Are old adapted lenses good enough?

So, you got yourself an adapter and now you can mount all your wonderful FD or M43 lenses on your big fancy DSLR. Congratulations! The questions is, are they good enough?

The thing is, they are old lenses, and you probably got them for cheap. I mean, yeah, you could spend 1000 dollars on a Canon FD L lens, but then, what’s the point? For 1000 dollars you can get a brand new L lens. I mean, the reason you get into this old lens thing is for the price and the amount of fun you can have with those lenses. If you pay too much for them then you’ll loose AF and the electronic comunication between the lens and the camera that you would find in a standard EF mount.

For fun sake, adapted old lenses are great and are a blast to shoot. You can get so many different effects for really not much. Personally, I got a 135 f2.8, so I got the longer prime lens covered, a 28mm f2.8 so I got your standard focal length covered and a 70-150 zoom lens which also doubles as a great macro/close-up lens. All of this for around 100 dollars gives plenty of opportunities.

1. What do you gain?

The bokeh from the 135 mm lens is fantastic. Basicaly, what you get is a lot of variety for a really afordable price tag.

In terms of focusing, you get things you might not normally receive in modern lenses. First, they all have LONG focus throws and buttery smooth focusing rings (at least mine do). For an example, my 135 has an aproximate focus throw of 270 degrees. Yep, you read that well! No need for glasses…

Also, you get a distance scale. That’s great for quick and easy focusing. Plus, it gives prefocusing a real ease of use.

Also, some may prefer having a physical aperture ring. This is great especially for those who have single digit entry-level camera bodies, since they don’t have to press combinations of buttons any more in order to change basic settings.

2. What you lose?

It’s the handy modern features you get as a standard in all modern age lenses that you lose.

First of all, it’s the AF. For sports, for example, the lack of auto focusing is a big NO NO.

Also, old manual lenses don’t have electronics built-in. What this means is that they can’t communicate any information to the camera, and that means no aperture reading, which might stop you from using some of the creative modes (P,A,S,M).

Another thing you lose is sharpness. Look, theese lenses are made with really old technology, so expecting them to perform flawlesly wide open is like expecting a Vauxhall Astra to catch up with a Ferrari in a car chase. Well, at least if the driver is not stupid enough to crash… Than, things might change a little… Still, let’s get back to the subject! Theese lenses don’t excel in sharpness. While you can get usable results, they are no match, in my opinion, to modern day glass.

3. So, why bother?

Because it’s fun! There is a real joy in thinking creatively while using theese lenses, a joy you might not find in modern day lenses. So, after you let down your chunky DSLR after a big shoot, on weekends, think of experimenting and slowing down by using manual lenses.

 

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Road trip through christianity and comunism

It was “Ziua Mortilor”, in romanian, or, translated, it would be sort of “The day of the dead”. Basicaly, we did a little road trip through Maramures, in Transylvania. The thing is, through Maramures there are not many other things to visit other than churches, monasterys and cemetrys. Sure, you have your beautiful unique gates of Maramures, but there are not many other things to see.

Visiting churches and cemetrys on “The day of the dead” was something that happened by chance, nothing intentional. The one exception to the rule was a comunist prison, but, to be honest, that place ain’t happier than a place full of tombs, so yeah…

DAY 1

First stop was at Sapanta cemetery, or “The happy cemetery”. It’s sort of funny, but when walking into the cemetery you don’t feel sad, the funny texts and ilustrations can’t not cheer someone up.

But wait a second, this is a photography blog, so for more historical facts I highly recommend a website: http://www.wikipedia.com .  

Probably the first question is: what did I take with me? Well, the selection was quite simple. My Olympus EPM-1 with a spare battery, the kit Olympus 14-42 mm lens and a Canon FD to M43 adapter. That’s because I also took with me a 135mm f2.8 and a 28mm f2.8 old manual lenses. But I’m going to talk more about those lenses in an upcoming post.

At any point in time I tried to get both wide shots, standard images and telephoto ones. Sure, that implied a lot of lens changes and that meant leaving the sensor exposed for quite a while, but you know what? The sensor is perfectly fine and no dust got in. My only conclusion is that sometimes people treat sensors as being dust vacuum cleaners, which is simply not the case.

The second stop was filled with history. It’s called “Pain’s memorial”, and it’s an ex-comunist prison transformed into a museum that acts as a witness to the cruelty some people endured in Romania’s past. As for what photos go, it wasn’t such a varried enviroment. Here there were mostly wide images, because of two reasons:

1) Each cell was transformed into a sort of a mini-museum, each having its own theme. I didn’t want to photograph walls with articles on them, so what I was left with were the main coridors. And here I could only envision wide pictures.

2) Being a prison, you would expect it’s not the brightest lit building out there. Since I had to take landscape-like photos, I could use really slow shutter speeds. Firing bursts of half a second exposures with IS was something usual, but it allowed me to get into some really dark places, like certain inmate cells.

There also was this wall with the names of ex-prisoners (not all of them, many have not yet been identified) written all over. I wanted to take two images of this, one to show the overall context and the other one to focus on the names of the inmates.

The last stop was at an old wooden church. To be fully honest, this one didn’t impress me that much, but it was still a great photographic oportunity.

DAY 2

Day 2 was also going to be the last day of the trip.We had two more locations to go visit, and the first one was another old church, this one being part of the UNESCO world heritage. The exterior was nice and beautifully kept. In order to get the whole church in frame I had to back up quite a bit. I finally found a spot where there would be no tree branches coming into the shot and I would still get it all with my 14mm lens (with a 2X crop factor, of course).

The interior was also beautiful, but I only stayed with one image because of this: It was really cramed inside, and adding a real lack of light, I couldn’t get any other usable shots. But hey, I’m proud of the image I kept of the inside, so I’m good with it! 🙂 (look it up in the flickr set)

The last and, in my opinion best, location was Barsana monestery. I was amazed a place like that existed in Romania. Everything was amazingly well kept, you saw no garbage or dirt on any of the alleys (and that’s not rare at all where I live). The buildings were recently restored, looking better than ever while preserving their value. 

Also, the sun was in a good enough spot, and I think those elements combined gave some pictures I’m really proud of…

 

As a conclusion, please visit these links to see the full sets, and consider visiting Maramures at least for a couple of days, since it’s one of the most amazing places for taking photos in Transilvania. Heck, in Romania too!

Day 1: http://bit.ly/MaramuDayOne

Day 2: http://bit.ly/MaramuDayTwo

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Buying things off ebay from another country…

Buying things from Ebay… Is it worth it?

Embed from Getty Images

Well, it depends… A lot. Let’s just suppose for the sake of this post you already have a PayPal account, it’s been verified, so you can simply go online and order your brand new Naikan D815 chinese copy from Ebay.

1. Shipping

Here is the big factor: Shipping times and costs from Evilbay do vary. A LOT! If the item is on the same continent as you, this might speed up the process a little. But if not and if, let’s say you’re ordering from the UK an item thats curently in China, well, you’ll have to wait. Don’t get me wrong, Most likely your product will arrive in the time limit, but sometimes that time limit is really big. For example, I’ve been waiting for two M43 lens adapters from Hong Kong for about a month now… And they’re still not here. Sure, I made a 5 dollar saving from the 10 dollar price, but is it worth it?

2. Cost

Embed from Getty Images

I have laying around me 3 nice Canon FD lenses that are waiting for my atention, but, without an adapter, they are useless… In this case, the savings were too small for the HUGE time wasted while waiting for them.

Ebay does accomodate some really nice offers, though. The end point is, don’t expect small, under 100 dollar items to be shipped super quick or to get incredible out of the ordinary deals, it’s usually not going to happen. I was browsing the web looking, out of curiosity, for some laptops. I found a Dell XPS 12 for about 1300-1400 dollars shipped! Great price, especially because the equivalent in my country costs more than 1500 euros… Do the conversion, and you’ll see why I’d be OK with waiting for a couple weeks to save a good amount of cash.

3. Is it a money waster?

When browsing Ebay, you must be carefull not to be atracted by small, shitty 2 dollar items. They can add up, especially with shipping, and can eat a biggish chunk of cash really quick. If used smartly, Ebay can turn into a great place for looking up deals.

4. Final thoughts…

There are some rules with Ebay as with any online shopping activity. If you follow them, you basicaly can’t get scammed… almost… First, look for sellers with good, positive feedback. Next, if anything looks dodgy even the tiniest bit, avoid it. 10 dollars in minus are not much, but you still have 10 dollars in minus. Next is don’t spend your money on useless nick nacks. I know, that teal bottle opener you saw last night was a steal for 15 dollars, but, since you already have half a douzin bottle openers, they are still 15 $ out of your pocket…

 

 

 

Why I moved my blog to WordPress and how?

Why did I move?

You might have noticed the last post I shared was on a blog called “more than snaps”. Well, here is my sort of new blog! Why did I go from blogger, though?

Embed from Getty Images

1.    URL NAME

    First of all, think about the name. When I created my first blog, the name I initially wanted was, you guessed, taken. So, I ended up with “Tudorphotobeginnings.blogspot.com”? That’s a mouth full. That’s a total of 31 letters… Yeah… A bit long, right?  Plus, each time I told somebody about it I had to personally write it down on paper for them to even understand. Not good at all!

2.    BLOG DESIGN

    Look, this is just my personal opinion, but the templates on blogger are less than meh… I mean, compared to the ones wordpress offers, they look llike something I did in HTML in a notepad file in 9th grade… WordPress ones look so much more modern, sleeker and more minimalistic.

3.    BLOG HOSTING

This isn’t really a big problem, but hey… Let’s mention it. TO ME, PERSONALLY, something.wordpress.com sound better. I can’t say it sounds more professional because come on, let’s be serious… But it does sound less likely that a 6 year old would create a blog on wordpress about his transformes toys…

 

How did I migrate my blog over here?

 

Well, this is simple… Sort of… Damn, I use this expression too much! Ok, back to our topic. Switching platforms is simply a thing of downloading your blog from blogger.com and importing it in wordpress. Or is it? On the face of it, this is the way to do it, and I think the only way too. The thing is, your fonts might differ, title styles and some simple formatting differences. Nothing major, still better than having an empty blog that feels sort of like an abandoned, but brand new building. (We do have those in Romania)

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/blog-text-concept-speech-bubble-drawing-royalty-free-illustration/181461540

That’s that, tried to keep it short, sort of made it short-ish. Damn, that expression, “sort of”, I used it too often. It’s sort of like I …. Screw it, see you next time! 🙂

 

The Edit: Mercedes S63AMG

“The Edit” is a series I want to start on this blog after every serious shoot. For short, what I want to do with this is explain what I did after I captured the images. From Lightroom adjustments to Photoshop layers, I’ll try to expose them all.

So, these being said, let’s start!

BEFORE

AFTER

 

The settings I applied in Lightroom for the outdoor images are quite similar. In the Basic Develop module, I cranked up the contrast. Quite a bit. Since shooting RAW produces the flatest image possible, I like to “boomify” my images by adding contrast to the image. The exposure slider usually remained untouched, nailing it quite well at the time of shooting. Highlights and shadows were adjusted, well, depending on the image, but they stayed quite close to default. Another mean I used to create contrast is reduced blacks and also, one thing I do really often, I move the Whites slider quite a bit to the right.

The car I was photographing was silver. Luckily, this isn’t really a color… not magenta, not green, not red, no color. This made it really easy to create a desaturated look because I simply draged down the vibrance slider and… voila. This way I also managed to make distractions a lot less noticeable( see image below).

BEFORE

AFTER

Now, if I had to photograph a brightly colored car, things would have changed a little. If the car’s color was different from the background color, I would go into the advanced colors in Lightroom and desaturate the ones that don’t affect the car. If, though, we would have, let’s say a blue car with a blue building in the background, desaturating the building would desaturate the car, which we don’t want. This would require a little more work, since I’d bring it in Photoshop, create a selection of the car, reverse it, convert it into a layer mask and THEN desaturate the background. A lillte more time consuming, ah?

For the inside shots, things weren’t that different actually. The one big difference is in color, since I usually added llike +5 of vibrance max, but usually I created the boomification effect was more a thing of playing with the contrast.

 BEFORE

AFTER

 

Ok, so that’s the color and light side of the images. But there is more. We only had a busy parking lot to shoot in, and we couldn’t position the car so that there were NO other cars showing up, so I tried to find the cleanest background possible. Then, I had to let the Photoshop magic begin 🙂

For a few of my best pictures I also did some sort of doging and burning in PS. Here’s how I did it. I brought up 2 curves layers, one I added exposure through curves and on one I substracted. Than I applied layer masks on those adjustment layers and inverted them so that nothing was visible. Last I took a soft brush with a flow in between 10 and 20 % and painted over the darker parts of the image and over the highlights in order to accentuate some specific shapes and create contrast in specific areas.

BEFORE

 

 

AFTER

I basicaly cloned out the cars in the background and also cleaned up the sky. Damn, Photoshop can be such a handy tool! Finally, here are some more before/after pictures!

BEFORE

AFTER

 

 

BEFORE

AFTER

Mercedes S63 AMG Coupe. Carpornography.

Well, I am a car lover. Actually, a BIG car lover. Actually, a vehicle lover. Actually, a lover of anything with wheels and an engine. So you’d imagine when I was given the chance to photograph a not even launched yet in Romania car, I imediately took the challenge.

We first took the car outside to shoot the exterior. I put the car against the simplest background I found in the whole parking lot. Luckily, it was cloudy outside, so the lighting was nice and even. Also, it was getting dark, so starting out with the outdoor shots made a lot of sense. After turning the lights on, shooting pictures, turning them off, shooting pictures, moving it a little, shooting pictures, turning it around, shooting pictures, puting it back as original and shooting some more pictures… You get the point, I could be standing there all day photographing the damn beauty. But, as allways, beautiful moments are interupted by weather, so, when it started raining, we put the car back inside. I finished the exterior images already, so we went inside.

Inside we were supposed to shoot details and interiors. The car was in the delivery room, which was some good nice quality light. Problem is it wasn’t really much light… My settings were constant, ISO 800 and aperture between f1.8 and f2.8. It was pretty dark in there you know… I had a wider angle lens on my small M43 Olympus, but I used IS and even shot at 28mm equivalent at 1/4 of a second.

After doing the exterior, I tried to get some semi-abstract images, like the one below. I know, I was stupid for not bringing a tripod, but anyone makes mistakes, even the best ones (cough cough modesty).

Going to the interior, I had the idea to bounce the flash off the ceiling. Briliant! Except, it had a panoramic roof, so there was glass up there, no carpet sort of thingy. But, luckily, it had a cover to go over the glass! Brilliant! I could take out my flash and just… Well, the roof cover was black, so bouncing light off that was as useful as bringing a firefly to light a dark room. Not gonna happen, no matter how hard you try. 

At first I did my wide shot, and then got on with the details. Having a dark interior, there was even less light to work with… Hurray! 😦

Still, I enjoyed the whole thing, had a lot of fun! I’ll be writing a post about my editing on theese, because a lot happened there too!

LINK TO FULL GALLERY: http://bit.ly/S63Gallery

Long time no see

It seems like I almost forgot about this blog. I sort of left it down into a deep dark hole and never touched it again. Why? I don’t know, really. But I guess the will to type on a keyboard got back to me again, so I hope I will be able to continue this blog a little more.

There have been changes in the way I shoot pictures. Not like keeping my thumb 1 cm lower on the camera body types of changes, but changes to my vision. My artistic vision, that is. When I abandoned this blog I was still into street photography. Now, not so much. Or, am I? The thing is, I’ve been focusing a lot more on the other genre I love, sports. I’ve been doing sports since I was little, and coming to photograph them was sort of a natural progresion. Even though in the last years I haven’t been focusing as much on actually doing the sports in case, I was kept in touch with this area through my other activity besides photography: Timekeeping. Actually, through timekeeping I’ve managed to be the referee or timekeeper of BIG events, like Red Bull Sea to Sky or even Red Bull Romaniacs. But I’m not talking about my life on this blog, so let’s keep moving.

I’m going to do a short rundown of the more important pictures I’ve taken, trying to follow the changes in my style or workflow as I advance.

One big change in my workflow has been learning Photoshop. Not only it opened up lots of opportunities for me to transform my images, but it also gave my imagination freedom to think of unrealistic images that I could possibly come up with. Here is my best example, a 34 layer 900 MB image inspired by sin city posters. I initially watched a tutorial on phlearn on how to do it, then, with the gear I had I did my best to get results as close as the ones explained.

I also wanted to add more variety to my portfolio as a sports photographer. This is why I went to photograph a local rally. It was one of the first times I felt the effort of staying hours into the rain was actually worth it. After I saw the images, those long hours and the hike to the photo spot proved well worth.

Another thing I’ve been into is car photography. Although on a small level, I started photographing cars. First at the same local rally I was talking about, next to car events and last at a local dealership. My best car so far has been the merc s63 amg coupe… Lovely car… OK,let’s get back to the point. My family members have worked on car related jobs since I was born, so I was a native car lover already. Combining vehicles with photography was the obvious choice for me.

To diversify my portfolio even more, I took pictures at some running competitions around town. At the moment of shooting I wasn’t really pleased of what I got, I wasn’t feeling the moment. When at home though, after importing the pics in lightroom, a smile on my face appeared. After editing a couple picks in Photoshop, that smile only got bigger. I realized I managed to keep an editing style throughout the set while still getting some interesting results. Sure, there are some missed moments here and there, I walked out pleased after all.

I almost forgot, I also shot some more cycling. From the same series as Maratonul Fagetului , this time though I did the exact opposite to what I did in April. Instead on focusing on the organization, it was all about the riders this time. And here is what came out of it…

So, consider this post as a sort of summer photography summary. Not too long, although I’ll try to go back to the format where after every shoot I’d stop and explain what and how I did. My way may not be the best way or even the right way, but it was the best way for name AT THAT TIME.

 

 

 

 

Project: Marathon BTS

    Here it is! Finally, after more than a month of preparation, shooting, editing and not only, my project is over (sort of). I still have to share it as much as I can, but the images themselves are done. Here is just a demo picture, the rest are on flickr at this link: www.flickr.com/photos/spizdi/sets/72157644476912825/
    I prefer to put them on flickr for the added qualiy and for flickr’s lack of compression. Hope you enjoy the images!

People’s mentality on photojournalism

    First of, I want to start this post by saying that this is my opinion, you may think different. This short writing was determined by an accident I witnessed in the city.

    To give you a short description of what happened, a 40 ish year old man was cycling on the bike lane on Hero’s Boulevard (Bulevardul Eroilor) in Cluj-Napoca, when he hit a car’s mirror and crashed. The car was not moving, the fault was 100% on the cyclist. He landed face first, but he had no helmet. More people, including me, jumped to help him, turned him right face up, but at first he would not respond to what we were saying. A lady called the ambulance immediately, and after 5 minutes or so it arrived. Before it did, people were trying to keep the man still because he wanted to take his hand to his eye, but he had some glass around the eye from the car’s mirror. Honestly, I think I saw the same man a couple streets ahead when he was getting on his bike. He seemed to stumble, and needed the whole width of the road to get on his two wheeler, but then he carried on.
   
    But I don’t want to talk about the accident, this is not the point of this blog post. Five minutes after the paramedics arrived, I went away, like some more people did. Than I heard a couple of ladies saying “And those guys just sit there and film him, look at those jerks!” (I did my best to translate the phrase as accurate as I could in English). Going back to the accident, a guy with a video camera showed up. He probably was a journalist, because normal people don’t own such a big and professional camera. He came to the scene after the paramedics arrived and the medic told everybody to stand back. Basicaly, he could do nothing to help. He didn’t get into anybody’s way, he was respectful towards the event.

    This old ladie’s statement kind of made me ask some questions: Is what the guy did right or not?

    Here comes the part where I have to specify again that this is MY opinion, it may differ from person to person. As a photojournalist, your job is to capture the world around you as accurate as you can. And we all know this same world is full of both good and bad things. In such a case, I think that if you have the ability to help someone you should go and help him, forget you have a camera while you can still do something for that person. But, how I see it, since he could do nothing more to help the man, since the paramedics told everyone to back off, it’s ok that he, basicaly, did his job. He captured images of an accident that has happened, and I don’t see the “jerk” part in this.

    I think this mentality of calling people who document other people’s hard moments “jerks” is wrong. Actually, for example, what this man did could help people realize why wearing a helmet is so important. We have to accept bad things happen and let the people who capture theese things tell a story from which we  can learn something for ourselves. I never agreed to stay away and photograph a bad moment if you have the oportunity to help. Just to prove this, some may know the famous picture of the eagle and the child, an image that won the Pulitzer Prize. (If you haven’t heard of it, just google “eagle and child pulitzer prize”) The author of the image left the scene right after taking the photograph, and then ended up regretting it, as his journal said. After all the critics he received, he comitted suicide some months later.

    This proves that helping a person in need is crucial, but I think that if there is nothing you can do for him/her, taking images, doing your job, is not a bad thing to do, and if it can help other people that see the images or video, why not? If this guy in the accident had a helmet, I bet he could stand up back again on his foot. People seeing this might realize how important the helmet is, and it might help someone in need.

    This is just my opinion, be free to leave yours in the comments below.

Cityscapes of my home town

    A couple months ago, after finishing shooting some landscapes, I walked through the city home with all the gear and, with a moment of sudden inspiration, I decided to take some night-time street images. This post ain’t too much talking, I just want to showcase my work and get your opinion on it. You can find the higher quality images in here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spizdi/sets/72157640416484185/

This is an image that’s a bit different from the ones I took from the top of the hill, but I managed to save it in post, since the exposure difference between the sky and ground level was huge. It’s different in the way that it’s the only image from the hill which was not shot with a telephoto lens.

Light trails were not my goal, but in a busy city, at night, they are inevitable.

The same spot, just a different angle. I don’t understand why people use star filters on their lenses, when you can get the same effect in camera at the right aperture.

Finally, I got pretty close to oncoming cars, I could feel the vibrations in the road as cars were passing by. This is the last image in the set, some more street shots are coming soon to the blog.

Thanks and don’t forget to check out my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/tudoraxr and the      full res images on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spizdi/sets/72157640416484185/

Edit: I’ve got no idea why there are those white borders around my images, I’ll sort them out soon.