetle in the parking lot at the grocery store.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-M1X

These were snapped with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X using the M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 superzoom. That lens is one of the great things about the Micro Four Thirds format, as it has an equivalent focal length range to a 24-400mm lens on a full frame camera yet is smaller than a soda can.

Grinding Gear

So, the Shitty Camera Challenge is fixin' to start again, and I figured it would be fun to use the Nikon Coolpix 990 that was so state-of-the-art in 2000 but which definitely falls into the "shitty" category by modern standards.

Mine had been sitting on a shelf in the living room since I last played with it for this blog, back in...wow, it's been three years!

I pulled it down yesterday and the batteries were flatter than the horizon in Amarillo. "No problem," I figure, "I'll just get some fresh AA's out of the kitchen drawer." (I keep a well-stocked battery tray in there.)

I put the new batteries in the camera and turned the power on and...nothing.

Hmmm. Popped the battery compartment open and cleaned the contacts with a pencil eraser. Still nothing.

Blew air under the power switch and proceeded to pivot it back and forth vigorously. Apparently that worked, because the camera powers up now.

Fat Dan's Deli and Twenty Tap

"...television tuned to a dead channel..."

I stumbled across a neat (and very comprehensive) review of the game Neuromancer, which I have fond memories of playing with a friend at his apartment in Athens, Georgia, back when a 286 with EGA graphics was still a pretty decent gaming rig.

Go and check it out!

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Lenses I Live By: 50mm

The basic building block of any lens kit is, or at least used to be, the fast normal prime. In full frame terms, that's generally a 50mm lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.8 or faster. I have something like this for just about every system I use.

Nikon's excellent little 35mm f/1.8G is a great crop sensor prime, letting you isolate the subject and blue the background nicely.

Fuji makes a few 35mm XF primes of varying prices and maximum apertures, but on my Fuji cameras I like the 32mm f/1.8 Zeiss Touit. If you really feel the need for speed on a budget, Sigma offers their 30mm f/1.4 Contemporary prime for the X-mount, too.

The Zeiss makes me happy...

Still, given the versatility of modern zoom lenses, I usually only break out the 50mm equivalent when I need the really fast aperture. They do see more use than my 35mm wide-ish angle primes, though.

It comes in handy with cameras that aren't great in low light, like the small-sensor Pentax Q series, which has an 8.5mm f/1.9 prime that's a 50mm equivalent.

DSLR Pics: Triumph TR-3A with the Nikon D800

It's hard to believe that the Nikon D800 is over a decade old now. It's still an enormously capable camera and 36 megapixels is still rather a lot.

The image above, snapped on a Saturday afternoon in October, is a JPEG straight out of the camera. Like with all my cameras that can shoot RAW, I have the camera record one RAW file and one high quality monochrome JPEG. The reason for the JPEG is because that's the photo that gets shown for review on the monitor on the back of the camera when I chimp, and it keeps my head in that "light and shadow and texture" frame of mind.

Sometimes the JPEG itself is actually a keeper, too, like the one above. It should embiggenate quite nicely.  It was shot at ISO 200 and the lens was the 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom.

The actual color photo processed from the RAW is below.

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All those Redbox kiosks have been fossilized.

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Lenses I Live By: 35mm

I'm not a wide-angle shooter by nature. I rarely use the wide end of zoom lenses, so wide primes are not a thing I typically have in my kit.

The widest prime lens I use with any regularity is the Fujifilm XF 23mm f/2 R WR. With a field of view equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full-frame body, the compact little "Fujicron" is fast, sharp, and (like it says on the label) weather resistant.

When I'm shooting with longer glass on my Fujifilm X-T2, I'll bring the XF 23mm f/2 along, mounted on my X-E1, to handle wide interiors, streetscapes, and other similar chores.

Plus, I really love the way it looks with that retro vented hood. I keep telling myself that I'll be an ace street photographer with this setup someday... someday. First I'll have to overcome my reluctance to get up in people's grilles with such a relatively wide lens, though.

Tagging Photos

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a post up about problems he's encountered sorting, storing, and finding photos:

When I started making photos again in about 2006, I didn’t have any photo-editing tools beyond an ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro. But I didn’t have that many photos to store. I created a folder called Camera, created a folder for 2006, and created folders for each digital photo outing or roll of film. From the beginning I’ve named those folders with the date and often some information: “2006-08-15 Birthday” or “2007-10-11 Yashica MG-1 Kodak Tri-X.” I still do this.

He notes that, as the sheer number of photos he stores has grown, and as they cover a longer and longer period of time, he's having more difficulty finding older ones and wishes he'd been tagging them all along.

I feel his pain. Almost exactly.

I have two ways of sorting photos. Photos of a specific event or occasion, like a trip to the zoo or a museum visit or just a photo walk downtown, will get stored in a folder labeled "YYYY-MM-DD EVENT NAME".  Every January, I round up all the previous year's photo folders and move them into a "YYYY" folder and archive that inside my "Pictures" folder.

The random and incidental pictures, like ones of cars and dogs and squirrels and people that just get randomly shot during the course of a day get stored in a folder labeled with the camera that was used, e.g. "D700" or "1D Mark III".

Thus far this hasn't been much of a problem, but...

Yesterday I was looking at a photo I'd posted on Facebook and thought it might make a suitable subject for my car blog. I didn't note with which camera I'd shot it, but I did leave myself a clue in the caption: 

In the thirty seconds I had these open in Photoshop Bridge to convert them from NEF to JPEG, I grew a mullet and a flock of bald eagles landed on the front porch and started screeching the opening chords of Lee Greenwood's Greatest Hit.

So I knew it had been snapped with a Nikon, and I knew it had been taken in November of 2021 from the date on Facebook.

I spent probably thirty minutes scouring the following folders: Coolpis P7000, D2X, D3, D200, D300S, D700, D800, D3000, D5000, D7000, D7100, Nikon 1 J1, Nikon 1 J4, Nikon 1 V1, and Nikon 1V2 before finally looking in the folder of the one camera I was sure I hadn't used... and there it was, in the D1X folder.

I have really got to get better about tagging photos.

Baby Steps

Back in 2015, Bobbi and I went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (I refuse to call it "Newfields", no matter what the current signage reads) to see the touring "Dream Cars" exhibit.

I brought along a few cameras. Two were SLRs, a Canon EOS 10S, wearing an EF 35-135mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom lens and loaded with Ilford Delta 3200, and the other was an EOS Rebel XTi wearing the EF 50mm f/1.8 "Nifty Fifty". There was also the Nikon Coolpix P7000 I carried in my pocket all the time.

Thing was, I still had a lot to learn (and also re-learn) about photography. For instance, all my SLR experience before I bought the Rebel had been back in the film days, so I didn't know anything about crop factor. I slapped the 50mm on there because of the fast aperture, but the APS-C sensor on the Rebel made it effectively an 80mm lens. It was unstabilized, the fairly primitive sensor in the XTi struggled in low light, and I had way too long of a lens for shooting in the tight indoor quarters of a museum.

Meanwhile, even with the high speed B&W Ilford film in the EOS 10S, the unstabilized kit lens really struggled with the lighting.

The only camera that I got any really decent results with was the Coolpix, which had a fast, stabilized zoom lens, and which I put in Program mode at ISO 400 and just let 'er rip.

Not only was the gear primitive and my lens choices questionable, but I was shooting SOOC jpegs and my metering bag of tricks had, like, only two tricks in it.

Given what I had available at the time, I'd have been better off with the unstabilized 50mm on the film camera and just going with the stabilized EF-S 18-135mm travel zoom on the Rebel.

I would love to go back in time with my Fuji X-T2 or Nikon D800...

Mirrorless Pics: Motorcycles with the Olympus E-M1X...

Of all my cameras, the Olympus E-M1X is easily the least fossil-y. It was announced in January of 2019, meaning it's barely over five years old; a spring chicken among the stringy old hens and roosters in my camera coop. They're still available new-in-the-box, although used copies are only about a third the price.

Still, although it was announced in 2019, it uses the same Sony-manufactured 20MP LiveMOS Four Thirds sensor first introduced in the 2016-vintage OM-D E-M1 Mark II, albeit backed up with dual TruePic VIII image processors, which gets it close to at least honorary fossil status.

I wish...

That picture of sleepy Huck was snapped with the Nikon 1 V2 and the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2 portrait lens. That was the closest thing to a professional lens Nikon made for the Nikon 1 system. Well, that and the 70-300mm telephoto zoom.

I wish they'd made some pro-type zooms to go with the V-series bodies. A 10-45mm f/4, which would be a rough 28-120mm equivalent would be a banger.

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Small is Beautiful

An all-in-one "walking around" zoom lens is what's normally on my cameras. I like them because they're more versatile than a fixed focal length lens and have more reach than the typical 24-70mm pro zoom. They don't have as much reach as a superzoom. In non camera nerd speak, these are "5X" rather than "10X" zooms. 

The lack of focal length, however, is made up for by much better optics as well as larger available apertures over the most of the range of the lens. For instance, my favorite Nikon full-frame superzoom, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6, has a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 28mm, while the 24-120mm f/4 VR is a third of a stop slower. But by the time you've zoomed out to 50mm, the 28-200 can only manage f/4.5, while the 24-120 will hold f/4 all the way out to 120mm.

The bigger hole lets in more light, allowing you to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds indoors or in the shade.

These lenses tend to be compact, but still fairly chonky, and that's one reason that smaller sensor cameras still appeal to me.

Thanks to the magic of crop factor, these are the equivalent lenses for full-frame, APS-C, and Micro 4/3rds:

• Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR: 84x103.5mm, 710g
• Fuji 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR: 78x89mm, 440g
• Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4: 68-86mm, 320g

That Micro 4/3rds lens on the Olympus, seen in the photo above, is almost an inch shorter, about a half inch smaller in diameter, and less than half the weight of the full-frame Nikon, yet it covers the same effective field of view and is a full stop brighter on the wide end, to boot. 

That's just shy of a pound's weight difference between the Nikon and Panasonic glass, and you notice that when it's hanging around your neck during a long day.

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Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Fuji X-T2

Here are a couple more shots from the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF 50mm f/2 R WR "Fujicron" short telephoto.