FISH EYE FUN

Monitary Christmas gifts and a good deal from 'thestickman' on the Four Thirds User forum meant I was able to purchase the Zuiko 8mm fish eye lens. I am already enjoying the possibilities of this lens, which really is much more than a gimmick.

On Tuesday my daughter and I took a trip to London to visit an exhibition at the V&A and to go to the theatre. I took along my camera with the fish eye attached to make myself try out the lens.

We used the underground and I was able to use my camera without any questions from 'the powers that be'. I am told that provided you are 'passing through' there should be no problems taking hand held, non flash photographs. My experience has shown this to be true, as I have never been stopped or questioned when using my camera on the underground network, perhaps it's a case of work fast so they can't catch you!

This was a grab shot as I got off the train and turned around, looking for a picture. This is as taken, apart from a RAW conversion and a bit of sharpening and is pretty well a classic fish eye shot. I must admit I rather like the effect with this type of image and of course the walking man had no idea he was in the picture!


We then moved into the V&A. I walked around for a while taking lots of 'so what' pictures, I think you will know what I mean, if not I am sure Richard will come along soon and explain :)

I was heading towards my meeting point, to join my daughter for lunch, when I suddenly saw this man sink to his knees in front of the statue, well it had to be taken. I realised that my fish eye was not the most appropriate lens for this pic, however it did enable me to get the shot unnoticed. It required some cropping afterwards and I converted to mono, adding a slight sepia effect, to remove the distracting colours and thus keeping the eye focused on the man and the statue.

SNOW, SNOW, SNOW...

OK so here is my first real post.

I chose this because of the seasonal links and the location of the shot. I am a great believer in the fact that there are always photographs to be taken and this was snapped in my garden during the recent heavy snowfall, when I was limited to photography within walking distance of my home.

This does have a small amount of cropping applied, to remove a plant stalk from the right hand side of the image, I then played around with levels and curves to get the white snow as I wanted it. Finally a small amount of fractalius was added to enhance the graphic effect of the leaves.

WELCOME

This is the first post on my new blog. I am no 'diarist' and this is simply a way of sharing my journey with anybody who is interested. I aim to post regular images, they will not always be my best pictures, just images which demonstrate something I am working on at the time. Any thoughts or comments will be welcome.