*Olympus 45mm f/1.8 Lens on sale!

by in Photography gear and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

IMG_7115

I’ve been on the fence for years now regarding a moderate/short tele micro 4/3 lens having been pretty happy with my adapted Contax G Zeiss 45mm f/2 Plannar lens, until fate dealt me a debilitating blow last week which saw my trusty 12-32mm pancake zoom bite the dust.  I’ll get into that in more detail later, but looking to replace it, and having a difficult time finding one, I came across the current Olympus Lens Rebates (click here to see them all).  The Oly 45mm f/1.8 lens is largely regarded as one of the best lenses for the system, especially for the price.  Right now, that normal price of $399 is down to $349 as Olympus has issued a $50 rebate which runs through June 14th, 2014 according to Oly’s website.

While I’ll do a more in depth review on this little gem shortly, come on in for my initial thoughts and sale links.

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*Canon EF 55mm f/1.2?

by in Photography gear and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

Canon EF 55mm f/1.2

Nope, not a typo.  I have, in my possession a Canon 55mm f/1.2 lens with an EF mount.  How?  Well, many of you may know of Ed Mica, an engineer with a passion for photographic lenses, and lens mounts more specifically.  He has worked to provide many mount conversion kits for older FD lenses, converting them to a more modern EF mount and while Ed has had a conversion mount for the FL 55mm f/1.2, I’d been waiting for an FD 55mm f/1.2 SSC conversion since I’d first heard about Ed’s products a couple years back.  Now, he has a conversion mount for many different FD, FL and FDn lenses including my lovely 55mm.  Not only do I now have an ultra fast semi-standard lens for my full frame Canon cameras, I also need to keep one less micro 4/3 adapter around which turns this lens into a 110mm equivalent lens capable of absorbing light in the near darkness for both formats…  Examples and test shots on the other side…

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*Time to vote! Vote for the winner of our third monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge; Closer.

by in Photo Blog Challenge and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

1. Bee Macro by Art Codron

 

2. A little close… by Alpha Whiskey Photography

3. Almost… by Nuno Quina

Hi All and welcome to our third monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge where our winner gets to choose our next theme and also qualifies for our 6 month giveaway where we’ll pit our 6 monthly winners in a vote for the ultimate champion 🙂

Vote below, and visit Heather and Mat over at Mirrorlessons to vote there as well.  Get prepared as we’ll have our winner announce the theme for June’s contest in 5 days and you’ll be able to submit your image to our Flickr group threads HERE on TRP and HERE on Mirrorlessons.

Voting lasts through June 5th and June’s challenge will begin shortly thereafter.  Join up with both groups and submit to both threads and in the mean time let us know who your favorite “Closer” image is:

*Topaz Clean, on sale through May

by in Postprocessing techniques, Software tutorials / reviews and tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I first stumbled into my relationship with Topaz by way of their edge manipulation and texture smoothing plugin, Clean (on sale through May for 50% off HERE, use “mayclean” at checkout).  Normally $30, you can get it for $15 currently. I had been trying to find a way to replicate the effects of Fractalius, which is a PC only plugin.  Through my exploration, I found my way to Topaz Clean, and the rest is history.  (you can read my Fractalius for Mac post HERE).  While not a perfect substitute, there are ways to utilize the edge manipulation in Clean to get a similar effect and because of this initial review, it began my Topaz obsession which has grown to include DeNoise, ReMask, Clarity, ReStyle, B&W Effects, Star Effects, Detail and Simplify.  Come on in for a couple examples and my thoughts.

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*Monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge #3 – Closer

by in Photo Blog Challenge and tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

 

Screen Shot 2014-05-07 at 1.39.46 PM

image © Othman Kammah

April’s winner, Othman Kammah (Click here to Visit and see his photography) has chosen the theme “closer” for this month’s challenge.  All you need to do is to submit your image to the TRP Flickr group thread HERE and the Mirrorlessons Flickr group thread HERE.  The submission threads will close on May 31st at which time Heather, Mat and I will choose our three favorites and put them up for a vote which will run for 5 days.  Once a winner from that vote is determined, they will get to choose the theme for June and we begin again!  The winner this month will join Othman and Marco in a semi annual vote which will see one of the six monthly winners voted on to win our first champions giveaway!

So get close, and get shooting.  Enjoy and I look forward to seeing everyone’s submissions!!!

Happy shooting,

Tyson

*Congratulations to Othman Kammah for winning April’s Flickr Photo Blog Contest!

by in Photo Blog Challenge and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Prelude

“Strings” by Othman Kammah

Thank you to everyone who has voted, and to all who’ve submitted.  With a tight vote, Othman has won our second monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge and will have his image submitted to the winner’s bracket.

Please visit Othman on Flickr HERE, befriend and congratulate him and enjoy his photography.  With each month, our growing network and photographic family expands.  If you’d like to be part of our community, you already are.

Othman will get to choose our next theme so please stay tuned.  Thanks as always to Heather and Mat at Mirrorlessons.com for the coordinated effort and stay tuned on Flickr in both the TRP (here) and ML (here) groups to add submissions to this month’s challenge.

We have decided to do a giveaway after 6 months where we will all vote for our overall favorite from the 6 monthly winners, so you have 4 more chances 🙂

Cheers and happy shooting everyone!

Tyson

*Panasonic Battle, GX7 vs GM1

by in Photography gear and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 35 Comments

GX7vsGM1blog

As is always a bit of fun, I’ve gone through and pitted these two cameras against each other to see if I could tell much in the way of a difference in the file quality.  DXO says there’s a 4 point difference in the performance between these two sensors (in the GX7’s favor) yet they seemingly employ the same sensor and processor…  Seems a little weird, and while I feel DXO does a good job at giving all of us a great resource from which to compare different cameras, it didn’t seem to add up on paper.  C’mon in, We’ll have a look at files from each of these micro 4/3 cameras…

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*Vote Now for the winner of our second Monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge; Music!

by in Photo Blog Challenge and tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Prelude

“Prelude/Strings” by Othman Kammah (Click HERE to visit Othman)

Little Hurricane

“Little Hurricane” by Bill Bowdish (visit bOw_phOto on Flickr HERE)

A Ukulele in Black and White

“A Ukulele in Black and White” by Gene McDaniel (see more from Gene HERE)

The poll will run until Monday, May 5th and the photo with the most votes between the poll below and the Mirrorlessons Poll HERE will get to choose our theme for May.  If you haven’t been involved in our monthly challenges, we’d love to have you join up and in the mean time, vote for your favorite on both sites!

All you need to do is find us on Flickr in the TRP Group HERE and the MIRRORLESSONS Group HERE, submit your images to the respective monthly challenge threads.  Heather, Mathieu and I choose our faves then any and all of our site readers get to vote.  We feature the three finalists and winner via posts on our respective websites as you see above with links to your flickr page and any websites you’d like us to, so get your imagery seen by the thousands of daily viewers between our sites and help by inspiring our entire community through creative and inventive themes and shots!

Vote for your favorite, and feel free to link and lobby for your choice.  The more folks we can involve in this process, the better and more diverse our family becomes.  We are also discussing possible giveaways for semi annual, or annual champions, so, FREE STUFF!

Thanks to everyone that submitted this month, and I hope we can continue to build this movement going forward.

All the best, and happy shooting!

tyson

 

*Can’t we all just get along? Music, photography and the common ground.

by in General ramblings and tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Tornadoonfireinspace

Let me start by saying this is an opinion piece, as much of what I write is.  I’m not looking to legally council nor reprimand, or cite the intricacies of international copyright law.  I’m no lawyer.  I am however a musician and photographer with mixed levels of success in either arena, and I have found some of the recent battles being waged by bands, managers, fans and photographers to be somewhat disheartening.

I like to read through various sites daily to keep up with the goings on and such.  Over the last few days, it seems there is a war brewing between a small pocket of the music industry and photographers.  I speak of course about the recent copyright battle between photographer Rohan Anderson and the band Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (you can read through the article that I read HERE on PetaPixel for all the fun, juicy details if you’re not yet aware).  Then, seemingly in response, Shawn Hamm, the tour manager for Three Days Grace went on a twitter tirade condemning photographers and their claims to compensation for any intellectual property they may think they are entitled to by way of shooting bands (you can again read the PetaPixel article on that one HERE).  Of course, I’m paraphrasing, and will leave my opinions on these individuals and bands (and their behavior) aside to focus more on my opinions at large regarding the mingling of various artistic industries.  Come on in for my thoughts, and the ability to add your own…

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*Helpful Topaz Workflow Suggestions

by in Postprocessing techniques, Software tutorials / reviews and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-04-21 at 2.03.35 PM

 

image © Darcy from Topaz – all rights reserved, used with permission

Hi all.  Darcy from Topaz Labs was nice enough to share this simple yet remarkably helpful graphic showing us the proper order to best utilize and stage different Topaz plugins.

As many of you know, I’m a bit of a honk for the Topaz products as I really feel they offer an amazing value in the plugin universe.  I’ve fielded quite a few emails over the years asking about when is it best to implement noise reduction versus sharpening, etc and I’ve always said it is good to get your initial, simple exposure tweaks done in your host or digital asset management software (lightroom, aperture, et al) and then before altering the pixels any further, run through noise reduction before doing anything to sharpen or further define the pixels as that would also further define the noise or any artifacts, color shifts, posterization, etc.  Sharpening should be the last thing done to any image, and now we have a cool step by step in visual form.  Thanks Darcy!

Darcy has laid this out wonderfully in Topaz terms, and for those of you who’ve been getting into the Topaz plugins like myself, I’d imagine this graphic will do well to help us streamline our workflow through the various Topaz plugins.

Currently, Topaz Detail 3 is on sale for 50% off through April (click HERE and use “aprdetail” to get 50% off)!  What is normally a $40 plugin is now $20, so head over and download the free trial to give it a go.  If you like it, buy it before the end of the month to qualify for the half price license.

You can head over to Topaz Labs website to see what they offer, or below are reviews I’ve done of some more of the Topaz plugins that I use often, and love.

Topaz DeNoise 5, the best noise reduction software I’ve ever used.

Topaz Clarity, possibly my favorite enhancement plugin.

Topaz ReMask, anyone using photoshop masks should download this. Now.

Topaz Simplify, art filters with the click of a button.

Have a look, have a go, and enjoy.  Please feel free to share your results (or any imagery) with our ever growing community on Flickr HERE, and connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks and happy shooting!

Tyson