Been ordering some new gear, and yesterday my new Olympus Zuiko 50mm f2 lens arrived. I didn’t have much time to play with it yesterday, but I did take a couple of photos. This is not by any means an exhaustive writeup or review, I need to use it more first. Immediate reaction though: WOW. This thing is crazy fast. Can’t wait to try it on my E-30 when it arrives next week. And I especially can’t wait to try it with my EX-25 for some serious macro work. I love this thing already.

And of course, I had to try a candid portrait with it. I need to work on this a little more, but I like it alot.

As you may have gathered, I have been taking pictures of some local glassblowers and the work they produce. I have also been trying to take pics of the guys in action, but I was missing one key piece of equipment - a proper lens filter.

The glass that these guys use for their artistic glasswork is called borosilicate. When it is introduced into the flame, you get a very long sodium flare, as illustrated by the photo at left. The best way to counter this effect is to employ a Didymium filter. The glassworkers have eyewear made from it, and you can order large square pieces of it to use as a type of shield for a glassworking station. But you cannot easily find a camera filter made from this stuff. So I contacted the company that the glassworkers get their eyewear from. Turns out that Aura Lens, based in Minnesota, can take a normal UV filter, remove the filter element, and replace it with Didymium treated glass. Mine arrived last week (cost was roughly $70).

Friday I went to the glassworkers studio and took about 150 shots. The picture at the top of this article was shot through the Didymium filter. Compare that to the unfiltered shot further down and you can really see the difference.

Lighting these situations can be pretty tricky, depending on what you want to show. For a few of the pics, I wanted to be sure I got the workers hands in the image, or part of their workspace. To accomplish this, I placed my homemade softbox on my Olympus FL-36 flash, mounted on my Gorillapod and fired with the Cactus remote triggers. I moved it around a bit during the shoot, and was pleased with the results.

I love the doors that photography and website management and consulting have opened for me. I have been able to travel to some interesting places (Detroit Auto Show, Toronto) and also meet interesting people and learn about new things (the glassblowing, a recent photo shoot about wine). I am especially pleased to be involved in the main project these glassblowers are working on - The Community Carbon Project. Cool glassware that is recycled and useful. Can’t beat that.

I have had my Olympus E-510 for over a year now, and I can say it has served me well. From time to time people ask me why I chose to go with Olympus for my DSLR purchase. There were a couple of factors at work. The kit I purchased (E-510 with two lenses) was very competitively priced compared to what Canon and Nikon had to offer. To get comparable equipment from the other two would have cost me a few hundred dollars more. Sensor resolution (10MP) was the same as the other two manufacturers. And then there was the big deciding factor - image stabilization. Olympus was the first with IS for their DSLR cameras. You had to buy the 510 to get it, but it was there. Even better, it is in-camera. That means the lenses don’t cost extra if you want IS (or VR) in them. That really helped frame my opinion up front. But this wasn’t (to me) a small purchase.

Wolf Camera, in conjunction with Olympus, had a special deal going where you could “borrow” a camera (E-400 or E-510) for a weekend to take some pictures and see what you thought. I jumped at that chance. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, they were out of the 510s. I took the 400 home for the weekend and really enjoyed shooting with it. I must admit, I was intimidated by making the jump from my P&S (Canon Powershot G5) to a full on DSLR. But I had a good weekend of shooting, and decided what the heck.

I then started doing my research online. I found the 510 for an even better price from B&H Photo/ Video. Fortunately for me, the manager at Wolf decided to match the prices I found at B&H when I was ready to walk out the door. That willingness to eat the margin a bit also meant I will buy from them in the future - mostly prints and stuff I think.

Now that I have had this camera for roughly a year, I naturally have my list of likes and dislikes about it.

Likes:
- Lightweight (in my camera/ laptop backpack, this hardly adds any weight)
- Great image quality (never had an issue with the image quality)
- Sensor cleaning (the sensor cleaning system seems to work well, don’t see any problems in my images)
- Kit lenses are good quality (I wouldn’t know what ‘great’ glass is, but these do everything I ask)
- Live view (even if I never use it)

Dislikes:
- Limited EV bracketing (3 shots, in one stop increments)
- Unique Olympus USB connector (cables are more expensive and harder to find)
- No tilt/ swivel LCD (was useful on my G5)
- Requirement of Oly xD card for pano mode (I can take panos manually and stitch in something else though)
- “Live capture” software has additional $$ cost
- FL-36 (seriously, why did they even build/ sell this?)

All in all, I can’t say I made a very poor decision in buying this Olympus. It continues to serve me well. That said, Olympus as a whole doesn’t seem to be very innovative at the moment. This worries me. I don’t have a huge investment in Olympus glass and gear, but it would be nice if they had an upgrade path that looked enticing. Compared to what I am seeing from Canon and Nikon, Olympus has a lot of catch up to do. I am not ready to upgrade just yet, so this isn’t of immediate concern. Who knows, maybe they do have something impressive in the works. They need to. The E-3 is outdated now, and the E-30 is not even close to being an evolution.

When you are shooting a room with a great view, it is a good idea to show that view, if you can. But that is more complicated when you think about the exposure levels outside versus inside the room. Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice on. I have posted a few images from this test in the Photography For Real Estate Flickr group (yes, it is a Flickr complement to Larry Lohrman’s excellent site/ blog) and have received some useful feedback from it.
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