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Watch it hover, Fly.
I decided to get my “Flying Bird” shot. It didn’t end well. The birds must have decided to not go out for the day, however, my old friends, the hoverflies were out playing with each other. When I say “with each other”, I really mean it. I try and focus on a hoverfly with full zoom about to get an amazing shot… when another hoverfly comes screaming over playing what appears to be “hover-dodger” and smashes into the one I was about to snap.
This happened a lot. My photo opportunity window with these things were about 5-10 seconds, 15 at max if I was really lucky. Not much time to manual focus (because of the tiny size of the critters) and snap the picture but I managed it, somehow.
A nice touch to these photos, which was completely unintentional, is the dark background. This happened because the sun was beaming directly on them and they were showing up as little white pellets so after I turn the exposure down and speed the shutter speed up, that was the result. This was using the 14-150mm M.ZUIKO lens with the Olympus E-PL1
As always, click the image for a larger version. (opens Flickr in a new window)
Nature
I wanted to make a video with the 14-150mm lens because it’s touted as a good video lens due to the near silent auto-focus. I ran into the garden and decided to just film anything. It’s not anything spectacular, but it is a nice demonstration.
How to make pigs fly.
I found a mini pig today with the most excitable look on it’s face. Not sure what he’s so happy about but I’m pretty sure the fly is about to find out.
The Moon
Seeing as I had the 14-150mm (28-300mm equivalent) lens, I decided to go and get my moon shot! At first I thought, like most night time photography, I had to have a long shutter speed… but no. It came out as a big circular blob of failure. I sped things up a bit and ended up with this cracker.
Scrabble: M
So I had a bit of fun with the Scrabble set today after being inspired from a game of… Scrabble! I took a set but this was the best picture so I played around with it in Photoshop, just changing saturation, colours and some other stuff that I won’t bore you with.
EDIT: As you may have noticed (or not), I messed up and spelt “Unusual”, “Unusal”. Never mind. Cheers, Photoshop.
Self Portrait: Who Needs Lights?!
I’ve recently been wanting a super cool, awesomely epic and badass self portrait. Tonight I tried my hand at it. This, from the start, was obvious that it wasn’t going to be my prize and glory, but I thought fuck it; I’ll give it a go.
Of course, with no natural or studio lights, I could only hope to learn technique rather than be left with a kick-ass final image. I had a tripod, a chair, a blank wall, a standard lamp (which you can see in my glasses) and the room’s ordinary ceiling light. I also had my trusty Olympus PEN.
This is the image I captured with manual focus and the 2 second timer:
This is what using some basic and intermediate photoshopping techniques achieved:
But then I got bored of being on the computer so I went and hung out with some girls. I was excluded.
A Spider’s Lunch
I saw the most intriguing spider outside as I was taking out the bin bags so I ran back in to get my camera but by the time I got back, it had gone into hiding. Not 5 seconds pass until I see a commotion on my front door between a different spider and a fly! I took some pictures using the Olympus E-PL1′s kit lens (14-42mm). It’s not a macro lens, but it did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the detail quite vividly. (click any image to see it larger on Flickr)
Stereoscopic Photography
I thought I’d give this a try seeing as I had the Olympus PEN out. Stereoscopic photography is the art of making a photograph appear to look 3D by simply showing 2 photos of the same picture at a slightly different angle really fast. I did it with Charlotte being the subject of the photo.
After exporting it as a GIF file, thus the lack of photo quality, here is the end product. It’s not the best attempt, but i’m planning on doing some better ones soon.
A Brief Guide To Stop Motion
You may have recently seen a Stop Motion I made with the Olympus PEN E-PL1 of the Monopoly Car driving around the game board. Well so did Olympus and in turn have asked me to write a “How-To” guide to making a stop motion video.
Hoverflies on open Lilies.
I’m ill today, and in being so there is not much to do so I decided to play around with my PEN camera! I had the intention of making another stop motion (which I will still likely do), but I ventured into the garden and saw that the Lilies my mum planted had opened up and were infested with these little hoverflies.
So I took some pictures, but I’m only really proud of one. (click image for full size)
