Richard & Caroline's Blog

With the house move now complete, though we still have stuff in storage, I have started to think about planning my office.

While having breakfast yesterday morning, I was enjoying the view of the Blackbirds darting into the Yew Bushes. It made me think about the Photographer Moose Peterson. He has a long lens mounted on the side of his desk and a view straight out into his garden.

With the right desk positioning I may be able to set up something similar. I’ll certainly be get my office and desk straight before even thinking about the studio space.

It’s been quite an exciting few days on the camera front. With Panasonic releasing the Photographer Centric GX-7, then today the GM-1, Sony’s new full frame goodies the A7 & A7r based on RX-1 and even Nikon getting in on the action with some very minor upgrades for their SLR’s.

I was hoping to have posted my thoughts and a few demo photographs from the Panasonic GX-1, but I have been unable to find time to test the local demo model that London Camera Exchange currently have.  Hopefully i’ll be able to get round to it next week.

One of the more interesting options with the new Sony Full Frame cameras is the ability to take Leica M lens.  While this is possible with MicroFourThirds, Sony Nex and the Fuji X interchangeable lens series cameras this is the first none Leica Full frame camera series that can do this.

Exciting times.

Another great World Photo Walk.  A good walk and the standard this year looking at the local flicker group is even higher then usual.  I have only edited a few of mine so far which you can see above.  The Lincoln shots that the group has put together can be found here:

This weekend is the Worldwide Photowalk, there is still time if you hurry to find a city near you and subscribe.  Its free, its fun and you could win some great prizes as well as make some new friends and have a good day taking photographs.

I’ll try and blog about the day next week and publish a few of my shots.

 

Until then heres a shot I took of the local University on one of the previous photo walks.  Photoshopped and HDR used way over the top but I think the building can take it!

 

I tend to use a tripod quite a lot, part of this is down to my camera and lens choice.  Two of my cameras are impractical to use without a big heavy tripod, and several of my lens are far easier to handle with a tripod then hand held.  I have posted about tripods before here, but thought I would mention them with respect to the smaller formats.

My little Leica’s M4 & M8 and my Nikon V1 virtually never see a tripod.  Its one of the advantages for these smaller cameras, being small light and mirror less they can be used at slower shutter speeds with less impact of camera shake.

But one of the advantages of the smaller sensor’ed cameras like the Nikon V1 and Micro FourThirds is the reach one can get and the lower cost of long telephotos.

If you have a long telephoto for your SLR then your long lens may come with a tripod collar who one is available as an option, but if you look at the current long telephotos for the small sensor’ed cameras, none of them come with tripod collars.  This is a major limitation in my view.

Luckily third parties now seem to be addressing this, lets hope the lens manufactures learn from this.

Tripod Collar for FourThirds.