Walking The Olympus Way With Camera Electronic

 

A Photowalk can be a peculiar ritual - somewhere between a civic parade and a band of footpads skulking through town. It is innocent enough, though, when it starts...

Actually it generally begins with a greeting by the industry representative - in this case Burke Flynn from Olympus Imaging - and a setting out of the rules; you are welcome to try the new cameras and please do not drop them in the mud. Do not run away with them as young, fit shop assistants will chase you like greyhounds. We have counted the lenses...

Friday's Olympus Photo Walk  from our new Murray Street Store was actually delightful, coinciding as it did with pleasant summer weather and the Friday night hawkers markets in the centre of Perth. If you can stand fire, smoke, and the smell of things frying you have a chance for some great pictures. As well, the falling light in Perth at this time of year can be surprisingly gentle and artistic - particularly if it is reflecting off signs and Christmas revelers.

It was not always thus. The city at the end of Friday in the 1960's was alternately grim and garish, though you were pretty safe wandering the streets at nearly any time of the night. I should not care to linger late in the area these days...but then I get nervous when they let the Bingo mob out of the local parish hall - full of tea, biscuits, and passion. You get hit with a Zimmer frame and it is all over...

Well, back to the centre of the city. Two examples of the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 MkII were to be had, but one of them was firmly in the grasp of Camera Electronic's Sam Perejuan. And I was able to observe one very smart design feature that Olympus have changed from the OM-D E-M1 original. Look at the picture of Sam's hand holding the camera.

Sam's hand is not a small one - call it an average man's span. He has a firm grip on the camera with forefinger on the shutter button and thumb ready to turn the back dial - but his hand is not having to fight its way over the camera support lug and strap holder. Olympus have moved it from the position  they...and most other people...formerly put it on the side of the camera. It is now up in the cradle of the web formed in finger and thumb. It is ever so much easier to handle the camera than before.

The picture of Sam shooting the camera with a rather large strap attached shows that the strap naturally lays out of the way now and does not bunch under the hand. Bravo! Stand there fighting with a strap for an hour and see how your concentration suffers.

Now as to topics for a walk - apart from the doughnut stalls and fist fights - people can find some artistic treasures:

Or architectural flights of fancy:

Or just quietly evocative lanes.

I just enjoyed speculating about the late-night goings-on...I believe they call for players some time after 9:00. Tennish, anyone...?*

 * Yes, that was intentional. The weblog pun filter is not turned on.

Saturday Morning In Western Australia

Can you all remember Saturday morning in Western Australia in the 1960's? If you were keen you got up at 7:30 and had a hasty breakfast and headed out to the shops ready for them to open. At 9:00 it was, as they say in the riot control training films, on.

From Fremantle to Wanneroo and as far east as the Greenmount hill, the entire world came out and tried to cram themselves into the shops to get what they needed for the coming week. You took life chances in Boans in the city and basically you could only visit one side of Albany Highway in Victoria Park because there was no way short of 1:00 that you were going to get to the other; choose right or left and be satisfied with it.

Then at the stroke of 1:00 PM the entire town shut up with a clang, and everyone vanished into football stadia, pubs, or dark lounge rooms. The only sound up Murray Street was crickets and the rustle of tumbleweeds....

Things has changed*. Shops open all afternoon on Saturday and people can spread their purchasing time out a little better. Some places even open Sunday and money changes hands. They have cleaned the tumbleweeds from Murray Street.

All this to say that the people who have heretofore been desperate on Saturday in their quest to buy photographic gear from Camera Electronic will be able to able to benefit greatly from the opening of the new Camera Electronic store at the corner of Murray and Queen Street. Consider the following:

a. There will be two shops and more space dedicated to gear. More staff to serve customers. Shorter waits, perhaps.

b. New transport options. The new store will be just a block away from the Perth Underground train station. If you want to tootle in from Clarkson. Mandurah, Fremantle, or Midland on the train you can leave the car at home and not have to circle the city block looking for a space. Those of us with Seniors cards can do the entire trip for free and have extra money to buy lenses. And we're gonna be smug about it, too...

c. There are two pubs on the way from the Perth Underground Station to Queen Street and a bar down Queen street. The Belgian Beer Cafe is just over the road. There are restaurants galore. You need not suffer at any time from hunger or thirst.

d. If the train-travellers flock to Murray Street, the car drivers will have more Saturday parking spots in Stirling street. Just choose your transport and head on in.

e. You'll have new vistas to test wide-angle lenses out on in Murray Street. Stirling Street will still be best for telephoto...

All the above having been said, you'll still need to remember that the wide open spaces of the weekdays - from 9:00 to 11:00 and 2:00 to 5:00 - are the best choice for people who need to have an extended consultation. The rush of lunch hour or the despair of closing time are somewhat abated, and sales assistants can help people with more questions. It's likely to be the same way with the new store - weigh up your needs and plan your visit accordingly.

Someone asked what the heating and cooling will be like in the new place - no idea whatsoever, but when I discover it I'll let you know. Summer is coming and this sort of thing is an important consideration.

*Some things have sadly gone; the city cinemas are no more. They were the destination of choice for a lot of us back then.

Being An Upright Photographer

Last year I had a chance to see an exhibition of photographs prints that had been taken in and around the City of Perth. We might not necessarily think of our town as an exotic place for photos...but the vision of the photographers was acute enough to find dozens of unique and memorable sights. Some of these were historical but a complete mystery to me - I'm glad there were captions.

One point of amazement was how many of Perth's buildings are built with walls that slope inwards from the bottom. I think that the designers must have been trained on Mayan ziggurats...or maybe they just ran out of materials as they went higher and had to make the buildings narrower.

Of course, it may have been to counteract the forces of nature, as I noted in about 20% of the entries that the horizon sloped down from right to left or vice versa. Perhaps the buildings were only reacting to the shifting gravity. Amazing how well the ocean stayed on some prints, when it should have dripped off to the side...

Well, snide comments aside, it did point out the basic optical fact that when you point your camera up or down get in all of the top or bottom of a building, the structure will seem to taper away from you. Your eye sees it as well, but when your brain processes the information it lies to you and tells you the building walls are straight up and down, because it knows they probably are. The camera is a much more literal observer.

Pro shooters have known for years that they need to keep the camera level get the building walls vertical. Even if it is just the back of the camera, it has to be straight up and down to avoid distortion of the image. This means that the person taking the picture has to be far enough away or use a wide enough angle on the lens to get the part of the building they want on the sensor...and in some cases it means that they have to half-way up a building nearby their target to satisfy all the criteria.

Old timers like me who used view and field cameras with rising and falling fronts and lenses with a large coverage could sometimes fiddle this to perfection from ground level . Modern digital shooters with tilt/shift lenses (Nikon, Canon, Samyang) can also do it.

If pressed to it we can also go into many of the digital editing programs like Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and pick a portion of the filters that will correct this distortion. It is amazing to see how far a bad situation can be recovered, though not getting that far away from the correct shooting makes the repair a lot easier.

At this point I will admit that there are any number of photographs that have wildly converging verticals and have benefited from the look - they have been made with a deliberate use of the forced perspective to make an artistic statement. It is only the ones that have tried to be realistic and failed that we address with the special lenses or programs.

As for the tilting horizon? Well, Cullmann, Manfrotto, and Promaster all make extremely neat little bubble levels that will allow you yo shoot with the camera level to the horizon. Lots of camera s have artificial horizon indicators built into the EVF or LCD display. If you use them they work.

If your image passes through a computer between your camera and the printer...then take the time to correct that horizon in the editing program. Even if you have to measure the screen with a wooden school ruler you can still make your vision conform to the way gravity actually works.