I own an Xperia Neo which one of the posters before listed as one of the phones with the same sensor as the iPhone 4S. Do I use the camera? A lot!

But as always, if this “suffices” really depends on your requirements for a carry-everywhere camera. In the regard that you nearly always have it with you, the iPhone certainly wins. If you will be happy with the image quality largely depends on what you are planning to do with those images, and what the shooting situation is.

Real life example – this summer I stumbled into a staged “fox hunt”, and tried to capture some images as I would have with my DSLR / larger gear. Best photo (click to enlarge):

But, best action shot of the same event (again, click to enlarge):

Ok, I used the sports program of the camera, which didn’t (to my suprise) raise the ISO, but kept ISO at 100 and thus chose a 1/100s at f/2.4. But the wide angle lens (and no zoom) made it hard to get closer (without being trampled), and the shutter lag rendered many shots of jumping horses useless because they were not correctly framed.

Worst problem – using the camera a lot sucks up battery, and after a while of shooting I ran so low I couldn’t even phone my wife to tell her I would be late because I had met the fox hunters…

Do I use it as an everyday camera? Yes, but for, say, ambitous amateur level photography, I even disregarded all compacts for lack of image quality and chose an Olympus Pen with it’s micro four thirds sensor.  Different league in all respects of course. More on my findings with the Pen in my blog article about my solution to the carry everywhere camera problem.

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1. My solution to the “carry-everywhere-camera-problem”

What is it?

The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.

Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.

The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4

Who needs it?

This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.

I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.

Use and observations

Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.

The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…

Example – what to expect

As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.

Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.

The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.

Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes

With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .

With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?

The Caveat

So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.

What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.

The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope

The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.

So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.

My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.

I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…

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When coming back from last weekend’s landscape tour, I knew I had a keeper with me: The brilliant yellow field of rapeseed with a dark blue sky of a passing thunderstorm makes for a simple, but really effective landscape image. Rule simplify for better photos applied at its best. Nothing special, but I certainly like looking at it again.

And suddenly, I saw it: A hot pixel. Hot pixels (or stuck pixels) can occur on any image sensor, and usually get mapped out in the camera – after the mapping, the pixel or subpixel will no longer contribute to the final image, and the value for it will be interpolated from its neighbouring pixels. So what really is a hardware defect, even if its a small one as there are 11,999,999 other pixels left, gets corrected in software. It is not very dramatic as well, but once you see it you see it in every picture – and reviewing older photos it got stuck already a month ago, and therefore is on all photos I took since then with the Pen.

Here is a 100% crop of the image above with the hot pixel in all it’s beauty:

Panic! I will need the camera for my vacation in 4 weeks! If I send it in, how long will Olympus need for the repair?

I wrote an email to the Olympus support (it’s di.support@olympus-europa.com in Europe, in case you need it) asking where to send it to. I confess, I have underestimated the Olympus engineers. Won’t do it again, promised. It is Nikon who asks to send the body in for such a fix.

Olympus support replied within 90 minutes of opening their hotline on Monday morning, and politely hinted I should try the “pixel mapping” function. Blush. Ok, RTFM – the camera already has the self-healing function built it. I triggered it using the procedure as described in the camera’s manual on page 129 – menu button, “gears” menu, sub-item I, function Pixel Mapping. Some seconds wait, problem gone!

Kudos, Olympus!

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Did it work? Well, yes and no. Despite adding the Olympus E-P1 Pen to my gear which produces fairly large RAW files, I have photographed (and kept) pictures worth of 94 GBytes in 2010, after 96, 73, and 96 in 2007, 2008, and 2009 respectively.

How come I need ~96 GBytes a year for the third year now? Strange, but at least I exhibit a somewhat consistent, or even linear, behavior

Here is the graph plot of my disks getting filled over the last 7 years:

Wondering how your byte photography trend is? Check out my download section with a script that can calculate the data for a plot as above. Let us know about the results here in the comments!

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1. Move to Texas?

When mid-2010 the Panasonic Lumix LX5 was announced, I thought I had finally found my “carry everywhere with me” camera – but when I saw its price tag (close to 500€), I was quite shocked. Sorry, folks, that is just too much.

Being thrown off-course with my decision for the LX5 already made, I had to look again at alternatives without much hope, but then a miracle happened – I met the Olympus E-P1 (aka Pen).

Love at first touch!

Sure, I had had a longer look at it before (and actually had preferred the Panasonic Lumix GF-1 from the test reports and features over the P1), but what had happened since then was the introduction of the E-P2, sending the price of the original tumbling down: The kit with the neat collapsible 14-42 lens came down from 800€  to 360€ – substantially less than the LX5. I thought once, twice, and ordered one – and I will not give it back!

For those not regularly updating themselves about new toys and gear (hopefully being focused on making pictures instead) – the E-P1 is the first of a series of bodies for a new lens mount in the so called “micro four thirds” format, also written as Micro 4/3 or MFT. It is a mirror-less system camera with a sensor not quite the size of the APS-C of e.g. the consumer DSLRs, but with a crop factor of 2. So the 14-42 lens effectively feels like a 28-84 mm. I won’t go into detail here, find all the techie details and test images as usual on dpreview here.

Here are some test images I took on last year’s Munich Oktoberfest. For pixel peeping, you might click on the download link giving you 100%.

[svgallery name="octoberfest-hd"]

My conclusions from half a year of use, with about 2500 photos shot with the Pen:

• The Pen is not pocketable. You need either a bag or a backpack. I have found a good solution to keep the bulkiness low is to add a retro wrapping casing like the Delamax case available at Amazon.
• Still I like to carry it along – the first days I had it in my smallest DSLR case, and anxiously kept checking that I hadn’t lost it because the bag felt empty with the Pen in it instead of the D300.
• The image quality is similar or better than my Nikon D300 up to ISO 800. It’s as simple as that.
• I totally, totally love the built-in electronic 2-axis spirit level, and use it as my default composition view. Horizons come out straight, and architecture photography with wide angle finally works also hand-held!
• It obviously does quite some image enhancements in terms of lens distortion and vignetting, saving you some time in post production. I do not feel it is overdoing it, but like the result.
• Controls and dials are ok, but not great. Don’t try it with gloves in winter…
• The screen is awful when the sun is out.
• The autofocus in low light sucks. Even in good light it is not fast, but that is not a problem with my typical walk-around subjects (no flying ducks there).
• It has no flash, only a shoe mount for one. Ok, no chance to take embarrassing flash-only images. But also no chance for those (few) subtly fill-flashed images profiting from a pop-up flash. I can live without it.

Summary: The Olympus Pen is a really nice package and a joy to use, despite the few drawbacks, of which the most serious is the screen usage in bright sunshine. But don’t overrate that – you still can take photographs, and normally your subject is in it

Some questions I ponder on:

• Can it completely replace the D300? Certainly not. Without the DSLR’s fast autofocus and continuous shooting speed, wildlife and birds are impossible. Same I would say for shots involving off-camera flash or even studio and macro setups. I might be wrong.
• Does it sometimes replace the D300? Certainly. Actually, ergh, more and more. If I know I will not be looking for wildlife or birds with my tele zoom but rather do “walk-around landscape”, e. g. hiking, I am completely comfortable taking only the Pen with it’s built-in image stabilizer and electronic spirit-bubble.
• Could I use something even smaller? Well, yes, but I still have a 7-year old Canon Ixus 40 (with a tiny 4 mega-pixel sensor). In the last half year I think I preferred it twice over the Pen, and both for “family-life” photography only, for which the 4 mega-pixels were ok.
• Will I expand the Pen into a “system” with exchangeable lenses, flash, and maybe other bodies? Hard to say. The Pen is fun to use, and I use it more and more… Panasonic now makes a 100-300 mm 4.0-5.6 MFT lens which is only 12,6 cm long, and weighs 500 grams. Not bad for 600 mm equivalent reach. Do they make tele converters for that ?

Here is a family portrait to show the difference in size in “travel” mode:

By the way, the E-P1 Pen is still available – I saw the body for 200€ today. Of course there is now the E-P2 with its electronic viewfinder, and the E-PL1 and E-PL2 models (those targeting the consumer with less manual control needs) – but I think still the original is incredible value for money.

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1. Using a smartphone as a carry-everywhere-camera?

Oh, I had feared you would ask – sorry for that extended break again. Now that the football world cup is over, more time for the important things in life remains, like updating my blog Promise!

A lot actually has happened since my last post, and I will need some time (yes, I know, if I am ever able to…)  to catch up, with my existing posting ideas turning into articles.

One of the major decisions I have made some weeks ago is to actually abandon Photoshop Elements for most purposes – a software I have used since version 2.0 when it was still called Photoshop Album – for something better. And of course, like everybody else not using a Mac (those also have the choice of Apple’s Aperture) I had considered Adobe Lightroom as the natural next thing to turn to. So when Adobe released the Lightroom 3.0 beta version, I gave it yet another try and installed it on my machine, to find out if I would like it this time. My first experiments two years ago ended with me not purchasing it, because Lightroom actually lacked many of the features I had come to like in Photoshop Elements back then.

Concurrently, I thought why not follow a tip I got on a workshop last fall by some fellow photographer who is actually a Lufthansa airline pilot and who recommended Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits, a tool seemingly known and used mostly by pro-photographers. Thinking, “Hey, this guy is a pilot, so he sure must like stuff that works and gets a job done!”, I downloaded and installed Photo Mechanic, and tried it concurrently with Lightroom for the image downloading and selection of a few photo shoots back in May.

To put it into perspective: Photo Mechanic is a pure photo downloading, browsing, and tagging/keywording application. That’s where the functionality stops. It is not a RAW converter, and has no image editing capabilities. In that, it is much more like the tandem of Nikon ViewNX and Nikon TransferNX you get for free when you buy a Nikon DSLR. The troubles I had with Nikon ViewNX I had blogged about earlier, and was starting to turn away from this combination as well.

“So what happened?”

From day one, I started using Photoshop Mechanic for my real “work”, instead of Nikon ViewNX. I had had the intention to merely test it, but I just never went back to my old tools. Hmmm. Does tell something, doesn’t it?

“And Lightroom?”

Yes, I forced myself to test it as well. I did, and though I had taken some classes on Lightroom previously on various occasions, and had a good grip on the software and its capabilities, it didn’t do the job for me as effortlessly and unobtrusively as Photo Mechanic. Instead of going into detail why, I for my part don’t think the selection of a software is a rational decision only – just like the selection of a camera body or a lens requires the real tactile feedback, the software has to feel like the right tool for the job at hand.

One point that certainly made a strong point for Photo Mechanic is the ridiculously low computing power requirement of the software. Mostly probably because it is exactly not a RAW converter, and since my lesson learned I always shoot JPG+RAW together, so I rely on Photoshop CS3 for the RAW conversion should I start image editing.

“Why is this important? Just get a faster machine!”

Well, for one, I did make a decision to spend money to buy stuff that makes me produce better photos, and just a new computer with more GHz and GByte will not do this for me. And secondly, looking forward I know I will need to get a Netbook for traveling soon, and as these are pleasantly cheap and pleasantly light by now, I have no intention to revert to a heavy and costly laptop for during-the-trip image downloading, selection and tagging (oh – you see my case now?).  Photo Mechanic actually made me feel I just got a new PC, it is so much faster than Nikon ViewNX. And I am running this on a 2003 Dell. If it runs on that, it will run on the Netbook as well.

“Well, that’s not a fair comparison – Lightroom is meant to run on modern PCs!”

Never said this was a fair comparison – I am just reporting what works for me at this time, and maybe to encourage you – if you are facing the same decision I did – to consider also non-mainstream solutions for yourself, maybe they fit you better, as they did fit me!

“Can you show me this ‘wonderful’ software?”

Sure I can! Here are some screenshots of the software in production at my place, but I want to encourage you to go to Camera Bits website – they of course have a fully functional trial version as well!

Here is a look at the thumbnail contact sheet view:

There is of course a larger single view as well:

This can do comparison views, in horizontal and vertical, locked and unlocked (surpassing ViewNX in this):

And the IPTC dialog looks very raw, but has many useful features:

It does support GPS as well, though I won’t change my GPS workflow using Geosetter for this, it is useful to be able to pop up the window with the Google Maps embedded:

“Hey, you must be kidding! This ain’t pretty!”

As said before, it works for me. Your mileage may vary

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In case you are having the same thoughts, I have made the script I used to calculate that statistic available on the newly created download page at Alpenglow.info as freeware. I’m interested in feedback, so please give it a try and let me know if it works for you!

So here is the result of running the statistics script on my NAS:

Oh – positive suprise! The aggregated disk space curve actually flattens roughly mid-2009, despite my fears of faster image data growth after I had upgraded the camera to more Megapixels and Megabyte per image. What is the explanation? Well, it’s actually two:

1. I did not have as much time for my hobby as I did before, and definitely did less photo shoots and excursions since then. I am inclined to change that again, and the next workshops are already booked
2. I definitely improved my workflow: Instead of importing the JPEGs into Photoshop Album, keywording and assigning the 1-5 star rating in there (usually keeping even the 1 star images), I rather go through the images using the RAW viewer Nikon ViewNX first, and use the “1″ key (which assigns a red category marker) for those images that are definitely not worth keeping. After I have made one pass through the images, I immediately use the filter selector to select all red category images, and delete them from the disk. Phew!

Now the one real challenge is to flag as many images for deletion as possible. And I definitely got better at this, being more critical towards my own images and recognizing when images will not be suitable for presentation and thus don’t satisfy my own quality criteria (and have no nostalgical value yet )  – to say it with the words of Florian Möllers, a workshop leader I once had the pleasure to experience on a nature photography course in the Bavarian Forest national park (I think to remember that Florian himself was quoting the late Fritz Pölking – please make sure to pay Fritz’ website a visit, there is definitely a wealth of information about nature photography there):

Tapfer sein! (Be courageous!)

Which translates to: Delete those images! Get rid of them immediately! There will be better days, and better photos!

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2. How many bytes do you photograph?

Guess what happened? Arriving on Sunday afternoon in the best of all possible sun flooded winter snows, we hit the track and had a great time. Next morning, things were even getting better – after one of the coldest nights of the year with temperatures way below -20° C (that’s -5° F), the sun came out and everything – and I mean really everything – was covered by the thickest hoar frost I have ever seen. And since last year I’m in love with hoar frost, remember?

We did a great tour of about 18 km through this wonderful landscape, and I’d love to show you photos – but I can’t, because while I had packed the huge Lowepro backpack with D300 and everything, I just forgot the tiny little Canon ixus 40 on my desk. Was too small. Just overlooked it in the huge pile of equipment I packed. I briefly considered taking the D300, but the >1 kg monster including lens was not suited for cross-contry, neither was the Computrekker Plus backpack. That is certainly not suited for any kind of sports, as it’s just barely ok for airplane travel.

Quickly decided to rathermore enjoy the scenery without taking pictures – only thing I can share of this perfect afternoon is our track. For more interest on geo-tagging and GPS data workflows, you’re invited to revisit my previous posts on this topic.

Wow, I just found a new feature in Google Earth 5.1 I had not noticed in it’s significance: It has a button for “Show sunlight across the landscape”. You can select date and time of day, and it will render the light. This could come in handy to predict cool photo spots in a mountainous landscape. Below the simulated phase of the Haldensee lake we touched on our ski tour at the time of day the sun dips below the first mountain range. This is certainly something I have to try in the future.

Next day, of course, no hoar frost anymore and the sun showed itself a little less generous. Did ski, but the photos we took later that afternoon are really everything but impressive in terms of light. Look how flat the light is with snow and high fog… This is the (frozen) Haldensee lake, looking back from the position indicated on the track map towards the “camera” of the Google Earth picture shown above. The track across the lake was closed, for the ice obviously not being trusted after the prior weekend’s foehn.

Lesson learned: Sometimes, less is more. And don’t be so stupid to leave the small camera at home.

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As I remember my months-long investigations and head scratching before deciding for the Sigma 100-300 f/4, I can only recommend to surf over to his page and have a look at his article on body selection, and the one on lens selection. I can agree with most of his conclusions, except maybe that you should also consider a Sony Alpha 700, which has the image stabilizer in the body stabilizing any of the long lenses.

Markus is an active member over at the Bird Photographers Net forums, which is certainly where I met him. Oh, and I just see he is living close to Munich as well!

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1. Sold off my old Sigma 70-210 f/3.5-4.5 tele-lens

Get out there.

But I think I got a good excuse – for the second time, I will be going next week to a nature photography workshop in the German national park Bavarian Forest. The first workshop I attended in winter 2008 when I was still using my Tokina 300 mm f/4 lens, and the experience from using the fixed focal length made me change soon after to the wonderful Sigma 100-300 mm f/4 zoom for more flexibility.

Now, a second experience I had made back then was that even with the 1.5x crop factor of the D70 (and the D300 has the same), the resulting 450 mm are not enough in many situations. I did have the Kenko 1.4x tele converter allowing me to get to real 420 mm (so 630 mm full-frame equivalent). I used this extension a lot, not to say on some days all the time! But the pictures taken by those participants who hauled 300 mm f/2.8 with 2x tele converters proved to me that the difference between my 630 mm and their Canon-powered (1.6x crop) 960 mm was absolutely surprising.

So I thought I could enter the game with buying the Sigma 2.0x EX DG converter. Theoretically, this gives me the chance to do either a 200-600 mm f/8 for a full frame max length of 900 mm, or even stack the teleconverters for a 280-840 mm f/11 monster with a 1260 mm equivalent length. Question was of course, does this work, and how much image quality (if any) remains? The question e.g. is discussed (sorry, German only) at the blog of nature photography school Foto Campus, and their verdict is: Forget tele-converters.

Having read and investigated other opinions out in the net over the use and quality of 2x tele converters, I had decided to give it a try anyway – despite the warnings about the images being degraded in quality to uselessness, I saw and still see no real alternative that doesn’t blow the budget completely. So I did the purchase, and tested it last Wednesday – from the balcony of my appartment.

[svgallery name="teleconverters"]

The four images show the top floors of the mildly famous Hypo-Hochhaus building in Munich. (Did you know it is the 41st highest building in Germany? Well…) :

1. The whole frame with 600 mm – image taken wide open at f/8 effective aperture, and 1/125s exposure time at ISO 200.
2. The corner of the same frame showing some cables and antennae. This is the part I had focused on using live view. Click on “show image in full size” to get the real 100% pixel view.
3. The whole frame later that evening taken with stacked teleconverters, this is at 1260 mm equivalent length. Image taken not stopped down at f/11 effective with 1/1.3s exposure time at ISO 200.
4. The corner of the second frame with the same cables and antennae.

Lessons learned:

• Ups, no autofocus at f/8? From my research I had thought only the Canons to turn off the AF, but the D300 did as well. There are tricks on how to use taping pins to get AF back, but I stuck with MF for these tests. And I can remember from my last visit in the Bavarian Forest even non-moving animals, with Lynx being cat after all… So this might not be such a big problem.
• Live View in tripod mode allows you to zoom in to 100%, and allows for really nice manual focus.
• Mirror lock-up is suddenly absolutely required. The images without mirror lock-up were unusable.
• At these focal lengths, the atmospheric disturbance by the air becomes visible (comparing two images of the building with it’s regular grid of windows made this very obvious).
• My tries to stop down to get sharper pictures failed – mostly I guess because of the low light situation and the fact that the exposure times were already reaching 1 second. All images with even longer exposures could be thrown away, maybe too many vibrations on my balcony?
• Stacking the TCs (the 1.4x must mount to the camera body, so the 2x sits between the 1.4x and the lens) reenabled the AF again (obviously the software couldn’t cope with both TCs connected, and reverted to detecting the f/4 lens only). But in the by then low light the AF was only hunting and did not acquire lock.

Resulting image quality? I am not disappointed, but there are many things that need to be done correctly. Looking forward to give it a try next week!

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1. Sold off my old Sigma 70-210 f/3.5-4.5 tele-lens