Saturday, May 5, 2012

I left the green bark and the shade

We got rain during the night, and it cleaned the air. The clouds hovered above at noon, and there was a little bit of fog, when I went for a walk around three lakes in Luukki: Väärälampi, Mustlampi and Halkolampi. The moisture painted the landscape in colors, it was good to be out walking with a camera.

I'm still thinking about cameras, especially the Olympus m4/3 ones, which have image stabilization built in. And even though I don't really like the design of the OM-D E-M5 (retro is not the way to go forward), the features are interesting indeed.

But then I start to think about the LX5 and realize how good the package is, f/2.0, 24 mm at wide end, and macro which usually works like charm, helped with the effective image stabilization.

Having a m4/3 system covering all the bases which the LX5 does could be possible, but the combination would for sure not be pocketable. But what is tempting about the OM-D E-M5 is putting it together with a very good lens - maybe a macro, but even more interestingly a wide-angle lens - and using just that, no other lenses at all.

At some point I was really tempted getting a macro lens and a sensor-stabilized m4/3 body, but then I realized that the LX5 has another advantage: it is much harder to get the subject in focus with a m4/3 camera than with the LX5. And I'm not really into the kind of macro photography in which the background is fully blurred; to me that is not what photography is about.

(Posting title is from the poem Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight by Yvor Winters.)

2 comments:

Markus said...

Yes, that topic of macro focus we had left out until now, and there is indeed a big difference: The LX3 and I guess the LX5, too, have their closest focusing distance at the widest end of the zoom, whilst with the 45mm you are definitely in the telephoto range. This can be helpful with shy insects, also with artificial lighting, but comes along with very shallow depth of field and also with the impossibility to include the environment in the image.

I wouldn't say it's worse, but again it is very different from the LX macro style. In the end it's a question of preferences.

Juha Haataja said...

@Markus: Indeed, using a bigger-sensor camera for macro photography would soon result in having a big load of equipment to carry: tripod, various lighting equipment (reflectors etc.), grips to keep the subject as still as possible, etc. etc. It would be very different, and I prefer the spontaneus possibilities the LX5 allows.

On the other hand, there is something in the look of your m4/3 photographs which I like very much indeed.