Tag Archives: photography

*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:

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

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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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*Monthly Flickr Photo Blog Challenge #2 – Music

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Music

Photo © Marco Bozzato

Welcome to the second monthly flickr photo blog challenge!  Marco Bozzato, the winner of last month’s challenge has chosen the theme “Music” which will lay the foundation from which we can build out submissions.  You have until April 30th to submit your musical image to the following Flickr group threads:

 

TRP Photoblography

Mirrorlessons

If you’re not a member of either (or both) group(s), please join us, submit your image and prepare to vote.  Heather and Mat from Mirrorlessons, as well as myself will each choose our favorite from all submissions and on the first of May, we will open up a vote on both of our blogs to allow everyone, and all readers to vote from May 1st through May 5th.  The image and photographer with the most votes will get showcased on both blogs and gets to choose the theme for the month of May.  We had dozens of images submitted for the first challenge, and I’d love to see this continue to grow.  The larger we can build this community both inside and outside of flickr, the larger an audience and family we will have to interact with, learn from and build upon.

So, get your camera out, and get creative.  The only rule is that the image needs to be related to music, and while not an official rule, we like the idea of newly taken images so that we can use these monthly challenges to spur creativity from the ground up.

If you’re not signed up to receive new updates, you can enter your email at the top right of the screen which will merely sign you up to get emailed when new articles are posted, nothing more.  I’ve thought about going into pharmaceuticals or trying to become Nigerian royalty, then looking for eager investors to help separate me from my royal billions, but at this point, I’m so far behind on just keeping the blog up so you’ll only receive relevant emails to photography.  Sorry about that.

Let’s get to it!

Happy shooting,

 

Tyson

*Congratulations to Marco Bozzato for winning our first Flickr Photo Blog Post

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Congratulations to Marco (see more from him HERE) for compiling over half of the overall votes between the poll here and on Mirrorlessons (click HERE to visit Mat and Heather)!  Stay tuned to find out Marco’s choice on our Flickr Photo Blog Challenge topic for April.  To sign up to receive posts as they go live, enter your email at the top right of the page, find me on Facebook here, or Twitter here and find the TRP Flickr group HERE and the Mirrorlessons Flickr group HERE!  It’s all about family, friends and community and I’m very excited that we’re continuing to grow ours.  If you didn’t see the recent eye enhancement tutorial featuring Heather from Mirrorlessons, check it out HERE.

Thanks to all for the continued collaboration, support and conversation.  I look forward to seeing where we can all continue to take this.

 

Take care and happy shooting,

 

Tyson

*Fun with soul windows. Eye retouching techniques using Photoshop.

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

 

_1500620

A couple years ago, I’d posted a tutorial on simple eye enhancement techniques and I wanted to revisit and build on that.  Lately, “Photoshop” has seemed to be getting absolutely bludgeoned and cast as some evil, socially destructive outcast.  Used as a verb, photoshopping has become akin to kicking a blind puppy, and then forcing it into a life of anorexia.  While I am in no way a fan of, nor support using photoshop to unnaturally build unrealistic body proportions, or overly plasticize a face to perfection, I will make the case that retouching is an art and like anything has boundaries.  If viewing retouching from a creative angle, there are things that can be a lot of fun.  If viewing retouching from a practical angle, it can be effective.  Going overboard in any direction can certainly lead to criticism, but so many forms of artistic manipulation have and will always continue to draw ire.  For this post, I want to play around with both the creative and practical angles in regards to enhancing one’s eyes in a portrait.  Thank you to my friends Mat and Heather from Mirrorlessons – Bestmirrorlesscamerareviews.com for the shot you see above.  Eyes are often a focal point in many a good portrait, so why not add a bit of punch to that focal point?  Come on in to see how I achieve this quickly and easily.  If interested, you can download these eye enhancement Photoshop actions for free…

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*Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens, Tested

by in Photography gear and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 49 Comments

Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 lens review Yet another kit lens has come onto the scene.  On paper, ho-hum, a little wider, a little shorter, still slow, no focus ring…  Why would this particular kit lens be a better choice than the other current options?  Yes, it’s tiny and light weight and nearly as small as the Lumix 14mm Pancake lens, but what’s this?  It’s reasonably sharp at all focal lengths and all apertures and offers us a 24mm equivalent lens as opposed to the moderate wide 28mm equivalent in most all other kit zooms… Interesting.  Hit the jump for my user review on this little optic…

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