My photography mentor, Bob Kiss, recently posted an image of his, taken in Tuscany, of a Tuscan field scene shot through a window, with the light carefully balanced so that you can clearly see both the exterior, and the interior around the window. It immediately reminded me of a not dissimilar shot I took many years ago, at the Fish Pot in Barbados.

While Bob’s shot is relatively recent, and took advantage of modern sensor technology and computational corrections, mine was taken using the Canon 40D. That was a 10 megapixel beast new in 2007, which offered what should charitably be described as a somewhat limited dynamic range, so I had to expose three bracketed shots, and combine them using HDR software. This was the result:

The 40D was an APS-C format camera and at the time my best “normal” lens was the 17-85mm, equivalent of about 27mm at the wide end. This forced upon me a less than ideal high shooting position which generated a geometry with diverging verticals. Fortunately even in 2008 Photoshop could do a suitable geometric correction which at least straightened up the window and horizon:

That’s not bad, but if you look carefully you can see that the image has a typical “early HDR” feel, with soft details, muddy colours, and noticeable coloured fringes along sharp edges courtesy of the 17-85mm’s significant chromatic aberration. Bob’s post therefore got me thinking about how my image might look with modern processing.

Fortunately I had kept the original RAW files, so it was the work of moments to open them up in Capture One. The latter immediately improves matters with its “HDR” shadow and highlight recovery, and allows me to work with just the central image of the bracketed set, so goodbye to composite HDR. Capture One also has correction for the lens’s chromatic aberrations, and allows me to apply the required geometric correction non-destructively. This is the output image:

That’s a major step forward. However pixel peeping reveals that the image is still not as sharp as would be ideal, and despite being shot at ISO 200 has noticeable noise in the darker areas. There’s also the compositional issue of the power socket half visible behind my Pina Colada. Fortunately we can also pass the image through Topaz Photo AI. It volunteered sharpening, and I also applied its denoise technology. I then went into its “remove” function and highlighted the half socket. This is the result:

I love the way this “pops”, and we’ve got rid of the compositional compromises. I’d be happy with this image if I took it today with a modern camera and much more expensive lens. Ideally I would actually have to hand a wider lens which would allow me to get the whole of the right shutter in shot, but I can live with it.

This is great news for cases like this, but it’s amazing news for cases where the old image can no longer be recreated, because the people or architecture have moved on. So if you have in your collection images of which you’re fond but which are technically limited, and you still have the RAW files, try reprocessing them. The results may be wonderful.

“‘Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance”
Driving on the right in Mongolia…

It’s instructive to look back on my Zimanga trip, to review what worked, and what I might have done differently. If you’re planning a photo safari, you might find the following useful.

Firstly, I can’t praise strongly enough the owners and staff of Zimanga (https://zimanga.com/). The vision to dedicate 7000 hectares of land to a game reserve specifically set up for photographers has paid dividends. I know our group all enjoyed it thoroughly, and Lee is having no difficulty selling his trips a couple of years ahead, thanks in part to a lot of repeat business! The staff are all charming, knowledgeable and helpful, and go out of their way to make you feel welcome. Highly recommended.

I was very pleased with my kit choices. I agonised a bit about spending the money to supplement my perfectly good 100-300mm lens (200mm-600m equivalent) with a used Panasonic 100-400mm, but it paid off well. I regularly used both the extra reach (especially on the smaller birds) and the feature to limit focus to >5m (vital for shooting from behind glass but not implemented on the 100-300). I did experience the common complaint that the zoom control is a bit stiff and slow, so it may not work so well for sports, but for this trip it was ideal.

Of the 1220 shots I have retained on the PC for further processing, over 80% were shot with that lens. Around 15% were shot with the 35-100mm f/2.8, and almost all the remainder, only about 4%, with the 12-35mm f/2.8. I always carry spares, but I could have done this trip perfectly easily with just the three lenses, and I could have lived with the tiny kit lens for the "normal zoom".

My last-minute decision to trade in my old Panasonic GX8 for a used G9 also worked well. Because of the time pressure I just used the Wex Photographic used camera service for both the purchase and the trade-in, but it went like clockwork for a net cost under £150. Wex didn’t want the spare GX8 batteries but they sold almost immediately on eBay bringing the net cost under £100. For that I got a more modern camera which is similar enough to the G9 mark II you can switch quickly back and forth between them.

Don’t underestimate the number of shots you’ll take, or the storage requirement. My previous records were about 3300 shots over three weeks in the Desert Southwest of the USA, and 2900 shot over two weeks in Namibia (which combined wildlife, landscape and human subjects). In effectively 8 days in South Africa I took 6194 shots, and filled around 300GB of fast SD cards. After filtering I deleted about 100GB and moved over 130GB to my "unused image" archive disk, but I still have ~50GB (1220 images) to process further.

The other things you need are patience, and luck. Even with hides carefully designed to attract the animals, and dedicated guides constantly sharing information about what’s where, there was a lot of sitting around waiting, or driving across the reserve only to find the subjects had moved on. If you want the predictability of knowing for certain what you’ll see in a certain session, then maybe a trip to Longleat is in order!

I suspect that I lack the patience to do a lot of wildlife photography. I certainly missed a couple of hide shots because I was doing something else when the animal appeared. So be it.

Even with that caveat, I came away with a good collection of images, with some of which I’m extremely pleased. This was a very successful trip, and I can recommend it should you get the opportunity.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the same conversation at least four times: before my trip to South Africa, at least twice while I was on my safari, and also after sharing my images for review. It starts like this:

Experienced Wildlife Photographer: "You need to use a shutter speed of at least 1/2000 s"

Me: "Why?"

EWP: "Because you have to, to get sharp images"

Me: "Why?"

EWP: "Because"

…

OK, in reality I don’t channel my inner toddler quite so directly, nor am I claiming to know better than the various EWPs. They do have some valid reasons, but I think that there’s also an element of "received wisdom" hiding very real technical and artistic options. The repeating nature of the discussion and my relative success with other strategies suggests that there is scope for more analysis. This is my take on that.

The technical decisions come down to minimising the risk of "missing the shot" – capturing an interesting subject, but the resulting image being of low quality, typically, but not necessarily, with unacceptable motion blur.

There are two sources of motion blur. The first is unintentional camera movement. In the olden days of film and non-stabilised lenses the golden rule was that the shutter speed should be at least equal to the focal length in mm, e.g. 1/800s if your telephoto lens is equivalent to 800mm. But it’s different now. A lot still depends on the photographer’s abilities and the physical size and weight of the camera and lens, but with modern image stabilisation most photographers should improve on that rule by 4 stops (a factor of 16), so should be able to hand-hold the 800mm lens at 1/50s. With the lightest mirrorless kit another factor of 4 or so might be possible. Shooting at medium speeds such as 1/250s really should not be an issue.

This does assume your own platform is stable. If it is moving, for example a boat, then you will need a higher speed, but again unless it’s pitching wildly in a storm you might get away with less than you expect.

The other source of motion blur is subject movement. Even a static subject may twitch, or may have the wind ruffling its fur. However the real challenge is an active subject engaged in deliberate motion. If you want to freeze that motion the required shutter speed increases as the subject size decreases. If you are trying to freeze small birds in motion then you really do need shutter speeds up well over 1/1000s, but that’s just not true with an elephant, where 1/100s will work almost every time.

You might be surprised how far you can go with medium-sized subjects and still freeze the motion acceptably. The picture above is a tawny vulture in flight, captured at 1/320s.

Even smaller and fast-moving subjects may work at lower shutter speeds than you think. My "Kingfisher rising" shot is "only" 1/1000s. I do wish I had used a higher frame rate to get a greater choice of positions especially on the downward arc, but I’m not unhappy with the shutter speed.

In the interest of not missing the shot you might be tempted to dial in a high shutter speed and have done with it, but of course there’s no free lunch. Unless light levels are very high, such a high shutter speed means using a higher ISO, going to a wider aperture, or both. Very high ISOs result in very noisy images, which may end up "soft" as a side-effect of noise removal. Using a large aperture on a long lens results in a very shallow depth of field, and your shot may end up soft because you missed focus. Either way you miss the shot anyway, whereas a different exposure compromise might deliver a clean and accurately-focused image with some amount of motion blur.

That’s the technical choice.

The artistic choices relate to your priorities for the image, and how you want to portray motion. My first priority is that most of the subject needs to be in good focus. I’m not a great fan of images where a tiny sliver is in focus and everything else is a blur, including much of the subject. (The classic example is a wildlife portrait where the eyes are in focus but the end of the nose isn’t. Not only don’t I particularly like the result if done well, but it will result in a bad image if focus is even slightly off.)

This means that I tend to ensure I’m working at moderate apertures. I get some benefit from the effective doubling of depth of field with Micro Four Thirds (MFT), but I rarely work at less than f/5.6. Occasionally this does leave a messy background sharper than ideal, but I would rather err on the side of caution, at least for the first shot.

Next, I try to avoid very high ISO values. With modern Panasonic MFT cameras ISO 1600 will work reliably and produce usable images even without much post-processing. ISO 3200 is fairly reliable, but all images need post-processing with Topaz Photo AI or similar to denoise and sharpen them. ISO 6400 and above tends not to work for "portfolio"-quality images. Admittedly in this case the smaller sensor is a disadvantage and full-frame cameras should get comparable images a stop higher on ISO, but sufficiently noise-free images above ISO 10,000 or so are going to be a matter of luck.

The received wisdom appears to be "get the shutter speed, accept the noise", but I know I can live with an image with some motion blur more easily than one with massive amounts of noise.

Then there’s the question of whether I actually want to show motion or not. If a lion is lyin’ there and happens to twitch its nose at the wrong microsecond I get a blurred shot, and that’s a fail. However if it’s doing something more dynamic, I quite like to show that.

My first influence is my love of equestrian sports as a photographic subject. My objective is often a panning shot in which the subject horse and rider are sharp, but the background is intentionally blurred to show the motion. If there’s some blurring of the horses’ hooves, polo mallets or the ball, that’s fine, as long as they are recognisable, and I think it adds to the dynamic nature of the picture. Practice has taught me that the best shutter speed to achieve this is around 1/250s.

I also like to photograph concerts and human sporting events. If these are at night, or indoors, then I’m constrained to the event lighting which imposes a relatively slow shutter speed. Again, similar judgements apply. I want the subject clearly recognisable, but if, for example, their hands are moving rapidly, then that’s acceptable. Consider the following image: to freeze the drummer’s hands I would have had to use a shutter speed up around 1/1000s and that simply was not available, but I’m very happy with the rest of him, sharp at just 1/40s. His hands appeared to us as a blur anyway, and that’s what I’ve captured.

So how does this apply to wildlife photography? Here’s a picture of a lioness running at 1/250s. That speed was to some extent imposed by very low dawn light, and also she started moving just after we arrived at her location and my camera was on settings from a previous subject. However I think it works. Yes, there’s some motion blur of parts of her body as well as the background, but to my mind that expresses how fast she was moving. A "frozen" shot at 1/2000s, had it been possible (it wasn’t) would not have communicated that.

Of course, you can take this a lot further, and that’s a pure artistic choice. For example, Richard Bernabe has a wonderful image of a moving herd of impala at 1/20s (See here). With wildlife I probably wouldn’t go that far, but I have experimented with dance and fashion subjects, so never say never.

Modern kit allows us to work at higher speeds than would ever have historically been possible. Modern software such as Topaz Photo AI cleans up and sharpens images which might previously have been deemed inadequate, and I certainly make active use of it – several of the shots on this page have benefitted from at least noise reduction and basic sharpening. It’s certainly possible to "cheat" some of the technical limitations in a way which has not previously been available. However, to paraphrase the famous quote from Jurassic Park, "you were so occupied with whether you could produce a very sharp image, you didn’t think whether you should".

For my part if I am trying to freeze the movement of small, fast animals I will use a faster speed. If I’m looking for artistic blur then I’ll use a very slow one. Most of the time I’ll stick with something in the range 1/50 to 1/500s, and embrace rather than eliminate subject motion.

Although my "group panoramas" are a tradition, I am on this occasion frustrated, as on every night there’s less than half of group at dinner, between night hide slots and three of us staying at The Homestead, a separate accommodation block a few minutes’ drive away, with its own catering arrangements.

In the end Ann and I persuade everyone to line up for a group shot taken after breakfast on the last full day. Back row, from the left: David, Yasmin, Mark, Lee, Issa, Ann, Ray. Front row: yours truly, Mike, John, Martin, Ali, Sue, Colin, Chris.

1/10 to Lee, who could have shuffled along to the left to fill in the gap!

Technical Note

Regular readers will recognise two recurring scenarios regarding my relationship to tripods:

• I have a tripod, but it gets used for a purpose definitely not listed on the manufacturer’s website
• I have no tripod, and have to improvise camera support using an object to hand

This is a good example of the latter. Camera placed on the edge of the pool, pointing at the sofa, flip-out screen pointing up so I can check composition, albeit upside down (ground glass screen and cloth, anyone?) To adjust the yaw angle, fork from dining table wedged under the camera body providing exactly the right angle of inclination.

Personally I think all this nonsense about tripods is overblown.

After the frustrations and ultimate disappointment of the previous night hide session, I demur from another and after lunch wave goodbye to John and Colin before joining another group, with Calvin as guide, for an afternoon game drive.

I Discover Pre-capture

Although it’s targeted as "anything you’ve missed so far", the drive turns into a birding session, which is a great opportunity to exercise the newly-discovered pre-capture capabilities of my camera. In action photography, especially sports and wildlife, there’s a common challenge of anticipating the action, for example a bird taking off, so you capture it. Typically if you wait until you can see something happening, it’s too late. Over the years an awful lot of film and digital images have been wasted, left empty while the bird has, literally, already flown.

The latest generation of higher-spec cameras resolves this with "pre-capture". If you sit with a high frame rate selected, your subject in focus and the shutter halfway down, as well as updating the viewfinder display the camera is writing images to a rolling buffer. When you finally press the shutter all the way, it starts by writing the last half a second or so of images while it continues to capture new images in real time. After the event you should have a sequence including the peak of the action.

This does come at a cost. There’s a lot of processing going on, and if the action is delayed long enough you can see the battery’s reserves running down as you watch. If you use the feature regularly it uses a lot of storage, and that storage needs to be fast unless you want a significant delay before the camera is usable again. The Panasonic G9ii again delivers benefits from its smaller sensor: most full-frame peers need very fast CF Express cards and are still JPEG-only at higher frame rates. The G9ii delivers RAW+JPEG at up to 60 fps, although I opt for 20fps which gives me a maximum burst of about 8s, and works acceptably with inexpensive cards like the Lexar Silver Pro V60 series.

The other challenge is that if your subject is patient enough then your supporting hand and your trigger finger get very tired. One of the "must have" shots from a trip like this is a lilac-breasted roller taking off, but a couple of us on the drive don’t yet have it. Calvin spots one sitting in a bush and manoeuvres the jeep close to it. Knowing that it’s not usually long before the bird takes flight, we sight up on it and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

We appear to have found either the most chilled, or the most full, or the laziest roller on the continent. After over 15 minutes it still hasn’t taken flight, although there is enough movement to confirm it’s still alive. We try everything to provoke a controlled take-off. We cough. We clap. Calvin turns on the engine. Calvin turns on the engine and moves the jeep a few feet towards the tree. Nothing.

Finally, when we’re taking it in turns to rest our hands, the bird suddenly flies. I’m lucky – I have just refocused after a short break, and I get a couple of wonderful shots of it in flight.

Once we’ve got a couple more shots of less-chilled rollers, we move on the corner of the male cheetahs’ domain, where a tawny eagle is sitting in one of the dead trees. We get a couple of good static shots, and suddenly all hell breaks loose when a black-winged kite, a fraction of its size, starts angrily "buzzing" it, flying close with beak open and claws out, so the eagle is forced to cower and then squawk back. We can only guess at the cause: maybe the kite has a nest nearby and is pre-emptively defending its young? We manage to photograph about half a dozen passes, then the kite gives up, and after a few minutes the puzzled eagle flutters away.

The last target of the afternoon is the bee-eaters. These tiny, colourful insect-eating birds have a highly complex social structure based around a communal nest in a cliff facing the river. They are very skittish, moving quickly together at any perceived threat, which might be as little as one of use, 30m away, moving a camera too quickly. However with a bit of patience we each get some good shots.

I mentioned how storage-hungry pre-capture is. I have done whole tours and come back with around 32GB of images. This afternoon, across about two dozen sequences, I capture more than that in less than two hours.

I Invoke the Dragon Gods

By dinnertime Colin and John have reported moderate success from the Tamboti hide. After dinner, in a somewhat drunken state, for a joke I get onto ChatGPT and generate and share a picture of a dragon at the watering hole.

About an hour later Colin and John post a picture of three elephants at the watering hole, followed by reports of a couple more visits. This is without question the best overnight experience for the whole trip. I’m mildly peeved I didn’t partake, but also suspicious that if I had been there my impatience might have jinxed things. Congratulations, but don’t forget that I invoked the dragon gods to bring you luck!

You don’t have to shoot Zimanga at 800mm!

I call this “Absence of Elephant”. £4M please! (If Peter Lik can get away with it, why can’t I?)

Oh, and about 5 minutes after shooting this scene, it disgorged a herd of about 10 elephants who were happy to wander past us and be photographed. There’s probably a deep and meaningful message somewhere about looking for hidden details, but I’m not sure my brain is up to it.

With Apologies to My Photography Tutors

First, I’d like to apologise to all the authors, tutors, mentors and tour leaders who have tried to instil in me “correct” tripod technique. As they say, it’s not you, it’s me.I don’t particularly have a philosophical objection to the three legged beast, and you will catch me using one when the camera has genuinely got to stay in one place for a long time, for example videoing a wedding speech, or taking a time-lapse photo sequence. However I do prefer a more free-wheeling approach, and my discovery that the latest Panasonic Dual Image Stabilisation allows me to hand-hold a wide-angle shot for 2-3s, or an extreme telephoto for 1/5s, has only encouraged me to eschew support when not essential.I do actually own three of the things, but the large and relatively heavy Manfrotto has only been used on one single photo shoot. However, coupled with the laser level it has proven invaluable as a surveying tool for our kitchen refit and preparing for my new workshop. My medium-sized Gitzo is a solid, professional but lightweight device, my default for a “serious” tripod. However I suspect I’d scare the purists by pointing out the pistol-grip Manfrotto head – none of this fancy gear rubbish!

And then there’s the Frankentripod . (It’s great to have one search term which gets your website at the top of all the search engines, even if you have to make up a word to do it!) It’s the tripod I carry when I don’t want to carry a tripod, but feel I should, to show willing, or “just in case”. It does the job, most of the time, at very little cost in terms of luggage space or weight. I say “most of the time” because there are limitations – in Cinque Terre, for example, it wasn’t quite tall enough to clear some of the safety fences around the harbour in Manarola, but I found work-arounds.

The Frankentripod also turns out to be the ideal device for my new tripod technique, which I call “why get a drone when you have a tripod?” The technique is simple:

1. Extend tripod to full length, legs together
2. Put camera on tripod
3. Flip screen out so you can see it from below
4. Put camera on self-timer
5. Start self-timer
6. Raise camera above your head, to clear obstacles such as vegetation, tall people etc.
7. Compose your shot by tilting the tripod as required
8. Wait for 0s
9. Bingo!

In the right situation this can be a game changer. For example, our views of Montisi from Castelmuzio were somewhat constrained by the fact that whoever was responsible for trimming the vegetation at the viewpoint was somewhat derelict in their duty. From head height the best wide shot was this, with some rather intrusive branches:

However, the Frankentripod method got my camera up above the errant foliage, and produced this:

The method does have some pre-requisites, and a couple of trust issues:

1. Lightweight camera and tripod. This is not going to work with a Canon 1DS, 600mm lens and Uranium tripod, unless you take my instruction in point 5 very seriously!
2. A flip-out or flip-down screen bright enough to be viewed from the other end of the tripod
3. Image stabilisation, very good image stabilisation
4. Trust that your camera is firmly attached. Otherwise this could become somewhat dangerous and expensive, although a long strap (shorter than yourself, obviously), tied to the tripod head, and a hard hat might provide some mitigation
5. A steady hand and strong shoulders, otherwise ditto. Pump iron!
6. A bit of skill to compose and then hold the composition in 10s, or whatever the timer is on your camera.

Or I could just buy a drone, Darling Wife!

The Italy 2024 Blog

I’m not sure I believe in curses as a general rule but I am starting to think that I have inadvertently offended a very particular deity and invoked their wrath. Every time I go on one of Lee Frost‘s photography workshops, there is some point on the first day where I am either wringing out clothes or emptying water out of a camera.

It was therefore of little surprise when a day before setting off to Pisa for a trip around the Cinque Terre and Tuscany, that Lee sent a WhatsApp message warning of a near-biblical weather forecast for the first few days. I replied flippantly that I had already packed my most waterproof clothes, but I could add a snorkel if required.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised when my trip was untroubled by rain, and the first full day dawned bright and sunny in Pisa. The other attendees gathered at Pisa airport also without apparent problems, and the only delay was inevitable Italian over-complication of the paperwork when Lee collected the minibus.

We had a pleasant drive to Manarolo, also in fair weather, and a delicious if slightly late lunch. Then Grant repaired to his room and opened his suitcase, to find every item soaking wet! There was no obvious cause, but some items were so wet they could be wrung out. While it had been raining heavily when he and John boarded the BA flight, the thorough wetness of his gear suggested that the case had not just been left in the rain, but somehow immersed.

After lunch we went down to the seafront, Grant wearing his only dry outfit. And the heavens opened, dousing all but myself, as I had returned to my room to collect something.

This is the most focused manifestation yet of the curse. I don’t understand how I have escaped, but "false sense of security" suggests itself. Hopefully Grant will dry out soon…

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

We had a late lunch, which for most of us of consisted of delicious but very large pizzas. I had a gorgonzola and truffle pizza which I failed to finish, very unusual.

The weather was less than ideal for capturing the traditional shot of Manarolo across the harbour, with a leaden overcast sky, and little prospect of a sunset. However very occasionally the sun did break through the clouds with a few well-placed beams of light, and working quickly we each captured a few well-lit images. As the alleged sunset came and went we were luckier with blue hour, less dependent on direct light, and we all came away with satisfactory shots of the town lit up in the gathering evening.

I did make one astonishing discovery. I have become used to hand-holding the Panasonic G9ii (and its predecessor) for shots with exposure time of 1/5 or 1/4s, but I wasn’t even touching the surface of the possible. I have come to Italy with only a small tripod, incompatible with the relatively high railings of the cliff walk, and I decided to try hand-holding longer exposures. I managed a couple at well over 2s which are acceptably sharp, and captured several very sharp images, like the top one here, in the 1-2s range. Obviously this only works with wide angle lenses, but even so it’s quite remarkable.

We each stuck to a single course for dinner, but that turned out to be further enormous portions of delicious food, with no complaints about quality, but one or two concerns about quantity. I can see that managing my diet is going to be a challenge…

With my Zanzibar trip now firmly behind me, I’ve looked back and tried to condense what I experienced into guidance for future visitors and photographers.

This was my first trip to East Africa, and I came away with a lot of positive feelings. This appears to be a happy, vibrant place with lots of friendly people. Most of the practicalities worked fine, albeit sometimes a bit slowly, in a way familiar to anyone who has travelled in the tropics. I never felt the slightest issue in respect of personal security, and all my commercial transactions were honest and straightforward, although there was inevitably some haggling with shopkeepers to agree a price.

Photographic Subjects and Practices

I did get some great shots of people, beaches and boats, and the snorkelling was easily the best I’ve done in about 20 years. For those happy in a relatively small boat I would thoroughly recommend a dhow trip, and a snorkelling trip with Safari Blue.

Beaches aside, there’s no scenery to speak of. The island is as flat as a pancake, covered with either very generic tropical vegetation or small-scale agriculture, broken intermittently by what are described as "villages" but many of which are in reality small towns of several thousand people. The historical area of Stonetown is home to some fascinating old narrow alleys and tall buildings, but away from there the vernacular architecture is either 1960s communist blocks, or nondescript smaller constructions of concrete blocks and corrugated iron. Both are, let’s be honest, just ugly. In some parts of the world buildings are at least cheered up by being painted in bright colours, but most in Zanzibar are left unpainted in drab greys and browns.

Stonetown does have a wonderful tradition of impressive, studded timber doors. These were present, but unfortunately at the time of our visit almost every one was covered in complex sets of numbers scrawled in chalk, the legacy of a recent census. Hopefully when the process is complete most will be cleaned and returned to their usual photogenic state, but I’ve come away with relatively few shots of these vaunted features.

We didn’t see any wildlife except fish, a few birds, a couple of impressively large rats, and some amazingly colourful dragonflies which frequented the hotel pool but were impossible to photograph. An occasional rustle in the trees or roadside vegetation suggested some slightly larger fauna, but it didn’t make itself obvious.

That brings us to the people. Most were pleasant and interesting, but not all were willing photographic subjects. They seemed to split down into a few groups (albeit with lots of borderline cases):

1. Those who are happy to be photographed without immediate reward. A lot of people in direct tourist-facing roles are naturally in this group, however they are not the majority.
2. Those who can be persuaded, especially if you engage with them first and take a genuine interest in their activity or situation, and then ask permission. This is down to your powers of persuasion, or those of your guide.
3. Those who are happy to pose on the transactional basis that they will be paid. As well as entertainers working for tips you will find a number of the general public who operate on a "dollar for photo" or similar basis. Stallholders who have either just made a sale of who have a real prospect of one are also usually willing.
4. Those who really don’t want to be photographed. I reckon this can be 50% or more in some cases. Some will make it very obvious with a "no photo" or covering their face. You have to acknowledge and honour this.

The reticence of many of the people seems to be down to a combination of the standard Muslim concern about images of people, more modern concerns about publishing one’s likeness, and an annoyance that their daily lives are being scrutinised by foreigners. It has to be said that most of us would be the same if the situation was reversed. I started to feel a bit uncomfortable tramping around the villages, and after a while focused photography on those in groups 1-3.

You also should be alert to those who due to peer pressure appear to be in group 2 or 3, but are actually in group 4. You may detect unease, or just poor poses and expressions – these are passive expressions of the same unwillingness. A good example is where we were invited into school classes, but some of the youngsters were obviously much less comfortable than others. Again, there’s no point in pushing with an unwilling subject.

Finally you have to be aware of the psychological aspects of the photographic process on willing but inexperienced subjects. In a couple of cases we found a great model, but the first photographer in the group thrust an enormous camera and lens into her face and insisted on taking dozens of images, and the rest didn’t get a look in. That’s unfair on both the subject and the other photographers.

If you do have to pay a subject it won’t require much – 1 US dollar is a good reward for a some shots of an adult, and you can scale up to maybe $10 for a group. Carry lots of $1 notes. However it’s not a good idea to pay kids directly – this is clearly driving a lot of poor behaviours.

Photographic Kit

There’s not a great deal to say here. Any good camera should serve you well, and unless you’re going underwater the practical demands are limited. The beauty of Micro Four Thirds allowed me to take a range of lenses covering from ultra-wide angle to long telephoto without breaking the luggage limit, but the longer lenses got very limited use, and a standard pair of zooms covering the equivalent of 24-70mm and 70-200mm or similar would cover the vast majority of subjects.

My new Panasonic G9ii behaved faultlessly, and like its predecessor proved an ideal camera for travelling "light but fully equipped". I took 1662 images on it, about 110 on the Sony Rx100 mk 7, and about 316 using the waterproof Olympus TG6, across about 8 days of "active photography" (as opposed to lying by the pool). The count was lower than many trips, but reflected the limited need for multi-shot techniques or high frame rate action photography. About 50% of the shots have been retained for further processing after an initial edit, higher than usual for the same reasons.

Make sure you have a circular polariser for each lens. I just left mine on most of the time, as the light frequently demands it, and it’s good protection against the dust and moisture. Alternatively you might want to take clear or UV filters, but that’s arguably overkill. My ND filters didn’t come out of the bag, and I didn’t catch any of my companions messing about with square filters, ND Grads and the like – the subjects really didn’t call for it.

Underwater the TG6 worked well enough, and avoided the literally fatal failings of its predecessor. However the images are not that sharp, and battery life is very poor, as I found to my cost when I lost power halfway through the second snorkelling session. If you are doing a trip with multiple snorkel or dive sessions in the water, change the battery after each one, and accept the risk of opening the camera in a less controlled environment.

You could get away without taking a tripod. Mine never left the suitcase. Obviously it depends on your style, and your tolerance for higher ISO for evening shots, but I worked exclusively handheld. By and large it was too cloudy for genuine night photography, and otherwise the light levels and subjects were always workable.

If you are travelling to that part of the world with significant photographic kit, avoid Emirates as an airline. They have a ridiculous 7kg and one piece limit on cabin baggage which they enforce quite enthusiastically. My work-around was to wear a photographer’s vest which ended up almost as heavy as my bag, but I shouldn’t have to be forced to do so.

Otherwise that’s about it. The phrase which sums it up well is "f/8 and be there…"

Practicalities

This section does need a significant "your mileage may vary" warning – it reflects my experiences and others may be different. For example all the advice beforehand warned that insects might be a major issue, but I was sufficiently untroubled that by the end of the trip I wasn’t even putting repellent on, just making sure the mosquito net was secure overnight. However another member of the group did get a very nasty bite on the first night…

Zanzibar is well set up for tourism, and a lot of things "just worked". With one ultimately amusing exception, I didn’t experience any major hotel room malfunctions. Toilets were uniformly clean and functional. Transport arrangements were unproblematic.

Money is straightforward. Take lots of small US dollar bills for tips and small purchases – these are uniformly acceptable, the locals are well versed in applying a pragmatic exchange rate and rounding up or down as required, and it keeps your wallet simple. You can also get Tanzanian Shillings, or you might receive some in change, and that’s not a problem apart from the fact that the exchange rate is about 2500 to the $, or 3200 to the £, so you need to be careful with the number of zeroes! Larger bills will be presented in USD and can be settled with a credit card – just live with the small surcharge.

You will need a guide unless you’re just sticking to the environs of the hotels, and you will need a driver if you’re moving around. The main roads between towns and around Stonetown are very good and I’d be perfectly comfortable driving them, but get 10m off them and they are biblically bad. Both services are readily available at reasonable cost, so let them take the strain.

It is hot – in the 30s Celsius during the day, low 20s overnight, and humid, often without much of a breeze. Wear high factor sunscreen and be prepared to change your clothing fairly regularly. Be respectful with your clothing, but I didn’t find it necessary to follow the "cover up" guidance you get from some sources. A T shirt and shorts should be OK.

Try and adapt to the temperature. In your hotel room turn the air conditioning off, and the fan on. I slept like a log, but then I am used to the tropics and run a warm house at home. This is one of those YMMV bits.

One complaint we did have is that not enough water is served in hospitality settings. In most warm countries the first thing that happens in a restaurant or hotel is you get a glass of cold water, served from a freshly-opened bottle when required. Not in Zanzibar, you have to ask for water at meals, and you may have to manage your own supply in the hotel room. It’s not a problem – bottled water is readily available and inexpensive, but you do need to be alert to the issue and make sure you don’t accidentally get dehydrated.

Be absolutely religious about sticking to bottled water for drinking and tooth-cleaning. One of our party made a mistake on the latter and was then ill. I did try filling a kettle from the tap, but the cloudy fluid didn’t look like even boiling it would necessarily remove everything untoward, and I switched back to bottled water even for tea.

We all suffered from some measure of "tummy trouble", some, as in my case, fairly minor, some less so. My suspicion fell on the attractive salads and ice cream served by the Z Hotel, and I switched to the "bottle and burger" diet. This is very simple: don’t drink anything you didn’t see come out of a bottle – water, wine, beer and spirits are fine, but no cocktails. Don’t eat anything which hasn’t been baked, grilled or fried immediately before serving. Hot drinks are OK, as are boiled vegetables but only if they are still steaming – cold rice and similar are a no-no. It worked for me.

After the trip we did share our concerns about the salads with the hotel manager who assured us that all vegetables were washed using boiled water. As they say in the British Parliament, "I refer the gentleman to my earlier statement."

I mentioned that in most respect most of the hotel rooms worked quite well. However we did get one new entry for the dysfunctional hotels blog. In my first room at the Emerson Hotel in Stonetown the active and spare toilet rolls were strung on a rope from the ceiling, conveniently positioned for when required. In principle this is a good design, however in a tropical downpour on the first night water got in from outside, ran down the rope, and soaked both rolls. Annoying, especially as this is not an obvious failure until your need is unavoidable!

Service and Sophistication

Service was always willing and helpful, but occasionally annoying despite the good intentions. Paying or signing for drinks at the hotels is a good example. The staff don’t want to bother you while, or immediately after, consuming your drink. That’s great, but it can turn into either an interminable wait when you’re ready to go, or to your being pursued around the hotel with an unsigned chitty at shift end. Being proactive doesn’t necessarily help: I got a great cup of coffee early one morning, but while the barman could work the coffee machine to good effect, neither he nor any of the other staff on duty could work the till. I had to come back later.

More complex services are a mixed bunch. I had absolutely outstanding service from Safari Blue who not only provided a snorkelling trip but also arranged my travel, meals and changing facilities for my final day.

On the other hand I was also hoping to get two additional side-trips into the last few days: a deep sea fishing trip, and a catamaran cruise. I have done each many times in the Caribbean, you just ring up, book your place, turn up and pay. Often they even provide a taxi from your hotel. Not in Zanzibar. You can’t walk 100 yards down the beach without someone pestering you about a fishing trip, but it’s a completely different commercial model. They will happily charter you a boat, for anywhere between $400 and $1000, but it’s then your job to fill it. There’s no such thing as a "shared" trip where they do that work, apart from the dhow cruises. I couldn’t interest my companions, so the week came and went without fishing or a catamaran trip.

It’s apparent that the challenges in the educational system are failing many Zanzibarians. The inability to work the till was one example, but in fairness that was obviously a "training" hotel. However I found quite a few examples of limited reasoning skills or "learned stupidity". For example, The Z Hotel will make you a nice latte and serve it in a tall glass as per custom. So far so good. They have two sizes of saucers in their crockery set: a larger one with a dimple the right size for the latte glasses, and a smaller one where the dimple is too small and the glass wobbles alarmingly on top. You can guess which one they had all been told to use, and no amount of demonstrating the issue to the waiters every day for a week made a blind bit of difference.

Compared with some other tropical locations, there does seem to be a genuine intention to try and reduce the environmental impact of both general living and tourism. Waste was minimised and well-managed, with impressive recycling or reduction of most plastics. I even saw an old lady recycling nylon rope, using exactly the same method as others use with coconut fibres. That said there are some messy corners in villages, and on some non-tourist beaches, but you feel that they are trying to do the right thing.

And Finally…

There’s a Swahili phrase which gets a lot of use: "Pole Pole" (pronounced pole-ay, literally "slowly, slowly"). Sometimes this is meant as "go carefully", for example when getting on or off a boat. But it’s also an excuse, like "island time" or "maņana". If you’ve travelled in the tropics before the relaxed timekeeping and unhurried approach will be nothing new. If you haven’t, then sit back and relax – there’s not much you can do about it!

One of the reasons we have not previously explored Capitol Reef is that although it’s an enormous, diverse park, it’s not particularly well served by either self-drive roads or shared transport like a shuttle service. You can drive through the middle of it on highway 24, and up and down Scenic Drive and Capitol Gorge, and that’s about it.

In the morning we tried the Notom Road, which winds through a mix of public and private land on the East of the park. There are a few good views, but nothing that dramatic. Eventually the paved road gives out and rapidly deteriorates below a level we’re comfortable driving in a road car, even one with 4WD, and we returned to town.

That leaves the Cathedral Valley. This is home to some of Capitol Reef’s best known scenery, but even relatively optimistic guides like Martres make it clear that this is not for road cars or inexperienced off-road drivers. Good advice. I signed up for a jeep tour with one of the local specialists.

The full jeep tour, up the Lower Cathedral Valley and back through the upper part is not for the faint of heart, or the loose of fillings! It’s 58 miles of washboard, sand, deep dips, and the occasional segment where the road surface appears to be constructed mainly of pebbles the size of cricket balls.

Fortunately Backcountry Safaris had provided a Jeep Rubicon, and Alex a young lad who’s driving style on the highway was a bit disconcerting, but which came into its own as soon as we left it. Within 100 yards of the main road we descended a rough slope with about a 30% gradient, and then drove for some distance on the bed of the Fremont River, which brought back memories of getting stuck in a river in Iceland, but this time there was no such issue and the tour got started.

At the first stop we were somewhat surprised by a group of pretty ladies in nice dresses and inappropriate footwear – see if you can spot one in a pink dress below. Obviously one of the other tour operators does their photo tour with models. Maybe next time…

The scenery is absolutely as dramatic as advertised, but the stretches between the landmarks were maybe longer than I expected. However that’s a small price to pay.

We did have a challenge with timing. Alex was obviously unused to dealing with photographers, and even with the best will in the world we probably spent more time at earlier stops than some tours. On top of that by the last week in September sunset at the Temples of the Sun and Moon is before 7. The result was a somewhat hair-raising dash to reach those final landmarks in the last of the golden hour sun, but we made it.

Overall an excellent experience, but I would advise others to discuss the timing of the trip with the outfitter, and maybe run a slightly earlier timeslot towards the end of the season.

Sunset Point

We opted for another lazy morning. The reality is that magnificent as it is, unless you are going to do long hikes or drive off-road Capitol Reef only has accessible viewpoints and activities to fill two days. With the jeep tour done our remaining target was to witness a good sunset from Panorama and Sunset Points.

After breakfast we took a short drive which included the gift shop attached to one of Torrey’s camp sites. While not an obvious target there was just something about it which looked hopeful. 20 minutes later we emerged with three of my favourite Mountain t-shirts plus one for Frances, all in the end of season sale at an average price of about £12.

We had a leisurely couple of hours by the pool, then set off mid-afternoon for the final run through the park. This time the weather played ball. We found a couple of additional viewpoints on the Scenic Drive, then hit Panorama Point, The Goosenecks, and finally Sunset Point, timing our arrival almost perfectly.

Capitol Reef, done. Tick.

Great sport at the UK’s Strongest Man 2023 / UK’s Strongest Woman 2023. However not impressed by the new (on the day, as far as I could work out) ban on “professional cameras” which meant the G9 had to remain locked away, and I had to rely on the tiny Sony RX100 and lot of post-processing in Topaz Photo AI…

Also not impressed by the fact we both seem to have caught a cold at the Nottingham Motorpoint Arena. Outdoor venues are much better for this!

Welcome to a new sport, discovered on a visit to Burghley House and Park this weekend. Horse Boarding.

You have to navigate a tight course of bends and slaloms on a skateboard. At speeds of up to 30 mph. While being towed behind a racehorse!

The wipe-outs are dramatic, but usually quite close to something relatively soft.

Excellent.

I understand a small operation is required, to remove any sense of fear but leave the sense of balance intact…

I don’t do a lot of underwater photography, but I like to have an underwater-capable camera for snorkelling on holiday, and it’s also potentially a good option for working in very wet conditions above seal level. For the last 10 years I’ve used a Canon S120 with the Canon underwater housing, which works very well. It shoots RAW, and I’ve developed a very slick process for correcting the white balance to produce colour-accurate shots which can be put through my normal workflow alongside the output from my other cameras. A few years ago I also flirted with a Panasonic GF6, again with a dedicated housing, and that also worked well, but I decided it didn’t give me enough extra capability to justify the larger size of the kit.

Unfortunately as I’m getting older my eyes are changing, and on the last couple of trips I’ve struggled to see the rear screen of the S120 through the combination of snorkel mask and housing. I therefore decided I needed to remove at least one layer of distortions and reflections from the chain, by buying a camera designed for underwater use. To work for me it would have to have good stills capability, a large rear screen, RAW capability and physical controls (I don’t get on with phones as cameras, again it’s largely an eyesight thing). Those requirements eliminated most options but the Olympus TG6 seemed to tick all the boxes.

I approached the TG6 with a bit of trepidation: a lot of reviews suggest that even though it is underwater capable as-is, you should still put it in a housing for serious use. Also I had a bad experience with one of its predecessors, the TG2, which failed dramatically on its first use in the sea. However most reviews were positive, and I decided to have a go.

Some of the issues with the TG2 have been fixed. The newer camera supports RAW, and has an extensive menu of underwater focus and white balance options. The screen is no larger than the Canon S120’s, but without a housing it is easier to see. Generally the TG6 a “high capability” small camera, with some features such as macro focus bracketing which I don’t have with any other camera. The external seals have been improved, with a clever double-locking mechanism to make sure they are shut and stay shut. Importantly, the camera survived two snorkelling trips without springing a leak, which shouldn’t be an achievement for this type of camera, but based on my previous experience, it is.

However I really struggle with the “tough” designation. By default the lens comes without any protection at all, so I shelled out an extra £35 on the LB-T01 “lens barrier”, which clips on in place of the filter ring and provides a neat “twist to open or close” lens cap. However on the second snorkelling trip I had to wade back onto the beach through some sandy surf. Some of the sand obviously worked its way into the lens barrier, and it jammed open. I await a replacement, and probably a future recurrence.

You imagine these devices being thrown into kit bags and dropped on floors, but if you do so you’ll rapidly scratch the rear screen out of usability. I carried the camera on its first trip in the side pocket of my snorkel bag. Just an empty, clean pocket in a nylon bag, nothing else in it. When we reached the boat the rear screen had picked up a couple of small but distinct scratches. I’ve just watched a program where they showed the “key scratch test” used on FitBit screens, but heaven knows how the TG6 would survive that. What’s annoying is there’s a very simple solution short of engineering the screen with genuinely tough glass – why doesn’t it come with a screen protector fitted as standard, and then you can just replace that when it’s damaged? I’ve fitted one now, but it’s a bit too late…

You still have to open either the USB port cover or the battery cover to recharge the battery. Why can’t it have an exterior charge point like a FitBit, or inductive charging like my toothbrush? Then if you set up WiFi to access the data you could leave the camera sealed for a whole trip, which would be much more secure. As it is I’m still not 100% convinced that the next time out won’t be the time the seals fail and it goes the way of the TG2.

Given my changing eyes I’ll hang onto the TG6 at least for a planned beach trip at the end of the year, but unlike some cameras, it’s a bit on sufferance and not an entirely comfortable relationship.

Back in 2019 I was privileged to take what is a pretty unique airborne trip. Paul Nugent of Airsportsbarbados had one of only four two-seater microlight aircraft in the Caribbean, and at that time was running tours. To make it interesting, he was based at the International airport (Barbados only has one), so we queued up for take-off behind a 747 bound for Canada, and formed an orderly queue behind a Lear Jet to land!

Camera and lens choice was important, as I needed something light, easy to manipulate and which wouldn’t stick out too far into the slipstream. Also I wouldn’t be changing lenses! The Panasonic G9 was the ideal body, and I paired it with the jewell-like Panasonic 45-175mm. That’s a real gem: only 90mm long (and no longer, it’s an internal zoom) weighs 210g, and its tiny size means that it can be held stable in quite a strong wind.

We flew up the East Coast and back, which gave me great views of The Crane, where we stay. On a really good day I might be able to get these shots with a drone, but the prevailing wind would make it a challenge. it’s less of an issue if you yourself are 300ft up.

The trip also took in other well-known sights on that side of the island including Codrington College, Bathsheba and the Morgan Lewis Windmill. Being able to photograph Morgan Lewis from the air was especially entertaining as it had just re-opened after a multi-year restoration, and by coincidence we had visited it, on the ground, the previous day.

This wouldn’t be for everyone, but if your phobias allow it and you ever get the opportunity to do something similar, take it!

Here’s my “group panorama” from Richard Bernabe’s Feb 2023 trip to Patagonia.

From the left: Gero, Nigel, Thomas, Karsten, Jörn, Lisa, Richard, Alejandro, Glenn, Alex, John, Pat, Yours Truly and JoAnne.

Please don’t study the stitching too carefully, or complain about the fact that Ale has become a hobbit – this is much, much easier on a round or square table than a very, very long thin one!

This morning’s subject was a “guanaco hunt”, capturing one or more of the charming Patagonia llamas in a nice pose, ideally in front of a mountain or similar.

Over lunch, as beer was consumed, we got talking about how we could improve the images we had captured. Looking at the wonderful view from the restaurant, I came up with the idea of a guanaco on a paddle board in front of the mountains.

Always up for a challenge I had my first go with Dall-E, the AI image generator. I gave it this simple prompt: “A photo of a guanaco on a paddle board on a lake in front of the Torres del Paine mountains”. Two of the four images it created were unusable, but the first was OK, the third was exactly what I had in mind. OK the guanaco’s legs are a bit odd, but the concept has been correctly interpreted and executed, and that’s the difficult part.

It really shouldn’t be that easy. Be afraid, be very afraid!

Is this the perfect travel tripod for the man who doesn’t actually like carrying a tripod? Legs from a 45 year old Slik 500g. New head from Manfrotto – lightest in the range. I did have to cut off the old head, and mount a new screw adapter which meant a bit of work for the tap and die set, but total weight is 675g and it fits neatly into the side pocket of the new bag!

OK, I wouldn’t use this with a Canon 5D and 600mm lens, but for my Panasonic G9 it’s about perfect. Now, about all that money I’ve donated to Messrs Gitzo and Manfrotto over the years since I bought the Slik…

I continue to be blown away by what modern AI-powered processing tools can do with early digital photos. This photo was taken from the back of a very jittery 1950s Ford Consul, by someone unfamiliar with my camera, in fading light which meant a 1/6s exposure time but still a high ISO. The result was a decent memory shot of an entertaining ride in an ancient Cuban cab, but it was a bit shaky, to say the least.

Mainly for my amusement I decided to see what would happen using the latest tools. First I re-processed the original RAW file with Capture One, to adjust the aspect ratio, lift the shadows and fix the blown highlights. Then I fed it through Topaz Sharpen AI in Stabilise mode, to reduce the effects of camera, photographer and platform (1950s Ford Console) shake. This produced an image which was much sharper, but a bit noisy. Finally I passed that image through Topaz Denoise AI, with a relatively low noise reduction setting (just 15%) but moderate sharpening. That seemed to be the best compromise to retain the original textures but remove the noise.

The result is above. It’s not only removed the blurring of my face & glasses, but also sharpened the lines of the scenery passing and the rain on the windscreen. I think it keeps the feel of the original, but is a bit less apologetic. What do you think?

When I first made the transition to digital photography, I got into several forms of multi-shot photography, techniques where you take two or more independent exposures and combine them to get a result not possible with a single frame. As cameras and processing have improved I have sometimes questioned whether these techniques are still required, but after a recent trip to Dartmoor I’ve come to the conclusion that they very much are, and they still suit my style of photography well.

All these images were taken in a single session at a single location: Combestone Tor.

Panoramas

Let’s start with a non-controversial one. Sometimes a scene is wider than your lens, and the subject matter suits an image with an aspect ratio of 2:1 or more. The simple solution is to take multiple shots, rotating the camera between shots, and then join them together after processing. There are few workable alternatives for a high-quality image. You might get enough of the image into one frame with a really wide lens, but my widest lens is 14mm equivalent and I find that it is still not wide enough for a genuine panorama, plus it introduces a number of distortions which are not present in a good multi-shot panorama merging shots taken with a lens somewhere between 28mm and 50mm equivalent. You could use your phone in panorama mode, or a 360 degree camera like the Ricoh Theta, but that’s a compromise on quality. You could go the whole hog and get a dedicated panoramic camera like the Hasselblad XPan, but that’s an expensive film-based option, and means carrying a large piece of “single purpose” kit. None of this is necessary if you have a DSLR or mirrorless camera, or even a point and shoot as long as it has manual exposure control.

There’s a bit of technique required. Firstly you have to either select a scene with little/no movement, or you have to choose a shutter speed and shooting strategy so that moving objects are either blurred consistently (e.g. moving water) or excluded from the overlaps between images (e.g. people). You have to select a manual, fixed exposure and white balance which will work across the image, so check that it won’t be over-exposed at the brightest point, or too far underexposed at the darkest. The exposures need to be made in a controlled sequence (e.g. left to right), making sure that they have sufficient overlap, are level, and have some room to crop at the top and bottom beyond the desired subject matter. All of this is easy using an “advanced amateur” camera like the Panasonic G9 which has a level and shooting guides built into the EVF display, but benefits from practice. If the subject is all at least 3m away there’s no need to worry too much about “rotating around the optical centre” and you can just either twist your body (if working handheld) or rotate the camera on top of the tripod. (Both the panoramas in this article were taken handheld.)
If you do want to include much closer elements then you need to counter the effects of parallax (near objects moving relative to the background between frames). As always there are all sorts of complex, over-the top “perfect” solutions, but I’ve found a very simple yet reliable one: I have a plate about 6” long with a tripod screw hole at one end, and a slot with a 1/4” screw (the same size as a standard tripod fixing) at the other. I mount the camera with the tripod attached to the plate’s screw hole, and the camera attached to the other end of the plate so that the front lens element is positioned roughly over the centre of the tripod. Rotate the tripod head and the camera rotates around its optical centre. This approximate method is good enough to eliminate parallax issues in all but the most extreme cases.

There are a number of options for processing the images. I process the RAW files in Capture One, making sure I apply the same exposure and colour corrections to all frames, and also ensuring that the images are not cropped at all at this stage (Capture One’s Copy and Apply Adjustments functions work perfectly for this). I then drop the developed JPEG files into Autopano Giga to create the finished panoramas. Autopano does a pretty good job of automating most steps, but you have full control including a range of different projections for the panorama if needed.

HDR

There seem to be four schools of thought regarding multi-shot HDR…

“You can get any shot using ND grad filters if you know how to use them properly”. This is complete rubbish. Now I have no desire to diss generations of hard-working landscape photographers who have done their best with the available tools, and there are many great photographs taken with ND grad filters which I truly admire. However the reality is that this is a painstaking, static method and unless there’s a pretty straight horizon between the areas of different lighting there are going to be major compromises. Look for mountains with the top much darker than the bottom, or trees and rocks arranged against others when breaking the horizon would be a much more dramatic composition.

“With modern cameras and processing there’s no longer any need for HDR”. This is partially true. With the increased dynamic range of modern sensors, and better highlight and shadow recovery, you may be able to get much of the same result from a single frame. The following is my attempt to re-create the image above but from a single original. There’s a trade-off: the single image version is likely to be sharper and look more “natural”, the HDR version may be more dramatic. There are also hard limits: no single image will capture a dark interior with a well-lit scene outside the window.

“If you can’t get an image using the first two methods it’s not worth taking.” Pure, unadulterated snobbery. There’s a closely related version “I like to get things in one shot rather than messing around on the computer”. By all means choose not to take such an image, but accept that doing so is a limitation of your technique, and may disbar you from getting a great image.

“HDR still has a role to play, but needs to be used carefully and appropriately”. Absolutely correct. With a modern camera and processing software it’s an easily-accessible tool which you can use when it’s useful to do so. If you have a way to set up your camera to take a high speed exposure bracketed sequence you have the best of both worlds – develop a single frame, or use several for HDR, or both, and make the choice at your leisure after the shoot.

Like any multi-shot technique you need to pay attention to any moving elements, and you also need to check the shutter speed on the slowest frames. I can usually take HDR brackets hand-held, but the slowest frame for the image above was 1s, and I did need my tripod!

There are numerous options for developing such images. My solution is to develop the RAW files in Capture One, applying any desired crop and with the option to further tweak the exposure per frame if required, and then combine the JPEGs in Photomatix Pro.

Focus Stacking

Just as a single image may not be able to capture the breadth of a scene, it may not be able to capture it’s depth, at least not all in focus. To get a close-up object and those further away all sharply focused then you have to use a smaller aperture, but you may hit the limits of your equipment, or simple physics. The effects of diffraction become noticeable above about f/6.5 for a 20MP micro-four thirds camera, and above about f/8 for a 50MP full-frame camera.

At this point you can choose to ignore the softness of the more distant elements, you can increase the f-number further and accept some loss of overall sharpness, or you can use a larger aperture and throw the more distant elements deliberately out of focus. These are all valid artistic choices, but they are work-arounds, not resolutions.

However if you’re in an environment which supports multi-shot photography there’s a further option: take a set of images bracketed at different focal distances, and use focus stacking software to combine them.
The usual multi-shot constraints apply, especially in respect of any moving elements. Where panorama and HDR software tend to be able to deal with “ghosts” (items which only appear in one frame, or move between frames), focus stacking software is less able to do so. Unless you’re a very steady photographer getting a suitable set of images may demand the use of a tripod, although I now get fairly reliable results hand-held with the Panasonic G9’s high-speed focus bracket mode.

The gold standard for focus stacking software is probably Helicon Focus, which works well with Capture One or similar for the initial image development.

3D

If you have the ability to display 3D images, such as a 3D TV, then this is a very rewarding type of multi-shot photography. To my annoyance I didn’t take any 3D photos on Dartmoor, I just wasn’t in that zone for some reason, but I have written about how I create 3D images at length here.

If you work with a single camera the usual constraints apply to moving elements. You can take these constraints away if you have two cameras with the same sensor and lens – simply mount them side by side with identical settings and trigger both simultaneously – but the single-camera method is probably easier.

Image Stacking

This is a technique I use less often, but there are valid cases for it. The idea is simply to take a number of “near identical” frames over a period of time (tripod and some form of automated shutter release required for this one!), and combine them. There are two very different objectives:

• Removing moving objects from the scene. For example you can take a number of frames each of which has other people in it in different places, but combine them so the net image has none.
• Combining the elements which have changed between the images. The best known application of this form is star trails, like here.

How you take and combine the frames will depend on your objectives for the overall image, and I’m not an expert, but when I have used this technique I’ve found plenty of guidance and solutions online.

Setting Up Your Camera

You can use just about any digital camera with a reasonable level of manual control for any of these techniques. Just make sure the exposure is under your manual control, and either consistent across the frames (for panoramas, focus stacking, 3D and image stacking) or varied in a predictable way (for HDR). However more recent cameras in the “advanced amateur or professional” class tend to have a number of features which make things very much easier. The Panasonic G9 is a good example.

It’s very much easier if you can program good default settings for each technique as a custom mode on your camera. On the G9 everything except the frame rate and auto/manual focus can be set in a custom mode, and, intelligently, Panasonic enable high frame rate when you select a bracketed mode, even if the switch is on “single shot”. Here’s how I set up my custom modes:

• HDR

  • Aperture f/6.3
  • Auto-exposure bracketing 5 steps ± 2EV
  • ISO 200
  • Auto white balance
  • Auto exposure bracket burst mode (This enables the bracketed set to be taken quickly with one shutter depression, even if the camera is nominally in single-shot mode)
  • Standard AF & metering
  • 3:2 aspect ratio

• Panoramas

  • Manual exposure: f/8, 1/60s (This is a starting point, the first action is to adjust it to fit the brightest part of the scene)
  • ISO 400
  • Daylight white balance
  • Level On
  • Single shot
  • Standard AF & metering
  • 4:3 aspect ratio

• Focus Blending

  • Aperture priority: f/6.3
  • Auto ISO and white balance
  • Focus bracket mode: 5 step, 5 images, sequence 0/+ (This moves the focus from the point you select for the first image to infinity in 5 steps)
  • Low speed burst mode
  • Standard metering
  • Natural Picture Style (This is so that in my workflow I can quickly identify focus bracket sets and move them to a separate directory)
  • 4:3 aspect ratio

• 3D

  • Aperture priority: f/7.1
  • Auto ISO and white balance
  • Single shot
  • Standard AF & metering
  • Scenery Picture Style (Again just to identify 3D pairs in my workflow)
  • 16:9 aspect ratio

If your camera doesn’t really support custom modes, and instead has explicit switches for everything, then it’s worth making a note of the starting point for each multi-shot mode rather than having to make it up as you go along. It will be a bit more work, but perfectly feasible.

Conclusions

“If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” While developing your mastery of “getting the shot in camera” is important, single-shot techniques won’t get every image, and it’s important to have other options. Specialist equipment, or the steadily increasing capabilities of phone cameras may come to the rescue, but a number of simple multi-shot techniques will work for almost any camera, anywhere, and provide you the raw material to create great images which might otherwise escape.

We awoke on day 2 of the Dartmoor trip to a changed world at multiple levels: news from the US election of Trump’s likely demise, and much crisper, drier weather over Dartmoor. Lee decided to return to Combestone Tor for the pre-breakfast shoot, so we could see it literally in a different light, and it was scarcely credible as the same location. We had the sun rising clear in a pale orange sky, the valleys below the tor filled with frosty fields and wisps of fog, and glorious red light on the stones as the sunlight reached them. Almost too many things to point a camera at.

After breakfast we took a short drive, and slightly longer walk, to the Windy Post, an old cross next to a small weir which rewards a low viewpoint and long exposures.

After that it was back to the hotel, which was threatening to lock the doors and barrier the car park at 4pm, to form a long convoy for the next part of the journey, to Saddle Tor. At the top of the Tor we were delighted by having a beautiful Dartmoor pony pose for us in front of the stones, and lower down we got shots of the fascinating Holywell rocks. I ate my lunch behind the rocks, with almost no-one in view for miles around, yet all the car parks were absolutely packed, with a very large number of other people having the same idea of enjoying the last good day on Dartmoor before lockdown.

The day’s last location was Bowerman’s Nose, a great outcrop which really does resemble a head and shoulders bust. The drive out was really hairy, as by then dark had fallen and at one point I had to negotiate a stretch of road at least 100m long between stone banks closer together than the walls of my garage, which set both front sensors on the car tweeting continuously. Fortunately I got out without a scrape, and in another stroke of fortune Gurinder had discovered that the Travelodge on the M5 was still taking overnight bookings for the Wednesday night, so at least I could defer the long drive back home to a very pleasant Thursday morning. Mission accomplished.

After the cancellation of my Patagonia trip in March at a few days notice, and our short trip to France at 12 hours notice in July I was really hoping I could make my final attempt of the year work. The plan was to travel down on Monday 2nd, have two days photographing Dartmoor in Autumn under the expert guidance of Lee Frost, and drive back on Thursday 5th. It was therefore somewhat inevitable that on the Saturday Boris announced a national lockdown starting at midnight on the Wednesday!

Lee decided to go ahead with the course, although it became apparent that the plan to stay over Wednesday night in our hotel and travel back on the Thursday morning wasn’t going to work. For a while it looked like I’d be doing a 200 mile drive after dark on Wednesday evening, starting in the middle of Dartmoor, although fortunately we eventually found a better solution.

After an uneventful drive down, and a pleasant dinner with the others on Monday night, Tuesday dawned wet and blustery. We did manage a pre-breakfast shoot at Combestone Tor, but it wasn’t terribly edifying. The main thing I established was that my old Russian hat will keep the rain out for some time, as will my 20 year old microfibre jacket, but my new hi-tech down coat won’t! Soaked through, the latter item didn’t serve any useful purpose for the rest of the trip…

After breakfast things lightened up a bit and we headed to Buckland Bridge, where the River Webburn joins the Dart. Both rivers were swollen and dramatic, there’s a beautiful old granite bridge, and there was still a lot of autumn colour in the overhanging foliage. The combination of fast-running water and still foliage demanded long exposures to slow the water’s movement, but I’d had a relatively long walk in from my parking space and had (maybe foolishly) opted not to bring my tripod! However the amazing dual image stabilisation of the Panasonic G9 and its lenses came to the rescue, and I discovered that with an ND filter on the front I could slow the exposure down to as much as 0.4s, but still get a sharp image hand-held. You judge the results.

Over lunch we trekked over the moor to Nun’s Cross Farm, an abandoned farmhouse literally in the middle of nowhere. I don’t really do “dark and gloomy”, and to my mind the boarded-up building falls between two stools, neither pretty nor really ruined. It was cold, wet and muddy. Nul points! We did see the local hunt, out themselves beating the lockdown and, one suspects, some of the rules about hunting with hounds. It does have to be said that I have never seen so many mounted huntsmen be so polite and friendly, so full marks for the charm offensive.

We ended the day at Brentor Church, a beautiful 14th Century church with a commanding view of much of the moor. This is a great location, and I found a lot to shoot, although we were again fighting the weather. However the frequent squalls delivered an amazing sight, a full-arc rainbow (with a partial second arc), but sunlight on the church itself. Shot of the day.

With my friends Bob Kiss and John Birch both busy resurrecting old photographs with new software, I thought I would have a go. To give it a real challenge, I went back to my shots from the original 2003 Barbados Vintage Reggae Festival. These were taken indoors using a 4MP Canon S40, which had a maximum usable ISO of 400 (200 was a better bet), and because I didn’t know about such things back then, I captured only JPG, not RAW.

However, Topaz Denoise AI has worked its magic, and I’m very pleased with these.

And yes, that is Sugar Minott, Ken Boothe, John Holt, Eric Donaldson, Pluto and Boris Gardner all onstage together at the end! The very best wishes to those still with us, and may those who have sadly departed this sphere rest happily, but hopefully not too quietly, in peace.

Over at The Online Photographer Mike Johnston posed a question about favourite Micro 4/3 lenses. The obvious answer is the 12-35mm f/2.8. I bought one several years ago largely off the back of Mike’s original review, it sits by default on my G9, and perhaps 90% of my photography by shot count uses it. As he said, it’s like having multiple high-quality primes in one small tube. By any practical definition, that’s my favourite.

I supplement it with the matching 35-100mm (same thing, just longer), the 100-300mm (capable of serious papp-ing, but also of some subtlety – see above, shot between two boats at 600mm-e),and sometimes the 7-14mm (although that gets very limited use given the 12-35mm is so good at 12mm). Together with the G9 that’s my “serious / obvious / heavy” kit. (Note that “heavy” is relative, the four zooms weigh a total of 1477g.)

However, maybe the 12-35mm is a lazy choice…

I also have a second kit, the “social / subtle / light” kit. This consists of the tiny Panasonic 14-42mm “pancake” power zoom, their 45-175mm, and the Olympus 9-18mm. Total weight 460g. These normally travel as spares with my old GX8, but get pressed into service when I need their remarkable physical characteristics. The 45-175mm is a real gem: only 90mm long (and no longer, it’s an internal zoom) and 210g, in adequate lighting it’s capable of shots just as sharp as the 35-100mm f/2.8. Its tiny size makes it unthreatening, its light weight makes it easy to hold the camera above your head (e.g. from the back of a crowd) and get sharp shots, even at maximum 350mm-e reach. However if you’re moving, it has another magic property: its size means that it can be held stable in the slipstream. Last year I was lucky enough to get a flight in a two-seat microlite, and here’s one of the shots I took from the back seat – try that with a 5D and EF100-400m lens!

Is the 45-175mm lens my favourite? I’m not quite sure, but how about it for a “left field” choice?

Apologies, I have a problem with my RSS feed which appears to require "live testing" to resolve. Please ignore this post, but if you’re already here please enjoy a nice picture of a beautiful leopard!

Enormous excitement chez nous. We have a bird box, installed in the courtyard many years ago, which has been systematically ignored most years. But not this year. A couple of weeks ago we realised that a couple of blue tits were frequenting it, dragging bits and pieces of nest material back and forth, and in the last week activity had ramped up dramatically but we weren’t quite sure to what what stage.

Then yesterday while Frances was planting she heard some very enthusiastic tweeting, and caught sight of a couple of tiny yellow beaks. Mum and Dad are now running relays about 14 hours a day to shovel food into those tiny beaks. It’s quite interesting to watch the patterns. One, let’s assume it’s Dad, has obviously found a good source of grubs at the other end of the garden and does straight runs right through the Chinese circle, only slowing slightly before dumping said grub into a waiting beak. He was on about a 2 minute cycle yesterday afternoon.

The other, let’s assume it’s Mum, is more cautious, and tends to land on a nearby branch or two first before approaching the box more slowly. Sometimes they arrive together and it’s amusing to watch one bouncing up and down waiting for the other to finish his/her delivery.

It was never a deliberate plan, but we have four windows with a view of the box, and they don’t seem to mind us standing watching or photographing as long as we’re behind glass. It’s a bit of a challenge photographically as they all move so quickly, and I haven’t yet got the perfect shot of a grub being deposited into a waiting yellow beak, but these aren’t bad. Enjoy!

Assuming that we all get back to travelling, it looks like I have seriously raised the bar on my own travel photography. Not only did we get to shoot at one of the same locations as Seven Worlds, One Planet, but it looks like I got to photograph the same individual! (Spot the distinctive pattern of bites on her ears.)

For about ten minutes at the end of each evening the sunlight lights up our newest sculpture through the Chinese circle. I thought it would be nice to share this:

• it’s a pretty image in it’s own right,
• I’d like to celebrate the fact that after several weeks I’ve finally just about finished reworking, updating and rehosting my website,
• … and this is a good test of my blogging software!

PS – it turned out to be a better test than I expected. Half an hour later I’ve learned how to use SSL with the .Net web client! Working now!

Here are a couple more of my shots from the Tutankhamun exhibition. The sarcophagus is a particular delight, as the full-sized items did not travel from Egypt, but this 6″ version did. In real life it’s tiny – if you look carefully you can see a pin to the left of the belt – that’s a normal mounting pin, not a bolt! So I have a picture of the sarcophagus, almost as if we’d seen the real thing.

I’m very pleased with this image. It was taken at f/4 and ISO 2000, through glass but from only about a foot away. Depth of field was a significant challenge, but I cheated slightly by putting the result through Topaz Sharpen AI in focus mode. The result is sharp in most areas, although the top of the headgear and tip of the beard are still slightly out. Noise wasn’t really a problem, although Topaz did clean it up slightly.

However this is mainly a testament to the Sony RX100, rather than post-processing. It may be the size of a packet of cigarettes, but it’s capable of images just as good as an interchangeable-lens camera ten times its size and weight. It’s not a “point and shoot” compact camera, it’s a big camera made small. However small doesn’t mean cheap, even this five year old variant costs over £500 if you find someone who still has new stock. The latest variant costs almost as much as a top-end Micro Four Thirds camera or mid-range DSLR.

But that’s absolutely right. Making tiny things which are just as good as the full-sized versions is hard, takes a lot of work, and demands arguably even more skill. I would hope the Pharaoh’s advisors accepted that when they commissioned a jeweller and a miniature artist to make these items. It’s equally true today.

Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh

Ahead of the opening of the new museum at Giza dedicated entirely to Tutankhamun, some of the treasures from his tomb have been doing a last "world tour", including London’s Saatchi Gallery. They will be there until 3rd May.

We visited the other day, and I simply have insufficient superlatives. "Blown away" maybe just covers it. It’s hard to credit that many of these beautiful statues, jewels and other grave goods are over three thousand years old.

I would also like to say a big "thank you" to the exhibition’s organisers. The numbers were being managed perfectly – enough that a reasonable number of people get to see the treasures, but not so busy that there was any jostling or a problem if you wanted to study an item closely or take a photo. Buggies and large bags aren’t allowed, so that filters out two of the main causes of congestion. This also ensures that the children present are old enough to appreciate it, and I have to say it was a delight to see so many youngsters engaged with the exhibits, not just dashing from screen to screen.

The captions and explanations are displayed either above or below the exhibits, large enough to be read easily without constant manipulation of glasses. These include both practical explanations, and apposite quotes from The Book Of The Dead.

The exhibition is also, bar none, the most photography friendly one I have ever attended. There’s no restriction on taking images, and little on equipment although flash is banned and large kits discouraged under the "large bags" rule. Tripods are not explicitly banned, but similarly covered and I didn’t see anyone attempting to use one. However there’s no need for them as the exhibits are all well lit, with dark backgrounds and a clear attempt to avoid reflections, hotspots and distractions. I just used my diminutive Sony RX100 mk IV, but any medium-sized DSLR or mirrorless with 24-70mm zoom lens would be equally acceptable and successful.

I was very please with the results from the Sony. Most didn’t need any correction beyond what Capture One applies by default with maybe some highlight and shadow recovery. For most images I just cropped in on the artefact, knocked the background back to black, and removed any remnants of the surroundings, for a "pseudo catalogue" look. Alternatively you could leave it lighter and include a bit of context, like my photo of a young admirer above.

The ancient Egyptians believed that you only truly die when the last person speaks your name. If that’s right then Tutankhamun succeeded in his quest for eternal life beyond his wildest imaginings. If you get a chance, then go to the exhibition and speak his name too.

Day 6

I make a fairly early start and go down to the small beach to watch the sunrise. Just as the sun is getting established it starts raining, but the result is an amazing rainbow behind the hotel, and great light on the beach.

This was planned as a rest day, so we have a gentle morning. After lunch we try the Museum and Cultural Centre, but it’s shut. Fortunately the Lava tubes are open, and absolutely fascinating. I learn a bit about the different types of lava, which seem to be most accurately described using Hawaiian and have fun trying to photograph the cave with camera in one hand and torch in the other.

Hana does seem to be a town without a coffee shop. We stop at the banana bread stall, but at 3.30 they have switched off their coffee machine and are not prepared to just sell us a slice of cake, only a whole one. Useless. Is this really America?

I have no idea why, but I don’t have much luck with sandals. Today for the third time in about as many years, both of my relatively new sandals decide to simultaneously self destruct, on this occasion with both soles completely detaching. The Hana local store sells me a pot of glue, which turns out to be a sort of foaming filler. The soles are now firmly attached, but with odd blobs of yellow filler poking out around the circumference. Frances not amused at the inelegance. Evo Stik added to holiday checklist.

Dinner is accompanied by an entertaining game of "do you know what it is yet?" Crowd pleaser standards, played on a Ukulele and sung in an impenetrable Hawaiian accent.

Picasso had his blue period. I had a blurry period.

There’s a common line in much of photography writing. Set aside those actively trying to sell you something, and most will at some point claim that "kit doesn’t matter”. The idea is that a good photographer can get excellent results with any equipment. He or she will understand and work within any limitations, potentially even making an artistic feature of them. Conversely the mediocre photographer chasing improvement through better equipment is wasting time and money better spent on training in technique.

However that has not been my experience…

I’ve been a photographer since my teens. Until the mid 00s I muddled along with low-end 35mm film cameras and a variety of relatively cheap lenses, typically “kit” lenses or items purchased randomly from shop displays of used items. Over the years I’d worked up from a “manual everything” camera with fixed 50mm lens to an entry-level Canon EOS SLR which provided automatic focus, exposure and film winding. The photos had their limitations, but I lived with them. They were better than most friends and relatives managed with “point and shoot” cameras, but they didn’t really relate to the sharp, colourful large-format images I saw in magazines or at exhibitions.

That changed with the advent of my first DSLR, a Canon 350D. Now I had a tool capable of producing high-quality digital images, in theory up there with the best of them. OK, auto-focus was slow for anything but well-lit static subjects, and the maximum usable ISO was 800, but by using the histogram I could reliably get correctly exposed and focused shots almost every time, banishing most of the technical issues which had limited my film photography. At the same time I realised that because of the constraints of my work, photography, and travel for it, was really my main hobby, and I wanted to become good at it.

Score 1 for a kit upgrade, but I suspect we all overlook this one.

I knew I needed to improve my compositional skills and my eye for images, but I read widely, attended courses, got some mentoring, and practiced. I do say so myself, but my ability to see, frame up and capture an image improved steadily. I learned to shoot RAW, and started to develop an efficient toolkit to work through and develop my pictures. I took the better ones proudly to my mentor…

…At which point he made a comment about sharpness, and I realised that it was true, many of my images seemed a lot softer than they should. Ignoring those with motion blur (due to subject movement), depth of field limitations or environmental constraints (haze or low light), quite a lot of straightforward static shots seemed to lack “bite”. I tried fiddling with the processing, but to little avail. I wondered if the problem was camera shake, but that seemed unlikely as I have a steady hand, and I proved that I could get sharp shots with my telephoto at full stretch and a moderate shutter speed, and from my non-stabilised wide-angle lens. That should have told me something, but it didn’t.

At the time my main lens was the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM. This was a decent lens, neat, smooth in operation with good stabilisation, and received decent reviews. It did suffer quite bad chromatic aberration near its limits, but that was usually correctable. However I became convinced that simply because it was relatively cheap maybe it was the culprit.

So I set about trying to find a better mid-range Canon zoom. This proved easier said than done. Canon had multiple well-reviewed zooms which were 24mm at the wide end, but that’s only "wide" on full frame, and useless for my style of photography with APS-C bodies. I borrowed a 17-40mm lens, but that seemed heavy, lacked image stabilisation and didn’t seem to produce much better results than what I had. Ditto the 17-55mm, which is a good lens, but a big lump for what it is. At the same time these all equated to about 28mm at the wide end, and I was ideally hoping for something a bit wider. My options seemed limited.

At which point, Canon released the EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM lens. This looked like the answer to my prayers: similar range to the 17-85mm but a bit wider, marginally faster, and about twice the price, so it had to be better, didn’t it? I read reviews and tried one in a shop, all of which looked quite promising. I bit the bullet and purchased one.

Picasso had his blue period. This was the beginning of my blurry period.

I don’t mean that every shot I took was a fuzzy mess. In well-lit conditions straight on to a static subject with no vast challenge on depth of field the results were OK. Subject movement wasn’t a problem either – the lens played very well with the Canon 7D’s excellent autofocus on moving targets. However in terms of my images being a bit disappointing on the sharpness front, if anything the rate seemed to have gone up.

Nice colours, no shake, but still blurry

Some of this was down to my technique. I was arguably becoming too reliant on multi-purpose autofocus, and maybe not paying enough attention to depth of field complexities. Some was due to a straightforward mechanical weakness of the 15-85mm lens: pointed too far up or down the front element would move under its own weight and disturb zoom and focus, but I learned to recognise and manage that. However the fact remained that some images which should have been consistently sharp just weren’t.

Things came to a head on the first day of my Iceland trip, when I suddenly realised that only the autofocus lights in the bottom 2/3 of the viewfinder were active – the others never came on. The lens just wasn’t focusing properly on objects at the top of the image. I swapped to the 17-85mm lens and the problem went away, so that became my main lens for the remainder of the trip.

The 15-85mm lens was still under warranty, so it went back to Canon for repair. Actually it went back twice, as the first time it was returned "no fault found" and my carefully listed symptoms clearly ignored. The second time Canon reported that they had adjusted the front element of the lens. It was a bit better, but not right. I could point it straight at a wall, and either the top of the image would confirm focus or the bottom, but not both.

I went for a walk with friends, and took the shot below. It may not show up well at web resolutions, but it’s a very odd image. The roof tiles reflected in the water are sharp. The tiles photographed directly, without the challenges of reflection, but by definition at the same optical distance, are blurred.

The Canon 15-85mm lens’ failings uncovered

After that walk I did another review of the market, but was still unexcited by any other option. I sold the lens (for a fairly low price to a happy buyer, I checked), and bought another, brand new. It was a further step in the right direction, but I still couldn’t be sure that I was getting the images I should.

One problem is that it’s very difficult to understand the limitations of your kit if that’s all you have to compare. It’s a bit like trying to assess the benefits of Blu-Ray via an advert on a DVD – you only have a DVD quality image to judge. I call this the “can’t tell through current medium” problem. At the risk of channelling Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t know what you don’t know…

I was getting frustrated, and it shows in my portfolio. After the walk which generated the top image, the Canon 7D hardly contributed apart from sporting events, where coupled with the 70-300mm lens it continued to shine. Everything else was taken with other, supposedly "lesser" cameras.

When I bought the Panasonic GH2, I wasn’t intending to buy a "better" camera. I’d become attracted to the idea of mirrorless cameras, and I wanted a "full capability" camera kit which was genuinely small and light. In truth there was also a bit of gadget lust, partly bought on by my growing frustration with Canon, who were also very tardy in upgrading the 7D. Driven by the small/light mantra, I chose as my first micro four-thirds lens the 14-42mm "power zoom" (which folds itself down to a pancake when not in use), a lens which requires prodigious geometric correction in the camera or RAW convertor.

And the images it produced were so sharp, they just "popped" off the screen. Casual grab shots with the GH2 had a clarity of detail and colour I had rarely matched with the Canons, and only readily achieved with the excellent EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens, rather than the mid-range zooms. I had found my reference!

My first real shot with the GH2 – sharp!

It’s surprising in hindsight, but even with this realisation, it was a long 18 months before I completely moved on. I was both personally and financially invested in the Canon system, and couldn’t change instantly. The GH2 was only 12MP (only 9MP at some aspect ratios). It struggled if the subject was actually moving, by comparison a great forte of the Canon 7D. In addition the early micro four-thirds cameras and lenses were tiny but felt fragile, and I was more disposed to expose the Canon kit to rain, dust or the sands of the Erg Chebbi. Underneath it all I suspect I was still somewhat in denial that a much cheaper, as well as smaller kit was capable of superior results.

The end of the transition came suddenly, via an accident which was happy for me, less so for my friend David. He was trying to shoot the swirling floodwaters of Winter 2013-14, knocked his tripod, and in went his 7D and lens. He wanted time to choose an upgrade replacement, so offered to buy my 7D as an interim solution. He also took a couple of lenses, but wasn’t interested in the 15-85mm. He’d obviously heard me swearing once too often!

The rest of my Canon kit went on eBay. Most sold quickly and for good prices. There was one exception: the execrable 15-85mm took months to sell and achieved a very low price. I was slightly chastened, but not really surprised.

Somewhat before the end I had mentally and practically moved fully into the Panasonic system. I loved much about it, especially the image quality, but also my kit finally included something which Canon had never been able to provide, a lightweight high quality mid-range zoom (the wonderful 12-35mm f/2.8, beloved even of lens snobs). My blurry period was over.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of people doing good work with APS-C Canon cameras, working carefully within the limits of the lenses, or living with their limitations. I could always have invested instead in a bunch of primes, or maybe I might have fared differently if I had got better results from my trial of the 17-55mm lens. However the reality is that I just couldn’t believe Canon would sell bad lenses for good money, and tried to "stick it out", rather than moving on sooner. For every photographer who is constantly chasing the next big thing, there’s probably one like me, constrained by the "I’ve bought it, so I must use it" mentality (or maybe just limited financial resources).

What moved me on wasn’t any clever analysis of reviews or lens performance charts. It was a few quid burning a hole in my pocket, frustration, a bit of gadget lust and a couple of inspiring Panasonic adverts. Effectively "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" saved my photography. I’m not sure to whom that should be a lesson, and I can imagine that this article may well not go down well with partners of dedicated gear nuts, but this is a true story, and you will never hear me say "kit doesn’t matter". I don’t agree.

My programming project of the last few weeks has been to build my own “rolling portfolio”, which shows random images from my photographic portfolio as either a screensaver or a rolling display on a second monitor. I’ve implemented a number of features I’ve always wanted but never had from freeware/shareware options, like precise control over timing, the ability to quickly add a note if I see a required correction, and the ability to locate and review recent images if someone says “what was that picture you were just showing?”.

Having previous blogged about the poor quality of “random” algorithms in Android music player apps (see  How Hard Can It Possibly Be?), I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and write my own preferred random algorithm. This does a recursive, random walk down the selected folder tree, until it either finds an image file, or a dead end (and then tries again). This was refreshingly easy to implement, and as expected runs quickly without needing any prior indexing of the content.

Also as expected, the simplest implementation returned a disproportionate number of hits (and therefore a lot of repeats) from folders with a very small number of images, but that was easily fixed by adding a “weighting” at the second stage of the walk, to reduce the number of hits on smaller portfolios.

Job done? Maybe. I started to notice that I still see the same image selected twice in quick succession, and sometimes more than twice over a day or two. At first I thought this might be an issue with seeding the random number generator, so that I was re-generating the same random sequences, but a quick check confirmed that wasn’t the problem. The next most obvious possibility (to me!) was an issue with the Microsoft .Net random() function, so I added some logging to the app, recording each random number, and then fed a day’s worth through some frequency analysis in Excel. That got Microsoft off the hook with a clean bill of health: there’s a slight preponderance of zeros, which I can explain, but otherwise the spread of results looks fine.

At the same time, I also added logging for the selected images themselves. In yesterday’s work hours operation the screen saver showed 335 images, of which no fewer than 21 were duplicates. Given that I have over 3500 images in the portfolio, this seems very high, but maybe not.

This is a known problem in mathematics, a generalisation of the “birthday problem”. It’s so known, because a common formulation is the question “given a room of people, what is the probability that at least two have the same birthday?”. While you need at 367 people to guarantee a duplicate, the counter-intuitive result is that with just 23 people in the room, it’s more likely than not. The generalised equation for the solution is the following:

E = k – n + n(1 – 1/n)^k

In this n is the number of items, k is the number of random selections, and E is the expected number of duplicates. Feed in k = 335 and n = 3500, and you get the outcome E = 16. That’s close enough to my observed value of 21 (this is all random, so any one measurement might be either side of the expected value, but the order of magnitude is right). Couple this with the way my mind works, looking for patterns, and I must therefore expect to see some repetition. However it’s clear that the algorithm is working fine, it’s just the normal workings of probability.

Another implication of this is that as the sample grows, some images will naturally appear several times, and others may not appear at all. If we take 3500 samples, the expected number of duplicates rises to over 1200, so over 1/3 of the images will still be unselected.

Do I fix this? The relatively simple resolution is to keep a list of selected images, and use that to discard any selections which are repeats during a given period. However I would rather run this without a data store and maybe, now I can explain it, I’m comfortable. Time will tell.

I’ve been having a few problems with my RSS feed, hopefully now fixed. If you view my blog via the feed and don’t see a picture from my trip to the Kolmanskoppe diamond mining town, please let me know.

Here’s my traditional end of trip contribution to the world of fine art photography. Peter Lik watch out!

From the left: Alison, Yours Truly, Nigel, Keith, Paul, John L, John B, Ann, Lee

Here are some facts ands figures about our trip, and some guidance for prospective travellers and photographers.

Cameras and Shot Count

I took around 2900 shots (broken down to 2788 on the Panasonic G9, 78 on the GX8, and a handful each on my phone, the Sony Rx100 and the infrared GX7). A fair proportion of these were for "multishot" images of various sorts, including 3D, focus blends, panoramas (especially at Wolwedans), HDR / exposure brackets (essential at Kolmanskoppe), and high-speed sequences (the bushmen demonstrations, and a few wildlife events). I’m on target for my usual pattern: about a third to half the raw images will be discarded quickly, and from the rest I should end up with around 200 final images worth sharing.

The G9 was the workhorse of the trip, and behaved well, although it did have a slight blip mid-trip when the eye sensor got clogged and needed to be cleaned. It’s battery life is excellent, frequently needing only one change even in a heavy day’s shooting, and the two SD card slots meant I never had to change a memory card during the day! The GX8 did its job as a backup and for when I wanted two bodies with different lenses easily to hand (the helicopter trip and a couple of the game drives). However it is annoying that two cameras which share so much technically have such different control layouts. If I was a "two cameras around the neck" shooter I would have to choose one or the other and get two of the same model. As I’ve noted before, my Panasonic cameras and the Olympus equivalents proved more usable  on the helicopter trip than the "big guns", and if you’re planning such a flight then make sure you have a physically small option.

As notable as what I shot was what I didn’t. This trip generated no video, and the Ricoh Theta 360-degree camera which was always in my bag never came out of its cover. Under the baking African sun the infrared images just look like lower resolution black and white versions of the colour ones, and after a couple of attempts I didn’t bother with those, either.

This was the first trip in a while where I didn’t need to either fall back to my backup kit, or loan it out to another member of the group. One of the group did start off with a DOA Nikon body, somehow damaged in the flight out, but his other body worked fine. There was an incident where someone knocked his tripod over and broke a couple of filters, but the camera and lens were fine. Otherwise all equipment worked well. Maybe these things are getting tougher.

Namibia is absolutely full of sand, and there’s a constant fine dust in the air which is readily visible if you go out in the dark with a torch. This gets all over your kit especially if you go trekking through the dunes (tick), spend all afternoon bouncing through the savannah in an open jeep (tick), encounter a sandstorm (tick), or spend half a day in a ghost town world famous for its shifting sands (BINGO!!!). The ideal solution to remove the dust is a can of compressed air, but they really don’t like you taking one on a plane. On previous trips to dusty environments I’ve managed to get to a hardware store early on and buy a can, but that wasn’t possible this time. Squeezy rubber bulbs are worse than useless. In the end I just wiped everything down with wet wipes, but it’s not ideal. I’ve now found a powerful little USB blower (like a tiny hair drier) which may work, but I won’t be able to really test it until the next trip.

It’s a good practice to check your sensor at the end of every day, especially if like me you use a mirrorless camera usually with an electronic shutter (meaning the physical shutter is often open when you change lenses). I recently purchased a "Lenspen Sensor Klear" which is an updated version of the old "sensor scope" but with proper support for APS-C and MFT lens mounts. That was invaluable for the daily check, but in practice I didn’t find sensor dust to be a significant problem.

The subject matter is very much landscape and wildlife. Others may have different experiences, but I suggest for art, architecture, action and people you should look elsewhere.

Travel

Setting aside my complaints about the Virgin food service and the Boeing 787, the travel all worked well. The air travel got us to and from Windhoek without incident. Wild Dog Safaris provided the land transportation, with Tuhafenny an excellent, patient, driver/guide, and a behind the scenes team managing the logistics and local arrangements. The latter were mainly seamless and without issue, although there was a bit of juggling regarding some of the transport at Sossusvlei, and some of the departure airport transfers. I would certainly recommend Wild Dog Safaris.

If you want to cover anything like the sort of ground we did on a Namibia adventure, then you will spend a lot of time on the road. I reckon that on at least 7 days we spent 5 or more hours travelling, and on most of the others we probably managed 2+ on shorter hops or travelling to specific locations. According to Tuhafenny’s odometer we racked up 3218 km, or about 2000 miles, and that excludes the mileage in open 4x4s provided by the various resorts. The roads were at least empty and usually fairly straight and smooth, even those without tarmac, although the odd jolt and bump was inevitable. However we all managed to get some decent sleep while on the road, and I could dead-reckon our ETAs fairly accurately at 50mph, which is a far cry from the 10mph average I worked out for the Bhutan trip!

Although most locations have airstrips, there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent of the air shuttles which move people between centres in Myanmar, at least not unless you have vast funds for private charters. Just make sure you have a soft bottom and something to keep you entertained on the journeys.

Practicalities

I was advised beforehand travel to carry cash (Sterling) and change it in Namibia, on the same sort of basis as my Cuba, Bhutan and Myanmar trips. That was complete nonsense. In Namibia all the larger merchants happily take cards and there are ATMs in every town. Changing £200 at the airport was painless enough, but my attempt to change £90 in Lüderitz turned into one of the most annoying and convoluted financial transactions I have been involved in, and I’m tempted to include buying cars and houses in the list! Namibia hasn’t quite got to the point where you can just wave your phone at the till to buy an ice-cream, but it’s getting there quickly.

Another bit of complete nonsense is "it’s cold in the desert". Yes, it may be a bit chilly first thing some mornings, but I needed a second layer over my T-shirt for precisely two short pre-dawn periods. Obviously if you’re the sort of person who gets a chill watching a documentary about penguins, then YMMV, but I was clearly heavy a sweatshirt, a couple of pairs of long trousers and one raincoat. In addition to shorts and T-shirts one fleece, plus the jacket and trousers for the trip home, would be adequate.

On a related subject, there’s one thing that almost all the hotels got wrong. Apart from right at the coast daytime temperatures are up well into the 30s if not the 40s, and the temperature inside most of the lodgings at bed-time was in the high 20s, dropping to the low 20s by the end of the night (all temperatures in Celsius). In those temperatures I do NOT need a 50 Tog quilt designed for a Siberian Winter. One sheet would be plenty, with maybe the option of a second blanket if absolutely necessary. The government-run lodge at Sossusvlei got this right, no-one else did.

It may be dusty, and there are little piles of dung everywhere from the local wildlife, but beyond this Namibia is basically clean. You can drink the tap water pretty much everywhere, and it’s not a game of Russian Roulette having a salad. It made a welcome change from the experience of Morocco and my Asian trips not having to manage our journey around tummy upsets, which is just as well when we had at least two stretches of over 150 miles without an official stop. Obviously sensible precautions like regular hand cleansing apply, but Namibia really presents less of a challenge in this area.

The larger challenge of the Namibian diet is that there’s a lot of it. Portions tend to be large, and there’s a lot of red meat, frequently close relatives of the animals you have just been photographing. I was fine with this, but I suspect vegans should not apply. Between the food, the beer and snacks in the bus I definitely put on about half a stone, which I’m desperately trying to lose again before Christmas…

Communications are good in the larger towns, but elsewhere you may struggle for a mobile signal and the roaming costs for calls, texts and particularly data are very high. WiFi worked well at the town locations, but at the more remote sites service was intermittent and almost unusably slow. On the other hand, we were in the middle of Africa! This is one of those cases where you wonder not that a thing is done well, but that it is done at all. (The odd exception, again, was Sossusvlei, where they charged about £3 a day, but the bandwidth was excellent.) However Namibia is a country where practical problems get fixed, and I suspect in 5 years this will be a non-issue. In the meantime if you want to do anything more than check the news headlines (say, just for the sake or argument, update a photo blog :)) then plan ahead and batch updates ready for when you’re somewhere more central.

I did suffer one related annoyance. On a couple of occasions an Android app I was using to entertain myself on the long drives just stopped working pending a licensing check, which couldn’t be completed until I got connectivity at the end of the day. There’s not much to be done about this, apart from a post-incident moan to the app developer to make the check more forgiving. It’s worth having a Plan B for anything absolutely vital.

Do carry a small torch. It’s great to get away from light pollution, but the flipside is that it’s dark (shock, horror!!) As well as for night photography we often had to walk quite long distances between our accommodation and the resorts’ central areas, with minimal lighting, and you really don’t want to trip over a sleeping warthog or tread in a pile of oryx poo. I have a tiny, powerful cyclists’ head torch which is ideal. It’s also rechargeable via USB, although as far as I can remember it’s still on its first charge from when I bought it in 2015, so I’m not quite sure how that works.

Finally, retail therapy. Surprisingly for a country trying to optimise the income from high-value eco-tourism, there was almost nothing to buy until we got back to Windhoek and visited a craft market. Most resorts had a shop, but I wasn’t impressed by the merchandising, and when I did find something I liked it was usually not available in my size (clothing), or language (books). It’s not the purpose of the trip, but I do like the odd bit of retail therapy. There’s an opportunity for some enterprising young Namibians.

In summary, Namibia is a very civilised way to see the wild. Some of the wild is not quite as wild as it might be, but that’s part of the trade-off which makes it so accessible, and this certainly worked for me.

I noticed while gathering for the bushman walk that five of our group were "packing" a pair of Canons. This shot was inevitable.

Thanks to John B for the title – excellent photographer’s joke. I am happy to explain if required.

This article was also published as a guest article on "The Online Photographer".

My Panasonic GX8 arrived pretty much on the day of official availability and has been my primary camera for almost three years, including two major photographic trips, and innumerable other opportunities in between. It improved on the already good GX7 with "just right" sizing, a better sensor and higher speeds. Like many other owners and fans I was looking forward to a fairly straight replacement – all Panasonic had to do was fix the awkward exposure compensation control and improve the action autofocus and it would be pretty much perfect. Fat chance.

Instead, and not for the first time, Panasonic have shaken up the Lumix G range, with the GX9 effectively moving down the range, and all the new goodness going into a new "stills flagship" the G9, which sits at the top alongside the video-centric GH5 and its variants.

After a bit of prevarication, I decided that I was due an upgrade, and plumped for the G9. My new camera arrived a few days ago. This review is based on the first few days’ moderately heavy use. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive, or dispassionate blow-by-blow review, but a set of personal impressions from a long-standing Panasonic user and fan.

Body Style and Size

At first the G9 looks like quite a different camera, larger and more expensive, and more of a "DSLR ethos" than the rangefinder-style GX8. I’ll come back to cost, but the size issue is deceptive: put the two cameras side by side and it’s clear that the only real difference is the G9’s DSLR "hump", and a slightly deeper grip, which is academic unless you use a very small pancake lens. Given that similarity it’s surprising that the G9 is a significant 171g (about 6oz) heavier. The camera offers better weatherproofing and a bigger battery, and does feel a bit more rugged, so that’s acceptable. Unlike its predecessor, but like my old Canon 7D, it feels like it might take the odd knock without problems. In practice, you get used to the weight quite quickly.

Like every new flagship camera the G9 is initially priced high, but this gives Panasonic and their dealers some room for manoeuvre with discounts, trade-ins and freebies. Depending on how you look at it my G9 cost me only about 2/3 of the advertised price, or the 5 year lifetime cost of my old GX7 net of trade-in was about £250. I can live with that.

Controls and Ergonomics

Back in early 2016 I wrote an open letter to Panasonic regarding the GX8, acknowledging its good points, but identifying opportunities to improve the ergonomics and usefully extend its stills capability. They clearly ignored the letter for the GX9, but either great minds think alike, or it did influence the G9.

Ergonomically, I am a fan of "electronic" control, by which I mean the ability to set camera functions fluidly between on-camera buttons and wheels including your choice of programmable controls, the menu system, and stored custom values. By contrast "fixed switches" break this free control model and cannot be included in stored settings for custom shooting modes. In addition, I am short sighted and wearing my "distance" glasses the tiny markings on such controls are effectively invisible.

The GX8’s exposure compensation control is a good (or should that be bad?) example of the latter. Apart from breaking my preferred control model it is also badly placed – I found that to operate it I either have to take my right hand off the camera and reach in from above, or somehow slide my thumb behind the camera, which usually results in both adjusted exposure and smeared glasses! No such problem with the G9 – you can quickly set up the camera so that the rear wheel, under the right thumb, controls the primary exposure value (aperture or shutter speed as appropriate), while the front wheel, easily in reach of the shutter finger, controls compensation. Vice-versa if you prefer. Perfect.

Unfortunately, however, Panasonic have perpetuated, and even aggravated one of the GX8’s other ergonomic failings, and arguably introduced a new one! The perpetual horror is focus mode. The G9, like most of the G series, has four main modes: manual focus (’nuff said), autofocus "single" (half press the shutter button to focus, then full press to expose with that focus), "follow" (another single shot mode, but if the primary subject moves while the shutter button is half pressed, the camera refocuses), and "continuous" (aligned to the high-speed shooting modes, refocuses for each exposure). The ideal solution would be a button which toggles between the modes. That’s good enough for a lot of very good cameras. However the G9 has a switch.

If you must have a switch, then surely it should have four modes? Nope. You select manual, continuous or single/follow on a three position switch, then have to dive into the menus to choose between single and follow, or the several variants of continuous. To add insult to injury, at least in the GX8 you could set the button in the middle of the focus switch to toggle between single and follow. Not on the G9, at least not with its initial firmware – this is set to AE/AF lock (which I personally never, ever use) and not programmable. The obvious fix is to make that button programmable so that when in the single/follow position it toggles between the two, when in the continuous position it toggles between the various variants of that mode, and when in the manual position it does something equivalently useful like turning focus peaking (highlighting) on and off. This could be fixed in a firmware update – I will just have to write to Panasonic and cross my fingers.

The other fixed switch on the G9 is for the drive mode (single, high speed, timer etc.) On the GX8 this is on a button, which is much better as you can include infrequent or situation-specific settings (like high speed mode) in appropriate custom shooting modes, and just leave the main aperture-priority settings or equivalent on single-shot, with a much reduced risk of going to take a shot and being in the wrong mode. The G9 arrangement seems like a retrograde step, but liveable.

Strengths

Krzysztof Radzikowski sets a new world record with a 150kg dumbell lift

That brings us from some arguable weaknesses of the G9 onto its real strengths. It’s fast – so fast it has three high-speed modes: high (about 5FPS), super-high 1 (about 15FPS) and super-high 2 (about 20FPS). The two super-high modes also have a very useful feature for sports and wildlife photography: hold the shutter half pressed and they will continuously store a few frames (about 0.4s worth) in the buffer, and write these to the card when you press the shutter, so if you are fractionally late clicking, you don’t lose the event. The downside is that you need to use the super-high settings with caution: if you are saving RAW + large JPEG files super-high 2 will chew up your memory cards at roughly 1GByte every 1.5 seconds. Another reason why I’d prefer to lock this to a custom mode!

Autofocus is much improved over the GX8, although I have to admit that my first sporting event with the new camera didn’t give it that much of a workout: in absolute terms, strongmen don’t move fast. it’s impressive to see a 150kg (330lb) man jogging with the same weight in each hand, but it’s not the harshest test of autofocus! However I can report that the G9 seems to adjust focus very quickly in continuous mode and seems to have missed relatively few shots. If there’s any pattern to the misses they tend to be the first shots of longer sequences, when I may have been moving the camera into position on the action. I’ll have to try and find something involving horses or fast cars for a better check.

Sensor readout also appears to have been improved, with a bit less banding on pictures of LED displays, and no obvious rolling shutter effects so far, although a higher-speed subject will really be required to confirm that.

The other area where Panasonic seem to have listened to my prior pleas is in support for bracketed and multi-shot images. In addition to the established support for exposure bracketing (for HDR), the new camera now does focus bracketing/scanning, as well as bracketing for aperture and white balance. Intelligently, even in single-shot drive mode you can choose to have the bracket shot at high speed to minimise the effect of subject or camera movement. The focus bracketing capability is something I have been seeking for a long time, and records full RAW files, a completely separate capability from the camera’s other ability to do in-camera focus stacking or post-shot focus selection from within a 6K movie file. Bracketed photos are clearly marked in their metadata, which makes it quite easy to build a script to sort them out from the rest of a day’s shooting.

Battery life is excellent – at the aforementioned strongman competition the camera was on for most of the five hours of competition and took about 600 shots. It used one battery and was about 30% into the second, much better than the GX8 would manage. I can also confirm that the two card slot arrangement works fine, effectively doubling the memory capacity, so I wasn’t fiddling with cards.

Two other ergonomic points are worth making. The rear display can be manually set to a nice bright setting for outdoors, but it’s automatic setting is far too dim. The EVF is large, detailed and bright, but as adjusted for my glasses has an odd pincushion distortion, with noticeably curved edges. This is nothing to do with the lens, which the camera corrects as required, but the way the EVF display is presented to the eyepiece. It’s not a major problem, but annoying to an inveterate picture-straightener like myself, especially as I haven’t had that problem with any of the predecessors.

Otherwise it’s pretty much business as usual. Image quality appears to be just the same as the GX8, much as expected given the common sensor, and the camera has a nicely familiar feel even if some of the controls are different and it’s definitely a bit heavier. Stabilisation is at least as good as the predecessor, with no noticeable penalty from the increased weight, but it’s clear that the full multi-second goodness of "dual IS 2" will have to wait until I can afford to start replacing my lenses with the new Mark II versions.

Conclusion

Would I recommend it? If you’re a committed Panasonic user, or have no existing mirrorless camera affiliation, and you want a very high capability, stills-centric camera, then absolutely. However if video is your thing, the GH5 may be better, and if you really don’t need the high speed or new advanced stills features, then a GX-series camera will save you weight and money. This is a very good camera, but not perfect. Panasonic still have room for improvement…

This is a bit of an experiment, but I think it works. I started with an infrared image in its standard form: yellow skies and blue foliage. I then performed a series of fairly simple colour replacement operations in Photoshop Elements: yellow to red, blue in top half of image to dark green, blue in bottom half of image to pale green, red to blue. The result is a bit like a hand-coloured black and white image. I like it, do you?

"I’m shooting infrared. My main output is RAW files, and any JPGs are just aides memoire. Between my raw processor and Photoshop I’m going to do some fancy channel mixing to either add false colour, or take it away entirely and generate a monochrome image. So I’m assuming my white balance doesn’t matter. Is that right?"

Nope, and this article explains why. If you’re struggling with, or puzzled by, the role of white balance in infrared photography, hopefully this will help untangle things.

I’ve just finished processing my 3D shots from Myanmar. If you have a 3D TV or VR goggles, download a couple of the files from the following link and have a look.

https://www.andrewj.com/public/3D/

I’ve been asked a number of times recently how I manage to write my blog during the often hectic schedule of my trips. It is sometimes a challenge, but it’s something that I want to do, and so I make it a priority for any "down time". I don’t see it as a chore, but as a way of enhancing my enjoyment, re-living the best experiences, working through any frustrations, and building valuable memories. If I’m travelling without Frances then there’s a lot of overlap with my report home, and if we’re travelling together then drafting the blog has become an enjoyable joint activity for coffee stops and dinner times.

That said, there are a few tricks to make the task manageable, and I’m happy to pass on some of those I have developed.

There’s no great magic to the writing. The main ingredient is practice. However I do spend quite a lot of time thinking through what to say about a day, trying to draft suitable paragraphs in my mind. If it was good enough for Gideon it’s good enough for me :). It is useful to capture ideas and even draft words whenever you get an opportunity, even on the go: travel time in buses and coffee stops are ideal. I just start drafting an email to myself on my phone, which can be saved at any time, reopened to add more as the day goes on, and sent before I start writing the blog.

The other important tool is a blogging app on your device which works offline and can save multiple drafts locally. I use the excellent Microsoft Live Writer on my PC, and the WordPress app on my phone and tablet, but any decent text editor would do. I would strongly counsel against trying to do travel blogging directly onto an online service – you will just be too obstructed by connectivity challenges.

Images are the other part of the equation. It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of images, especially if you shoot prolifically like I tend to do, and if you have a relatively slow processing workflow. The first trick is to shoot RAW+JPG, so you always have something which you can share and post, even if it’s not perfect. As I observed in a previous post, you don’t need perfect in this context, and it would be rare if you didn’t from a day’s shooting have a least one image good enough in camera to share.

However, as long as I have at least some time, I do try to perform a basic edit (filter) on my shots, and process at least the one or two I want to publish to my blog. That requires a robust but quick and efficient workflow. Different photographers work different ways, but the following describes mine.

Importantly, I don’t use LightRoom or the image management features in Photoshop. Neither do I use Capture One’s catalogue features. All my image management takes place directly in Windows, supported by the excellent XnView and a few tools of my own making. I find that this is both quicker, and puts me in direct control of the process, rather than at the mercy of a model which might not suit.

The first step is to copy (not move) the images off the memory card. If I have only used one card in a session, I find it perfectly adequate to just connect the camera via USB – this works quite quickly, and avoids fiddling with card readers. As long as I have sufficient cards I don’t re-format them until I’m home (just in case something happens to the PC), nor do I do much in-camera deleting, which is very cumbersome.

In terms of organisation I have a top-level directory on each laptop called "Pictures" under which is a directory called "Incoming". This is synchronised across all my computers, and holds all "work in progress". Under that I have two master directories for each year or major trip, and then subdirectories for each event. So for Myanmar I will have top level directories called "Myanmar 2017" (for output files and fully-processed originals) and "Myanmar 2017 – Incoming" (for work in progress). Under the latter I would typically have a directory for the images from each day’s shooting, e.g. "Lake Inle Day 2". On the "output" side I will typically have a directory for each location, plus one for all the originals (RAW files and Capture One settings), but I could easily also end up with others for video, and particular events or topics such as the group.

Having copied the pictures over to the right working directory, I fire up XnView. The first step is to run a batch rename process which sets each image filename to my standard, which includes the date (in YYYYMMDD format), the camera and the number assigned by the camera, so all shots from a given camera will always sort alphabetically in shot order, and I can immediately see when an image was taken and on which camera. After that I run a script which moves all "multi-shot" images into sub-directories by type (I shoot panoramas, HDR, focus blends and 3D images each using a distinct custom mode on the camera) and takes these out of the main editing workflow.

The next step is to "edit" the images, by which I mean filtering out the bad, poor, and very good. Because I have JPG files for each shot, I can set XnView to sort by file type, and quickly scan all the JPG files in full screen mode, tagging each (using shortcut keys) on the following scheme:

• Two stars means "delete". This is for images which are beyond use: out of focus, blurred, subject not fully in the frame. These will be moved to the wastebasket, and once that’s emptied, they are gone forever.
• Three stars means "others". This is for images which are technically viable but which I don’t think merit processing. The obvious candidates are things like alternative people shots where the expressions weren’t ideal (but I have a better shot) or where I took a few slightly different compositions and some obviously don’t work. However this is also where I park duplicates or the unwanted frames from high-speed sequences. When I get home the JPGs will be deleted and the RAW files moved to an old external hard drive to free up disk space.
• Four stars means "OK". This is for technically and compositionally adequate images, albeit which may not be the best, or may need substantial processing work.
• Five stars means "good". These are the images which leap out at a quick viewing as "yes, that’s going to work".

Having tagged the images in the working folder, I have another script which deletes the two star images, moves the "others", and creates a .XMP file marking the five star images with a colour tag which can be read by Capture One. I can also copy the in-camera JPG versions of the 5 star images as a starting point for my portfolio, although these will be replaced by processed versions later.

The thing about the tagging process is to keep going, quickly, but err on the side of caution (so tag borderline delete as 3 star, and borderline others as 4 star). I can usually work through at an image every one or two seconds, so the first filter of an intensive shoot of 500 images takes less than 20 minutes. At this point I have typically reduced the retained images by 40-60%, but that varies by subject matter and the percentage of rejects can be much higher for challenging subjects such as high-speed action but also people other than professional models, where a lot get rejected for poor expressions. The reason I’ve chosen the image at the top is that I love trying to capture hands at work, but that’s another subject with a high "miss" rate. I also find that I fairly consistently mark about 4-5% of shots as 5 star.

I don’t just delete the "others", because there is the occasional case where my selected shot of a group turns out to have a major flaw, and it’s worth reviewing the options. More importantly, for family events, weddings and the like there’s the occasional "didn’t anyone take a picture of Aunty Ethel?" I rescued a friend of mine from a serious family bust-up when it emerged that the official photographer at his wedding hadn’t taken a single photo of my friend, the groom’s parents! On the case, I found a shot in "others" which after processing kept everyone happy.

At this point, and only then, I start up Capture One and navigate to the target working directory. It takes a minute or two to perform its first scan, and then I can change the sort order to "colour tag", and there are the best of the day’s images, right at the top of the list ready to select a couple for the blog and process them. 90% of the time I restrict processing changes to the crop and exposure (levels and curves) – I wouldn’t usually select for the blog any image needing more than that. Finish the words, and I’m ready to post my blog.

From plugging in the camera to posting typically takes around an hour. There’s some scope for multi-tasking, so I can work on the words (or get a cup of tea) while the images are downloading from the camera, or while posting the images to my website (which in my case is a separate step from posting the blog). As a by-product, I have performed my first edit on the shoot, and have more or less the best images prioritised for further processing.

And I have an enduring and sharable record of what I did on my holidays!

Well, I’m back! Apart from a mad dash the length of Bangkok airport which got us to our plane to the UK with only a couple of minutes to spare, the flights home were uneventful and timely. Here’s my traditional tail-end blog piece, with a combination of “what worked and what didn’t” and more general musings.

This was a truly inspiring photographic trip, with a combination of great locations, events and people to photograph. We had a very capable “leadership team” who got us to great locations in great light, and the Burmese people were only too happy to participate in the process. No praise can be too high for our local guide, Nay Win Oo (Shine), who is not only a great guide and competent logistician, but has a good feel for what makes great photography, and a real talent for directing the local people as models.

If I have a minor complaint, it’s the observation that the trip was largely focused on interiors and people to the occasional exclusion of landscapes and architecture. I had to declare UDI a couple of times to get a bit more of the latter subject matter in front of my lens. Bhutan was perhaps a better match to my own style, but that didn’t stop this trip being a great source of images.

Cameras and Shot Count

The Panasonic GX8 was the workhorse of the trip, and took approximately 3690 exposures. That’s about 20% higher than either Bhutan or Morocco, both of which were slightly longer trips, and reflects the more “interactive” nature of the photography, with a rather higher discard ratio than normal. As usual the total also includes raw material for quite a lot of multi-exposure images, mainly for 3D and panoramas. I expect to end up with 100-200 images worth sharing, which is about the norm.

I took around 84 stills on the Sony RX100, mainly “grab shots” from the bus, but it came into its own for video, and I have a number of great video clips, more than  on previous trips. I also took a handful of images using the infrared-converted Panasonic GX7, but whether due to the subject matter or the lighting they weren’t terribly inspiring.

I used my Ricoh Theta 360-degree camera several times, mainly in the markets and at the group mealtimes. I’m treating this as “found photography” – I haven’t had much of a look yet at what was captured, and will look forward to exploring the output over time.

My equipment all behaved faultlessly. I used all the lenses a reasonable amount, with the Panasonic 12-35mm doing the lion’s share as expected, but the 7-14mm, 35-100mm and 100-300mm all getting substantial use. I didn’t use the camera on my new Sony Experia Ultra phone, but its excellent GPS was a vast improvement over the Galaxy Note’s poor performance in Bhutan.

I also did not use the Panasonic GX7 which I was carrying as a spare, but was able to lend it as a complete solution to another member of the group when her Canon L Series zoom lens started misbehaving. Having been burned previously I always carry a spare everything, and that’s a lot easier with the diminutive Panasonic kit.

Human Factors

While technology was broadly reliable, human systems were more challenged. The combined effects of the intensive schedule and the expected risk of tummy bugs led to as fairly high attrition rate. At least half the group missed a shoot or a meal, and a couple were quite ill for a couple of days. I was lucky that my own “wobble” was brief and started within a quick walk of a five star hotel. I would advise most travellers to think in terms of “when” not “if”, and definitely avoid all uncooked food.

Hotels and restaurants were clean, and even out and about most washrooms were acceptable. Similarly temple areas were kept clean, with the fact that all shoes are removed at the entrance a clear contributor. The challenge is in the more general areas, especially in the towns and cities, where any surface you touch may also have been touched by many others. Money is a particular challenge. All you can do is to keep sanitising your hands, but also bags, cameras, wallets and other items which you may have to touch with dirty hands.

Our Burmese travel agents certainly did everything they could to reduce stress.  Once we arrived in Burma responsibility for our large luggage and travel documents began and ended with putting our bags outside the room at the appointed time. Then we just got on the bus, walked through the airport picking up a boarding pass as we passed Shine, and that’s about it! I could get used to travelling that way…

With someone else doing the “heavy lifting” (quite literally in the case of my case), you can get around with two phrases and 3 gestures:

• Minga-la-ba, which is a polite “good day” exchanged between any two people who make eye contact. The choruses in the school and markets were fascinating! This can be used to cover a multitude of sins, and works very well as “please can I take your photograph?”
• Che-su-ba, which means “thank you”. ‘Nuff said.
• The smiley face and thumbs up, which work when you’re not close enough to use Minga-la-ba and che-su-ba.
• A gesture consisting of the left hand held out at table level, palm up, with the right hand held about a foot above it, palm down. This is universally interpreted as “I would like a large Myanman beer, please”

Burmese Bizarre

Myanmar is a bit bizarre in a number of ways. Let’s start with the name. Myanmar (pronounce “mee…” not “my…”) is a relatively recent invention, and is not universally adopted. It doesn’t help that Aung San Suu Kyi (the popular and de-facto leader) tends to use “Burma” herself, and there’s no common adjective derived from Myanmar, whereas “Burmese” works, and is officially valid if it relates to the dominant ethnic group and language. It wouldn’t surprise me if “Myanmar” goes the way of “Zaire” and “Tanganyika”, and we’re all back to “Burma” in a few years.

The Burmese really do “drive on the wrong side of the road”. In another anti-colonial dictat a few years ago, one of the madder generals decided to change from the British practice, and instructed the country to drive on the right. On it’s own, that’s not a problem. It works fairly well for the Americas and most of Europe. However the Burmese are trying to do it with the same almost completely right-hand-drive vehicle supply as the rest of Asia and Australasia. So all of the drivers are unable to see round corners or larger vehicles in front, and every bus has a “driver’s assistant” who’s main job is to stop passengers being mown down by passing traffic as they disembark into the middle of the road!

At a daily level Myanmar is almost entirely cash-based, with effectively three currencies in circulation. Major tourist transactions are conducted in US Dollars. These must be large denominations and absolutely pristine – they may be rejected for a tiny mark or fold. Next down, most day to day transactions by tourists and the more wealthy are conducted in Kyat (pronounced “Chat”), in round units of 1000 Kyat (about 60p). 10,000K and 5,000K notes tend to also be quite tidy. Transactions with and between the poorer people are in tens or hundreds of Kyat and the money is quite different. It’s absolutely disgusting, clearly and literally passing through a lot of hands in its lifetime. It’s all slightly reminiscent of the two currency system in Cuba, but with one currency used two distinct ways.

Uniquely among the countries I have visited, Myanmar has no international GSM roaming. However we had good straightforward Wifi connectivity at reasonable speeds and without any obvious restrictions at all the hotels and in several other locations. I suspect this is a transitional state, as the enthusiastic adoption of mobile phones in the local population will inevitably drive a standard solution fairly rapidly.

One thing which did amuse me – one of the primary providers of Internet services is a company called SkyNet. Shine say’s they’ve all seen the films, so I’m assuming the founder is a Terminator fan…

The usual Asian approach of throwing people at any problem showed mixed results. Bangkok Airport is an enormous hub trying to run on small site processes which don’t scale just by adding people. The role of “bus driver’s assistant” does find employment for young lads with a helpful attitude but few exams. However we did have one very delayed meal where the problem seemed to be one of short staffing, despite a lot of people milling around the restaurant with nothing to do, most of the order taking, cooking and serving was being done by one or two individuals who were run ragged. It will be interesting to see how the approaches vary as the economy grows.

Guide books describe the food as “a rich fusion of unusual flavours” and “a repertoire of ingredients not found in any other cuisine”. Yeah, right. I’ll admit that I was being a bit cautious and avoided some of the more unusual fish and hot curry dishes, but basically it was Chinese or Thai food with a few local variations (more pineapple), alongside a number of Indian, Italian and Anglo-American favourites. One member of our group survived almost the whole trip on chicken and cashew nuts, and I’ll admit to a couple of pizzas!

To Sum Up

Lovely country, lovely people, great photos, but keep cleaning your hands and stick to the Chinese food (and beer)!

I have to confess, this post is a conflation of two fairly separate topics, and I struggled to find a common theme, but I think I’ve just about pulled it off. Apologies if you disagree.

I’m just working through some photos I took last year, including a trip to Greenwich. When I first started using the latest generation of Panasonic cameras and Capture One software, I publicly questioned whether we still needed HDR techniques. The answer, I have discovered, is still very much "yes", but maybe only in more extreme circumstances than in earlier years. The dynamic range between the day-lit buildings outside the Painted Hall, the splashes of direct sunlight inside, and the dark shadows away from that direct lighting was considerable, and no single image could cover them. To process this I took a series of images covering a 4 stop base range, and then applied Capture One’s highlight and shadow correction to them, squeezing probably another two stops in each direction, before feeding into Photomatix to merge into one. I’m pleased with the result, and happy that it justifies keeping those tools in my software "kit".

This post is also a bit of a test of another returning technical capability. I very much mourned the passing of Google Currents in 2012. If you don’t remember, this was a beautiful news and feed reader with two key capabilities: offline working, and presenting the headlines of available stories as a mix of text and highlighted images, in the idiom of a paper magazine. However, Google killed it off in favour of the brain-dead "News-stand" app which has neither of these features. At the time I struggled to find a replacement. Feedly offers roughly equivalent feed management capabilities and equally pretty content presentation, but it doesn’t work offline, which is a key capability for me, as I often catch up on news in low-connectivity environments. The available independent off-line readers were not a great bunch, but I settled on Press, which handled content caching very well but was never very inspiring in terms of the presentation of content, or its reading environment. For reasons I haven’t ascertained, it recently stopped displaying the headline images from my own feed, which is rather annoying.

I have occasionally tried to find a more complete replacement for Currents, and last night, 5 years on, I may finally have found one. It’s called Paperboy, and it may do the trick. Like Press, it runs on top of Feedly to allow common feed management across multiple apps, and it looks like it has similar offline capabilities, but the display and reading environment is much more like the lamented Currents. However, I need to check how it handles my own feed, and that means making sure I have a new post. So that’s the other purpose of this item.

I’ll let you know how it works.

The blog has been looking a bit light on pictures recently. Meanwhile I’m beavering away trying to finish tidying up the Bhutan pics before I’m off to Burma in February. This morning I discovered a series of four similar close-ups on supporting "gargoyles" (I suspect that’s not quite the right term in the Bhutanese context, but close enough) which I never originally envisaged as a multi-shot combination, but which I think actually work quite well as a "quadtych" (which is exactly the right term, apparently).

Last night was crisp, clear, cold and very still – theoretically ideal conditions for photographing the lights at Albert Dock with reflections in the water. I couldn’t get out any earlier, but did manage to take my Sony RX100 with me on the way to a dinner meeting.

Unfortunately I was well past "blue hour" so there was no light whatsoever in the sky or its reflection. This presented a bit of a problem, in that it’s a real challenge to a camera’s dynamic range, and the tendency is to over-expose the highlights (lights). The RX100 also insisted in the longer views in defaulting to ISO 6400 (because of the low overall light levels), and in the cold I didn’t have the patience to fix this properly.

The result is that the best shots were those with a reasonable level of foreground light, like the one above. The image quality is excellent, as is the control of the highlights, especially considering it was taken on a small sensor camera in what would be low light by most standards. However I did have success with a couple of longer shots, typically where there was an illuminated building to lift the overall luminosity. The one below is a decent example.

The moral of the tale – try and get out a bit earlier, and set the auto-ISO limit a bit lower!

Apologies if it’s been a bit quiet here recently, but I’ve been submerged under a tidal wave of new (to me) technologies, and it hasn’t left much space in this bear’s brain for blogging. In the last month or so I’ve had to get my head around OpenLDAP, C#, Java development (OK, I’ve done that before, but not for about 8 years), microservices, Java Server Faces, Primefaces, and that’s just for one client. The other’s been a bit quiet, but even there I’ve had to outline and prove the concept of how to interface with an external expert systems framework.

However, that hasn’t stopped me “investing” in a few new toys. After the Cornwall trip I decided that with my changing eyesight I needed an infrared camera with an electronic viewfinder, and commissioned the guy in the USA who supplied the Panasonic GF3 to source and convert a GX7. Setting aside a nearly two-week delay through customs, mainly due to ParcelForce insisting on sending the charge note by second-class post (grr…), this turned up very promptly and works beautifully. It does appear to be a bit more fussy than the GF3 regarding whether autofocus will work in low-contrast scenes, but as I’m not likely to be using it to capture fast-moving action that’s not a major issue.

More recently, I’ve also plumped for a 360 degree camera, the Ricoh Theta S. This is a fun little gadget about the size of a small chocolate bar, with a lens on each side, and takes a 360 degree panorama in a single click of the button. It will do both video and stills, but the latter is probably more immediately interesting from my viewpoint.

There are some interesting dynamics to using this device. Firstly, it’s a return to much more of a “click and wait” process, on a shorter timescale than but otherwise not dissimilar to film photography. You can use it tethered to a phone or tablet, but a much more natural way to use it is to look for an interesting scene, hold it above your head and click, then look later at what you captured. This requires a discipline of “pre-visualisation” as Ansel Adams called it, but with the variation that you can’t just focus on what’s in front of you, but also need to be aware of what’s behind, above and below as well. A line of subjects on the horizon won’t produce a very good 360 panorama if you have an ugly or boring sky, ground or scene behind you. My usual policy of “getting high” may work fairly well, although that will produce images with much of the interest below the horizon line.

On the other hand, you do get a fascinating opportunity for what I call “post exploration”. Having downloaded the images, you can explore round them, looking at details which were invisible to you at the point of clicking, and trying to find a perspective which makes an interesting shareable static image. I’m becoming quite fascinated by the “small world” perspectives like the above, but there’s a lot of scope to go back to a favourite image and explore it again.

This process does also mean that I’ve had to join the selfie culture. At best, there are going to be a lot of shots of my thumb and the top of my bald head. However there’s a temptation to hold the camera lower and include yours truly in shot, so you have been warned

Editing is a bit tricky, as so far I haven’t found very good tools for the PC. There are reasonable tools for the tablet, which provides a fast and flexible way to view and explore the image, but the two-way export process if you want to return a cropped image (like the one above) to the PC is a bit fiddly. My search continues.

I went for the Ricoh Theta S, a slightly more expensive option, as reviews promised better image quality. It’s not bad, but like most small-sensor point and shoots there’s not much dynamic range, and so far I’m getting a lot of shots with blown highlights and muddy shadows. If there was ever a device which would benefit from in-camera HDR then this is it. There may also be some settings to explore, but given the very simple user interface I don’t hold out much hope in that direction. If I really get into this I’ll just have to find a grand for a Panono…

If you’re viewing this on a phone or tablet, have a go at exploring round the following by sliding and twisting (I haven’t worked out how to enable pinch to zoom, but I’m working on it.) Please let me know what you think.

I’m aware that I’m a slightly lazy photographer. I’m not a great one for pre-dawn starts or rushing out the minute the weather changes, and I do tend to walk around with a single zoom lens on my camera making the scene fit the lens rather than rushing to change it every shot. The other thing which can happen is I get "stuck" seeing lots of shots with a similar dynamic, rather than looking for variations.

On our recent trip to Cornwall, I kept on seeing potential panoramas, and made lots of them. A few, like this one, I’m quite pleased with, although others were middling. I took almost no 3D shots. A week later I was in Winkworth Arboretum, and I could only see potential 3D shots, almost nothing else.

This may not be a problem. There are plenty of people who focus their photography on a single subject and style, and try to become the real experts in that, like that German couple (Bernd and Hilla Becher) who just took low-contrast photos of water towers. However I do try to be more diverse, but don’t always succeed. I’m not sure what the cure is, or even whether a cure is strictly necessary. If I’m working on a more formal basis a shot list can help, but I think mainly I just need to spend more time shooting and training my eye to see the shots. Here goes…

Apologies if there hasn’t been much activity on the blog lately. I’m deep into the invention of the expert system I wrote about previously, and that’s filling the relatively small brain of this bear, and not leaving much space for other creative activities. However, I am gently working on a couple of longer articles I hope to share with you soon.

Meanwhile, I am working here and there to catch up on the photographic backlog. Frances and I had a couple of days in Prague about a month ago, and predictably I took a fair few photographs. What was interesting was the dynamic of the type of shots: I did relatively little close-up or 3D photography, but the opportunity to generate big panoramas positively abounds, especially if, as I did, you get up to the top of several of the towers open to the public. I’ve recently switched my panoramic development to Kolor’s Autopano Giga, which coupled with Capture One makes the whole process very quick and painless, effortlessly adjusting and stitching even images taken with a moving camera (moving from the waist, rather than rotating the camera around its optical centre as per correct technique), and those requiring substantial perspective correction.

The attached was taken from a point where the main entrance of the opera house filled the frame, and the two sides stretched away from me down two streets orthogonal to each other. It was also taken late at night, hand-held by available light but the Panasonic GX8 has made a decent job of managing highlights even if the sky does fall away to black. I think it works.

Mike Johnston (no relation) over at The Online Photographer has recently run a number of articles discussing the extent to which the photographer adjusts the “look” of a photograph (see What Should a Photo Look Like?) His primary examples were a set from a recent New York Times online photo essay, Cuba on the Edge of Change.

While it’s a fine article, the photos, with one slight exception showing a bride on the way to her wedding, all portray a dark, crumbling, slightly grim Cuba. The following is a good example:

Image from New York Times, photographer not identified

There’s nothing wrong with this photo. Some might say it’s a very good image. However it has been deliberately selected, as have all the others in the article, to show and reinforce the image of a struggling, poor, backward Cuba which is the common American image of the country. The low-key lighting is part of this “story”, and the look of the photos has been adjusted to enhance that.

I went to Cuba in 2010. Yes, I saw decay, old buildings which had not been well repaired, and I certainly saw poverty. I did see a few, not many, people surviving by begging. But that’s not my enduring memory of the country, and doesn’t fit the best of my images. I saw a country full of happy, reasonably healthy and well fed people who were managing to stay cheerful in a difficult economic situation. My pictures are full of smiles, kids running around, and, yes, lots of bright colours and a high key look. That reflected the Cuba I wanted to portray.

The picture at the top more accurately portrays the Cuba I saw than the NYT one, but I’m a positive sort of chap, and I was on a very enjoyable holiday. I don’t know whether the NYT journalist and photographer (or photographers, it’s not clear) had had a worse experience, or were just trying to illustrate a narrative that was already in their minds, but I’m willing to bet the latter.

So to my mind the question is not “what sort of look do you want in your photos”? Your photos will reflect a composite of the subject, true, but also the photographer’s own outlook. Inevitably the photographs will be both taken and prepared coloured with the effects of that outlook just as much as, maybe even more than, the original beams of light.

Some things don’t scale. You start off doing something, but before you know it it’s outgrown its usefulness and needs to change. So it is with website design…

I started off with lists in a couple of places on this site of blogs or albums related to trips I’ve done. However as the list has grown they were getting a bit unwieldy  and out of step with one another. I have therefore practiced what I preach, and "re-factored" them to a new "index" page, at www.andrewj.com/travel

Take a look, and let me know what you think.

As part of a general tidy-up, I’ve updated my camera history page, with a new photo of the "fleet". It may amuse you, especially as the count has crept back up again! "Photography" is a combination of many separate hobbies, and I’m definitely engaged in the "buying and selling cameras" sub-division.

Coming up with a reliable backup policy is a challenge as data volumes grow. My approach is as follows. On a weekly basis I do a full backup of the system disk of the more "volatile" PCs in our collection, plus a differential backup of the other disks. The best tool for full backups appears to be Acronis, but it has a brain-dead approach to partial backups, which cannot always be restored if you don’t have every file in the chain, and it’s just not reliable enough. I therefore also continue to use the venerable Windows ntbackup, even under Windows 10, as I still haven’t found a better option which supports a true "differential" model.

Every three or four months I then do a full backup of every disk in every PC, and re-set the baseline for the differential backups. That’s due for this weekend, and as a result I’m trying to finish processing images from some previous trips, so they will be fully backed up in their complete form. I have about 100 images from Santorini to process today, and then I get to a very neat breakpoint. I’m not sure whether such a deadline really helps, but at least it drives me to keep my photography backlog under control.

The picture above is mainly just to provide a bit of colourful cheer on a damp and windy February morning. Enjoy it!

As you know, I enjoy looking for patterns and coincidences. One potential source is the various ways I display my photo portfolios, and I occasionally spot the screensavers on two devices, for example, showing related images. This is interesting, but essentially fleeting – a moment to be enjoyed before the randomisers roll on.

However, last night I spotted one which I not only could, but thought I should share. On one page of my Android tablet I display two randomly selected images, and when I flicked through it I spotted this combination. The top image is from Antelope Canyon in Arizona, the bottom is a shepherdess in Morocco. Not only are the colour palettes almost identical, but in some ways the woman’s body position echoes the curves of the rock. Intriguing.

This really shouldn’t difficult. The image above is from the entrance to the Rinpung Dzong, in Paro. It’s a series of pictures of Buddhist deities which have been painted on bits of cloth, glued to the wall, and joined at the seams. Yes, it’s a stitched panorama. So why was it so difficult to make a photographic stitched panorama of it?

I set the camera to appropriate manual settings (to make sure that exposure was constant), faced each panel in turn, and when no-one was in shot took a picture. I then developed the JPEGs with exactly the same settings in Capture One. There was good overlap between the images, and as by definition it’s a series of images with a visible seam it ought to be straightforward to stitch images back together.

There seem to be two main challenges. Firstly as far as I can see all automatic stitching software assumes that the camera is roughly static, whereas I was shooting in a long thin tunnel, and moved the camera to face each subject. This is a well-established shooting technique, but seems to have minimal software support. Second, despite the manual exposure the resultant images vary significantly in brightness, and it looks like the camera was doing some measure of adjustment for the tricky lighting.

In the end I "went manual", importing the pictures as four layers in PhotoShop Elements, hand tweaking their position and geometry using free transforms, and then using the technique of painting the layer masks to choose exactly which elements of each image are visible in the final shot. The result isn’t perfect, but probably "good enough". In the meantime I’ve bitten the bullet and invested in some new stitching software which is supposed to cater for "moving camera" combinations, and we’ll see if it can make a better attempt.

Bhutan isn’t especially demanding on equipment. If your style of photography is similar to mine you will need a wide range of focal lengths, from ultra-wide (for when there’s limited space in front of a large building) to long telephoto (for inspecting details of the landscape). Outside light is usually very powerful, but inside you will rapidly need some combination of high ISO, fast lenses and a tripod. If anything the greatest challenge is the relatively harsh, direct lighting during the day (when the temples and Dzongs are open), and you will need to watch for flare and the effects of polarisation.

Dust can be a bit of a challenge, especially on or near the roads. It does tend to get everywhere, even inside filter pouches for example, but a filter will protect your lens, and other kit will just need a careful dust down. My excellent Hoya high-transmission 58mm polarising filter picked up a small scratch, but that’s a small price for providing both its optical services and protecting the lenses.

Shot Counts

The scores are in, and the shot counts are as follows:

• Panasonic GX8: Almost exactly 3,000 shots. Quite a lot of those are for "multi shot" images, including 3D for the first time this year
• Panasonic GX7: About 100 shots, plus video of "culture night"
• Sony RX100 mk IV: About 364 stills, plus quite a few short video clips

Overall the totals are very similar to Morocco, albeit with a different camera mix. It looks like I’ll have about the normal 50% discard count, and end up with around 100-200 images which I want to show people, which is fine.

Panasonic Cameras

The Panasonic cameras have worked well. The GX8 is fast and produces great image quality. Its viewfinder is large and bright (although I have to acknowledge that the Fuji XT1 is even nicer), but does seem to be more sensitive to white balance changes than previous models. This means that you may see a bit of a red or brown cast on the live image in some cases, which doesn’t affect the captured image but can be slightly off-putting. It wouldn’t surprise me if this attracts a firmware change at some point.

Handling of the GX8 is good, but the viewfinder and controls are just different enough from the GX7 that you can’t just leave a different lens on the older body and switch quickly back and forth between them.

Even though it packs a much bigger battery than the GX7 battery life is still only moderate. I never used more than 3 per day, but that could have increased if we had done significant action shooting, so my purchase of a total of 4 was probably justified.

Bags

The National Geographic Africa Medium Backpack is an excellent device for carrying equipment between locations. It meets the most miserly airline carry-on restrictions, but easily swallowed my 15“ laptop, tablet, 4 Panasonic bodies, 8 lenses including the 100-300mm, a small flash and various odds and ends.

Unfortunately it’s pretty bloody useless as a working bag on location. The only way to extract kit is to take it off completely and lay it flat on the ground, getting it and then you filthy, and the whole process is very fiddly. Luckily I had allowed for this and fitted one of my Lowepro Nova shoulder bags (the 180 AW) into my hold luggage. This has room for the main body and lenses, the infrared GF3 and bits & pieces with room over for a small water bottle.

Sony RX100 Mk IV

First impressions of the Sony RX100 mark IV are excellent. It is fast, with almost DSLR-like autofocus, and the image quality is superb – more or less a match for my Panasonic cameras at moderate ISOs. My camera has had a "baptism of fire" being used mainly to try and get grab shots from a moving bus, so maybe not exactly a fair test, but has delivered decent results albeit with some misses. Although the EVF is small, and does seem to need quite regular re-adjustment against my glasses, it is clear and perfectly usable in a way which wasn’t true of the Panasonic GM5 I tried.

The handling is a bit fiddly, but I wouldn’t subscribe to some of the complaints I have read in internet interviews. However it is far to easy to accidentally change shooting mode, and the other problem I have had is accidentally pressing the power button instead of the shutter, and switching the camera off at just the wrong moment. If you have the camera at arms length in a tricky shooting position, the feel of the two controls is just not different enough.

Battery life is limited, although no worse than other cameras with a similar sized battery (like the Canon S120). Sony’s insistence on in-camera charging is annoying, and I’ve now purchased a third party charger and spare batteries from Germany.

I tried carrying my camera just in my trouser pocket, where it fits well. However it rapidly picked up a number of small scratches on the rear screen. Nothing fundamental, but a real annoyance on a brand new, expensive little camera. This seems to be a vulnerability of Sony cameras, with one of the other members of the group suffering a similar problem with his A7. I’m hoping that I can fit a screen protector to restore the original appearance, and am now carrying the camera in a small cloth pouch which came with a Metz flashgun.

Other Notes

One other annoyance is that I changed my phone earlier this year from a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 to a Note 3. The older Notes had very good GPS, getting accurate fixes quickly in most conditions. The Note 3 has a useless GPS, taking time to get a good fix even at the top of a mountain under cloudless skies! As a result my GPS track has a couple of annoying gaps in it, and I’ve had to do a lot of manual work and fix it, which has never been necessary on previous trips.

At the same time, my Note 10.1" tablet seems to have suddenly lost most of its battery capacity, and is only good for about 4-5 hours, not long enough for some of the flights on this trip. I am seriously thinking of a shift in loyalties.

Overall a few annoyances, but I managed to travel quite light, and unlike some trips there were no major problems. That’s a refreshing change.

Bhutan: What Worked and What Didn’t

Sorry it’s been quiet for a couple of weeks. Inevitably there’s catching up to do on the return from a trip, plus I’ve had a couple of practical challenges before I could start properly sorting out the photos from the trip. However things are working OK now.

As always at the end of these trips, I’ve prepared a couple of posts with general observations on the trip, in the hope that it may be of assistance to someone planning a similar visit. To keep things manageable, this post focuses on the trip as a whole, and the following post focuses on photography and equipment matters. There will be a final post reflecting on my observations of Bhutan, the country and people.

On a positive note, the people everywhere were friendly, welcoming and most were happy to pose for the camera, without expectation of more than a "thank you". In reality most away from direct tourist contact have limited English, although that will change, but they all understand basic pleasantries well enough.

Bhutan is not an expensive location once you’re there and the $250 per day has been paid to the tour operator. My additional costs (mainly tips, T-shirts and beer) probably came to not much more than £200. Western money goes a long way in a country with a 1p note! There are plenty of stalls and shops selling handicrafts, but they understand the value of a "no thank you", and there are no street hawkers or other more annoying channels. There’s no need to haggle, and transactions are very straightforward with no nasty catches, but you do need to be aware of prices which can vary substantially between locations (beer varying between about £1 and £3, for example).

Travel in Bhutan is slow. 20kph is a very good speed in a bus, 15kph is a more sensible basis for estimating. One suspects that the current over-ambitious programme of simultaneously trying to widen almost all the roads is doomed to failure, or at least to very late delivery, so things will probably get worse before they improve.

In hindsight, the trip to Bumthang cost us two long days of uncomfortable travel for not much benefit, and I think most participants on our trip will be advising Light and Land to omit if from future itineraries. If your itinerary includes statements like "a full day of travel", question whether that is the best use of time and endurance, or whether further exploration of the nearer areas will be of more benefit.

Be wary of overcrowding on the transport. The standard tour buses are not terribly comfortable, and have a lower real capacity in practice than you might expect. They have a typical nominal seating capacity of 16-17 plus the driver and guide, but 4 seats are over the wheel arches with zero legroom, the back seat bounces so much that it suits only the hardiest, and there’s zero internal baggage space (suitcases are typically transported between hotels in an independent vehicle). Assume a maximum of 12 usable seats for longer journeys, in addition to the driver and guide.

Food is essentially Indo-Chinese buffets, mainly vegetarian with some chicken, although in the east you might also get a pork or beef dish. (I wrote most of this post at Doha airport, and I have never seen so many people queueing for a hamburger, in a Muslim country!… :))

The primary calorie source is uniformly boiled rice, although there is usually a secondary form such as potatoes, pasta or bread. Those catering more directly for tourists try and keep the main dishes fairly bland, with the chilli and garlic in separate dishes, but you can be caught out. One of the nastiest surprises of the trip for me was something called "cauliflower cheese", but about the strength and flavour of industrial defoliant!

The information I received about the weather was, essentially, lies. We had wonderful weather, dipping to around freezing most nights but between high teens and high twenties once the sun came up every day. We felt a couple of drops of rain once, and the mornings in Punakha started with a bit of mist, but otherwise we had zero precipitation. I had to carry a long-sleeved top or jacket for religious observation at the temples and Dzongs, but otherwise I could have operated entirely in T-shirts on all but two days. The waterproof, weatherproof tops, trousers, gloves etc. were completely unused.

Were we unusually lucky? It’s difficult to say, as this was the first time in Bhutan for all westerners in our party. However the fact that every other rooftop is covered with drying chillies, and the winter firewood is stacked in the open suggests that the Bhutanese are not expecting storms either.

This was my second trip (and the first for seven years) with Phil Malpas and Clive Minnitt of Light and Land. They continue to be great tour leaders: sensitive to the needs of their clients, well organised, and great fun to be with. As usual Light and Land partnered with a local tour provider (essential in Bhutan). Etho Metho provided a very good, supportive and knowledgeable guide in Yeshi, and I continue to be amazed by the accuracy and endurance of Chorten’s driving. Overall, a highly effective team.

So as a trip it worked well. Next: technology!

You’d think that with tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment, umpteen years of experience and an undying dedication to their art, 12 other photographers could take a nice picture of me. However, this was the handicraft of a passing Australian hiker who wasn’t even sure which button to press on my camera. Oh well…

I’ve discovered that I’m tending to go to extremes with my lenses on this trip. The shot in the previous post used the 12-35mm at 12mm. This shot was taken down into the Punakha valley from above, using the 100-300mm at 300mm. It’s not bad when consumer camera technology allows you to count blades of grass at about a mile!

Day 16

A much better night’s sleep. Washingtonians obviously follow the "Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting" rule, and cause less trouble on other nights. I’ve also developed a hybrid bath towel and pillow scheme which fares rather better in the head supporting department. Frances resorts to cotton wool in the ears.

Breakfast is taken at a rather unique institution across the road from our hotel, which appears to be a 24 hour political bookshop and cafe. I suppose if such is going to exist anywhere in the world, an area which houses many young people associated with the US administration is a good bet, but we certainly haven’t seen one before.

First stop after breakfast is the obligatory shot of the White House. Today there is almost no visible security activity and we are among a total of about 6 people at the fence. Much easier.

The bulk of the day is spent exploring the National Space and Flight Museum. It’s great seeing such iconic vehicles as the actual Apollo 11 command module, and we get the weight off our feet with a couple of excellent Imax films about astronomy.

We then pop over the road to the Museum of the Native American. This is rather less inspiring, reminding us of some rather less impressive American behaviour, but still interesting.

We finish up back at the bookshop. Oh well…

Day 17

Last day. Sniff…

First order of business is a tour of The Pentagon. This is mainly walking around a very large office building sandwiched between two very smartly dressed military men. In our case the lead is a young sailor who swears he’s over 6ft tall but we’re not convinced. However he certainly has the trick of walking backwards for an hour spouting a string of interesting nuggets and funny stories about the American military and their history.

For the afternoon we go to the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the news media. This substantial establishment deals with all aspects of the news media, including the history, ethics, risks and challenges of getting news to the people over the years. Historic papers go back to the 1500s. Static displays include items such as the antenna from the top of one of the Twin Towers, then used by all the New York media. More interactive displays include a fascinating quiz on how to handle the most challenging ethical publishing dilemmas. I even manage to buy a singlet with the slogan "Exercisin’ my right to bare arms"! Although squeezed into a few hours at the end, this is in some ways one of the highlights of our visit to Washington.

Our journey back takes in the third Washington airport at Baltimore, and uses train, plane, automobile and bus. However everything goes smoothly, and we’re home ahead of schedule.

What Worked And What Didn’t

This was my first trip with just the Panasonic cameras, and they appear to be an excellent solution. The GH4 combined with the two f/2.8 zooms is a first class kit which handles pretty well, although I’m still getting used to some of the button positioning, and I don’t have to worry about the odd bump or drop of rain. However it matches 2.5kg of Canon or Nikon kit while weighing less than a 550D and single lens. Around town I switch to the GX7 and the power zooms which lose little in capability and are so light I have to occasionally check they are still there.

The infrared-converted Panasonic GF3 seems to have produced some very interesting results from the rising clouds and running water of the Smoky Mountains, and the main cameras continue to surprise and delight in unexpected ways. It looks like the GH4 is designed to hunt for focus through each "plane" of a scene in turn, so if you just hold the camera steady and keep refocusing you should be able to capture all the shots required for focus blending. We’ll see how well this has worked in practice.

I’ve just finished processing my shots from Morocco, and have uploaded the portfolio to my album. In addition, there are several new panoramas you should notice at the top of my web pages. Take a look at www.andrewj.com/album/Morocco

I was asked the other day what I think of the Panasonic GX8. As I predicted here, it’s absolutely the right size: sit it on the desk next to the GX7 in its half-leather case, which is how I always use it, and they are exactly the same size to within a mm or two. It just feels right in my hands.

Otherwise it feels very much like a cross between the GX7’s neat rangefinder ergonomics and the GH4’s speed and weather protection, pretty much just as requested. There are a couple of minor annoyances:

• I’m peeved that the battery is a different model to the GX7 (and the various other Panasonic cameras I own). Apparently shared with the G7 in the current line-up, it looks suspiciously like the one from my old GH2. So bang goes the aspiration of travelling with just one battery type and charger… That said, it does seem to offer much better life, so there are pros and cons.
• Moving the "rear dial" from the edge of the top panel (like the GH models) to the top of the panel will take a little getting used to, but I suspect that will feel second nature fairly quickly.
• Panasonic have gone down the GH4 route of putting the focus mode on a physical switch. I broadly understand why, as if this is set wrong it can easily trip you up in a very confusing way, but the counterpoint is that I can no longer set focus mode associated with custom settings, but will have to manually adjust separately. On balance, I prefer a button/menu.
• The loss of the flash is a minor annoyance, but realistically I almost never use one any longer as I prefer to just "take pictures in the dark" using the remarkable high ISO capability of the new cameras. If previous patterns are borne out, I expect ISO 6400 to be fully usable.

It’s too early to judge image quality, as there’s no Capture One support yet, but the in-camera JPGs are pretty impressive.

Watch this space.

Another low-contrast shot from the Marrakech Medina, which didn’t look promising out of the camera, but I think works well after processing. This was at a much shorter range than the "bread" shot of last week’s post, but the cloud of dust and sparks from the active grinding wheel had much the same effect. I turned Capture One’s clarity slider up almost to maximum to try and cut through the haze a bit, with an almost "painterly" result. I think it works…

I have been using multiple shot techniques almost as long as I have been interested in photography. My earliest stitched panoramas were in the days when you got a spare set of prints and took out the razor blade and sellotape. I also have a rather nice picture of Frances using the "soft focus" double exposure setting of the Canon AE1.

However things really got going when I moved to digital. For several years I have done stitched panoramas and HDR. I have also experimented with focus blending to generate images with infinite depth of field, although I haven’t yet got my technique quite right to get the best results. All of these are well-established, well-supported techniques with good support in terms of both documentation and software.

The digital community moves on, and new techniques and capabilities are appearing. The new Olympus OMD cameras support an in-camera multi-shot technique to build ultra-high definition files. Another new technique which has caught my eye is the idea of "median blending": take a large number of pictures of a scene with annoying moving objects, such as other tourists and then blend them together to find the median colour at each point. As long as you have enough pictures in the stack that there are several "clear" at each point, all the annoying moving objects^TM magically disappear. The only problems with this are that it really can’t be done hand-held unless you are very steady, and the only really effective software support is in the full version of PhotoShop, which I’m loathe to invest in. Other software options are on the way, and I can then see this becoming a regular part of the toolkit.

In the meantime, I’ll continue occasional use of the original single-shot version of this process. Take a long enough exposure of a scene with annoying moving objects^TM and most of the annoying moving objects^TM disappear of their own accord, or become faint ghosts at worst.

In the last week, I’ve identified another multishot technique which may get a significant workout. We’re both fans of 3D films. In Paris, we saw an exhibition of Jacques Lartigues’ photography, which included some of his stereographic images. What the gallery had done is to scan these, and convert the slideshow to a short 3D film which could be viewed with standard cinema 3D glasses, and it got me thinking…

I now own a 50", 4K, 3D display. It’s called my television. We had already concluded that slideshows on the TV are the best way to show my photographs to Frances and visitors. The "lights on" moment was to question whether I could generate my own 3D images and display those in the same way. It turns out that this is perfectly possible, but surprisingly poorly documented on the interweb.

Option 1 – The Panasonic 3D Lens

This is easy. Micro four-thirds cameras can use a special lens from Panasonic. It’s not very expensive, and not much bigger than a lens cap. Put it on, and the camera goes into 3D mode, and creates special image files in the .MPO format. Put these on a memory stick and view them on the TV, the TV goes into 3D mode, you put on the glasses, and voila!, 3D images.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the implementation’s a bit limited. First the lens is fixed focal length, fixed focus, fixed aperture. The focal length is 68mm-e, on the telephoto side of normal and not a length I’d often use for static subjects. The other significant limitation is that like most in-camera implementations of HDR, panoramas and so on, you just get a "pre-baked" .MPO and .JPG file, with no RAW. You have to get all the image characteristics right first time in camera, and there are some restrictions on what you can do in any case. Worse, the output is an odd 1024×1824 resolution, which isn’t even enough to fill a full HD display, let alone 4K.

It’s a useful trick to have, especially for moving subjects, and as the lens is tiny I’ll carry it around, but the conclusion is "not good enough".

Option 2 – Blending Two Images

There’s an obvious alternative, at least in principle. Take a shot, move the camera right about 6cm, and take another of the same scene. Then somehow "merge" them into an MPO file, similar to a stitched panorama.

The challenge is that it takes a lot of googling to find some software capable of doing the merge. Eventually I tracked down the brilliant little program StereoPhotoMaker ("little" is right – it’s a single 2MB executable file). It does what it says on the tin – takes a pair of images, aligns them, and saves the result to various 3D formats, including my target .MPO file. Amazingly for such a small program it’s not just limited to that, and includes a number of clever adjustment and file management features, although realistically in a RAW-based workflow you are going to do most of the image adjustment and management externally.

The great thing is that this process isn’t limited in the same way as Option 1. It works with any lens, any settings, and takes the full resolution JPGs produced after anything Capture One can do, so the resulting images are more than capable of driving the 4K TV to its full capability. Like stitched panoramas, if you’re working on a tripod there’s no theoretical reason why you can’t combine it with other multishot techniques, so you could in theory produce a 3D focus blended HDR with annoying moving objects^TM automatically removed, although that would take a bit of discipline and patience to get the right shot list :).

The only real drawback is the one common to most multishot techniques – it really requires a static scene, unless you are going to manage the moving objects via either median blending or very long exposures.

There are a few annoyances to resolve, like why my TV can see the files on a memory stick but not over the network, but I’ll get there…

This is simple, easy and requires no special equipment or technique change. All I need to do is remember to take a second shot of any suitable scene, and this approach could produce some great results.

Option 3 – Two Cameras?

Stereographic imaging has been around for about 150 years. For most of that time photographers used a simple technique which works with any subject, static or not, and doesn’t rely on clever digital manipulation. Stick two cameras side by side, and take two shots simultaneously.

Although traditionally this is done with two identical cheap cameras, I’m not convinced that’s essential. The cameras do need to use the same sensor, and the same lens, but as I have two copies of the excellent, featherweight Panasonic 12-42mm power zoom and a growing collection of Panasonic bodies that shouldn’t be a challenge. Knocking up a suitable bracket should also be fairly straightforward. In my loft I have a device which might provide a very useful basis for this – a "pistol grip" camera mount which includes a trigger for the remote release – and it might be appropriate to use standard tripod quick-release plates to speed assembly and disassembly. With the Panasonic remote release system based on standard 2.5mm jack plugs the wiring should also be fairly straightforward.

The challenge is to make sure that both cameras and both lenses are set identically. There’s obviously a simple manual process for this, but it’s potentially a bit of a faff. However I’m wondering if the Panasonics’ ability to be controlled over Wifi from a phone is the answer – develop a bit of software which reads the settings from the "master" camera and applies them to the "slave". That’s maybe a bit more work, but worth investigating.

I’m torn as to whether this is worth the effort, and the extra weight to carry, or not. I have a bit of a history of spending time and effort to do something complicated, and then not using it very much. Watch this space…

On paper, the Panasonic GM5 should be an ideal "carry around" camera for me. The same sensor and processor as the excellent GX7 and GH4 in a neat pocket-sized packaged. A proper electronic viewfinder. Access to all the Micro Four Thirds lenses. Panasonic’s engineers have even been cunning beyond the normal behaviour of camera manufacturers and although it has a different battery to its larger brethren, it uses exactly the same charger. I’d managed to get a couple of minutes "hands on" in a shop and was reasonably impressed.

Last week, driven to Amazon by their remarkably "rubbish but effective" Prime Day pseudo-sale, I bit the bullet and ordered one, in a cheerful red. The general capability and image quality, as evidenced above, is all I expected. However, after a few days in my hands it’s going to go back. The reason – size. Like all disappointing love stories, it’s complicated…

It’s Too Large…

Although the GM5 body is tiny, not much larger than a Canon Powershot S series, put a lens, any lens, on the front, and it becomes too large to put in your trouser pocket, and too large to comfortably travel in my computer bag the whole time. In addition, I really need two lenses to cover a decent zoom range. The Panasonic 14-42mm and 45-175mm power zooms are both tiny, but together they make it into a package which demands a camera bag, in reality no different to using a next size up body.

… But It’s Too Small

In use, the camera is remarkably fiddly. I could live with the small buttons, but their legends and markings have also been scaled down, to a point which is almost invisible to me when I’m wearing my glasses. Also the smaller body puts my hands much closer to the lens and viewfinder in use, and I find that with the camera to my eye my hands are fouling my glasses.

Even wearing the smallest lens I own (the 14-42 PZ), there’s a bad case of "lens too big for the camera", and it won’t even sit flat on the desk. More of an issue, there’s no easy way to carry it in the hand, except gripping right round the body or lens, which makes it difficult to raise to the eye for a quick shot without having to use both hands.

For me, however, the killer is the tiny EVF. Impressive in the shop, in real use out and about, wearing my glasses, it’s almost unusable. The effective view size is tiny, and despite several attempts at adjustment I couldn’t get the view sharp with my glasses. You get, at best, a sense of what’s in shot, rather than being able to scan the picture for meaningful details. (Ideally I would have avoided the sextant statue "fouling" the statue of Edward VII on his horse in the above shot, but I just couldn’t see that detail.) If I can’t use the EVF I’d rather have a camera with a size larger rear screen, to give me some chance of being able to use it with glasses on, and in varying ambient light conditions.

So much though I wanted to like this camera, It isn’t for me. Sometimes engineers can shoot for a compromise between two opposing targets and pull off a remarkable double. My delightfully schizophrenic Mercedes Cabrio is a case in point. Sometimes, however, you end up with the worst of both worlds, and that’s what’s happened here.

Just Right?

Ironically, the day I ordered the GM5, Panasonic announced the follow-up model to my much-loved GX7, unsurprisingly named the GX8. The improvements in pixel count, functionality and weather protection are all almost uniformly welcomed, but there’s been some criticism of the fact that the GX8 is a bit bigger than its predecessor, by about 5mm in height and depth, 10mm in width, and 75g in weight.

Now I love my GX7. It’s my favourite camera of the many I’ve owned. But it’s never been out of the house except wearing the bottom half of the "ever ready case" Panasonic supplied with it. This improves its fit to my hand no end. By my estimate, the ERC adds about 5mm to the height and depth, and about 10mm to the width, and weighs somewhere between 25 and 50g. It sounds like the GX8 is spot on!

I wait with baited breath…

I was literally just about to get into bed in my hotel in Liverpool last night, when the air was rent with loud explosions. Fortunately nothing sinister – just fireworks giving a cruise ship a good send-off on her voyage. My hotel room was very well positioned to watch the show, with the fireworks and the ship visible through Liverpool’s "Big Wheel".

I did have my little Canon S120 in my bag, and couldn’t resist trying to capture the scene. I had a minor panic as I ran round the hotel room and rummaged through my bag trying to find something on which to rest the camera – good fireworks photos need exposures of 10s or longer. In the end I think this one was taken with the camera propped up on the TV remote control. Not ideal, but a reasonable success given the circumstances…

I’m finally getting around to processing the remaining shots from my Morocco trip in 2013!

I had parked a number of shots from the Dades Gorge, because we were shooting almost into the setting sun, and they were either hazy, or very low in contrast and the in-camera JPEGs look almost "blown out". However it was right to hold these back until I could exert the full capability of Capture One on the RAW files. Here is one where to get the best effect I’ve really had to deepen the shadows, but I think it works, bringing out not only the shapes of the rocks, but also their shadows on one another.

Let me know what you think.

There’s a frequently made assertion in photography books and blogs that the choice of kit doesn’t really matter, and a good photographer will make great images regardless. I don’t altogether agree. While I think it’s laudable to encourage photographers to focus on their images rather than gear acquisition, I also think this is quite misleading.

For all that’s written, you won’t find many professionals using low-end cameras to do their serious, paying work. There’s a reason why a hairdresser’s scissors cost £200, and I’m perfectly happy with a pair which costs £10. At the same time the hairdresser is probably perfectly happy with a laptop costing £200, while I expect to pay more like £2,000 for my main professional tool as a roving computer consultant, plus I’ll always have a spare of similar spec.

If you’re earning a living from photography (or doing expensive trips/shoots even on an enthusiast basis) there are some of the same considerations. One dimension is simply the durability of the more substantially-built models – you need a device which will just go on shooting after, to take my example, being bashed on a rock, in a bog, in the middle of nowhere, in Iceland. In some cases it’s about capability. OK, if you’re Jaques Lartigue you can get decent sports photographs with a view camera, but if you’re a mere mortal then you’ll get a substantially higher hit rate with the lightning autofocus and high frame rate of a Canon 7D. I love my little Panasonic GX7, but it doesn’t do action, and it doesn’t do getting wet!

Of course, there’s no guarantee that by spending more money you are getting a better tool for your work. My counter-example is, ironically, the same Canon kit. I’m becoming more and more aware of just how ghastly a lens the Canon 15-85mm is/was. Take a look at the shot above. Even at web resolutions you can see that the reflection of the house’s roof in the pond is sharp, but the roof itself, optically at the same distance and without water in the way, is blurred. The results from my newer Panasonic cameras, even with the inexpensive, diminutive 14-42mm power zoom lens, are just consistently sharper than than those from Canon even with a good, sharp, lens on it. And of course the 15-85mm died dramatically on the Iceland trip even before the incident where I knocked the 7D on a rock.

In a very real way the Canon 7D & 15-85mm combination actively held back my photography. I got into the bad habit of relying on the long zoom range, I got tired of carrying the weight, so didn’t use it as much as I should, and I’m now seeing from straightforward back to back comparisons from my Morocco trip that the image quality was definitely poorer, visible even in web-resolution versions, let alone pixel peeping at 100%. I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s either not possible to build a good zoom lens for APS-C with a good zoom range, or Canon can’t be bothered to do so.

I think, therefore, that the right way to view the camera/photographer equation is as a combination of two components. Both must exceed a certain minimum: a brilliant photographer may struggle with a very poor camera, and a poor photographer will not achieve much with an expensive camera. Beyond that, it’s a sum but where the photographer’s skill probably has a greater weight.

In terms of "what camera should I buy", the first thing to understand is that equipment purchases won’t compensate for your skill deficiencies. A camera purchase is also an engineering compromise. You need to understand your requirements (in particular what subjects and working style you want to follow), and choose kit which best fits that scope. If you really want to work without changing lenses, for example, buy a fixed lens superzoom! A little while ago I found the following wonderful decision tree. It’s designed to some extent for laughs, but there’s also a lot a truth in it. And without any cheating, it says I should go Micro Four Thirds, so it works!

https://www.andrewj.com/blog/2014/what-camera-should-i-buy/

Last Summer I purchased a Panasonic GF3 which had been converted to infrared photography. Like with many gadgets, there’s a period where you play with the funky effects, and I quite like the way you can get a really deep blue sky if you do a "channel swap" on the processed image. However I have now established its milieu, and that’s dramatic black and white shots of either partially cloudy skies, or graphic vegetation.

To help with this, I now have it set up to record RAW+JPG, with the picture style set to monochrome. The in-camera results may be slightly different from where the processed image ends up, but they are a decent guide.

Processing is very simple: you just use the "Color Sensitivity" mode of Capture One’s Black & White tool. This is a classic channel mixer, but one in which the channels have a dramatically different effect to on a full-spectrum original. Red affects sky shadows and midtones. Yellow controls the sky and reflected highlights. Blue controls the tone of foliage with some effect from Cyan. Counter-intuitively the green and magenta mixers have almost no effect whatsoever! I now have a sensible starting point for images like the above set up as a preset, but the sliders will usually need a tweak to get the tonal balance right, and some global levels and curves tweaks may also sometimes be needed.

I’m very pleased with the image quality. The image is lower resolution than some of my others for two practical reasons: the GF3 only has a 12MP sensor, and that an older design, and infrared light simply can’t resolve the same detail as blue with its much shorter wavelengths. In practice, however, neither of these are an issue. I bought the camera after reading an article by Ctein, who complained about "hot spotting" through some Micro Four Thirds lenses. I’ll accept that I’m not as critical as he is, but I’m extremely pleased with the results from the inexpensive Panasonic 14-42mm power zoom lens. There’s slightly more visible vignetting at the widest setting than in a colour picture, but otherwise I can’t see much wrong with this.

Now I just need some more "graphic vegetation"!

Great excitement chez nous last night. The security lights went on and we spotted not one but two hedgehogs snuffling around in the courtyard. Fortunately they stayed round long enough to get a few photos.

The security light provided good illumination, but kept on switching off (as it’s supposed to), so Frances ran around to wave at it and switch it back on. What was very funny was that each time the light came on, the hedgehogs froze mid-snuffle for about 10 seconds, just as portrayed in Over the Hedge, but which we’d never seen before in reality.

I spotted another one later on when I got up for a glass of water, so hopefully these welcome visitors will become a regular feature.

We visit a lot of photography exhibitions. The majority are inspiring or thought-provoking, and well worth the effort of the photographers, the presenters, and the attendees.

Along the way there has been the odd disappointment: sometimes we just don’t connect with the material, on other occasions we have felt that the volume or quality of the work hasn’t justified a high entrance cost. On one occasion an exhibition presented such a biased left-wing viewpoint that I felt desperate for the injection of some balance.

However today we had a new experience – an exhibition based on a good volume of high quality work, at a great location, which failed abysmally due to comprehensive incompetence in curation.

The offending exhibition was Human Rights, Human Wrongs at The Photographers Gallery. The piece was meant to chart the path of human rights since the Universal Declaration in the 1940s, drawing from a large archive of reportage. It failed.

The main problem was the complete absence of any organising principle. With the occasional exception of sequential shots of the same event, there was no attempt to group items by location, subject, date or photographer. It was just a confusing "bunch of stuff". At times the confusion seemed almost wilful – two related, well explained pictures from Vietnam together on a wall, but separated by a wholly unrelated picture from Chad.

The curators provided copies of original notes on some of the images, but these were presented in tiny type well below the average eye line, underneath the photos. To ensure there was no chance of even this being readable the images had thick frames spotlit from above, so half of each caption was adequately lit, and half in deep shadow. In any event there was no attempt to present any context, explanation or information about what happened next – unless the photographer wrote this on the back of the original you were on your own.

The caption typist had clearly lost the will to live with the highly structured but low information content approach, and even managed to mis-spell "Untitled".

Even the choice of content felt random. There were lots of good pictures of American Civil Rights events in the 1960s. Fine. Plenty of pictures of Martin Luther King Jnr, a portrait of JFK and a nice picture of Nixon with Coretta King. Good. But why have a blurry picture of Lee Harvey Oswald but none of Johnson, Bobby Kennedy or Malcolm X?

The supposed light relief afterwards, pictures of horses on the American prairies, didn’t work either, with captions in about 8pt type several feet away from the related shot, and the beautiful animals captured against wilfully ugly backgrounds.

The Photographers Gallery has a great new location, but they don’t seem to know what to do with it. This is an abuse of our human right to a decent exhibition!

Apologies, my first blog post of the New Year really should have wished you all the very best for 2015. Please accept this as a pseudo-first post, with said wishes.

I also just wanted to post this shot from yesterday. A low winter sun, passing clouds and unusually upright pampas grass for January combined to generate this remarkable light pattern. As we were just going out of the door this is a grab shot taken leaning out of the bedroom window, but I think the result worked. I hope it’s an omen for things being “on fire” (in a good way) in 2015.

I’m making use of my new Windows MacBook to catch up with photo processing, including a few shots from our trip to Barbados last year. One of the things I particularly love about the Caribbean are the splashes of colour from the various flora, and I’ve noticed that an increasing proportion of my photos are nice flowers.

This display appealed because it’s all related shades of red, pink and brown. This makes it almost a “monochrome”, even though there’s no black, white or grey in sight!

Barbados has an interesting little tradition that people throw open some of the larger or historically significant private houses to visitors a few days each year. Clifton Hall House had fallen into disrepair, but was recently bought up and renovated by a Massimo Franchi, an international lawyer and sports agent (Scottish, despite the Italian name). He personally made us very welcome, and after our tour of the house we spent a happy hour on the veranda discussing our shared interests, plumbing and DIY with him! Nice bloke, lovely house.

The astute among you will have noticed that I place a random panorama in the masthead of all my web site pages. I’ve just refreshed my album with a number of new images, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

I’ve just got a new toy, a Panasonic GF3 converted for infrared imported from the USA. I went for the 590nm filter which admits a fair bit of the visual spectrum for the popular “goldie” look, and which makes sure that the cameras metering and display work fairly unaffected. The challenge is that to get the best results you have to swap the red and blue channels in processing, and the only software which does that straightforwardly is full PhotoShop, which I don’t and don’t want to use.

However, I realised that I can combine the camera with the Hoya R72 filter, which passes only true infrared light above 720nm wavelengths. This instantly converts the camera to a true infrared system with monochrome output, which Capture One handles perfectly. The above is an example of how this works.

I’m just at the start of learning this fascinating technology. I may find that it’s a gimmick which doesn’t justify carrying around the extra kit (although as the GF3 shares batteries and lenses with my GX7 this is minimal), but it may help to develop my vision in an interesting way. I’ll keep you posted…

A friend asked me a few weeks ago about how I get such depth of colour in my images, and whether it was related to using automatic modes on my cameras. I had to explain about shooting RAW and correcting exposure and colour during development of the final image. That’s most of the answer, but as always it’s not quite as simple as that…
Most of the time I do trust my cameras to do most of the work. Well over 95% of the time I shoot in either aperture priority mode (if the subject is not moving much) or shutter priority (if it is). I also use auto focus almost exclusively. I may move the focus point around a bit, but more often I tend to use the old SLR trick of focusing with the subject centred and the shutter button half pressed, and then recomposing.

I do adjust the camera’s auto exposure if necessary, usually by dialling in some exposure compensation, or adjusting the metering mode if the conditions are tricky (such as a concert), but I only worry if the automatic exposure is at least a stop out, assuming I can correct anything less in RAW development. However I’m finding that the metering of the latest Panasonics is accurate enough and the development latitude sufficient that the requirement to meddle is reducing. That said it’s very important to me to have a quick and easy adjustment Indepedent of the primary exposure controls, and annoying that Canon have inexplicably complicated this on the S120 compared with the S95.

I usually leave the camera to decide the ISO setting and white balance. With the latter it’s easy to correct the rare mistakes in RAW development, and too easy to get it wrong manually.

Very rarely I go manual, typically when I’m planning some sort of multi shot technique such as a stitched panorama and I need to be sure of consistent behaviour across the source images. It’s no longer required for HDR as all my cameras now do accurate, fast auto bracketing, but it can be required for panoramics or focus blending.

So on my Canon 7D and the 40D before it I had custom mode 3 set to “manual everything”, which worked well for panoramas from Italy to Iceland. It was perfectly possible to replicate the same on the Panasonic GX7 and GH4, so I did. Gotcha! Whereas “sunny” white balance is a good default for most outdoor photos on the Canons, for reasons I don’t entirely understand it’s not a good default choice on the Panasonics, and can produce some downright weird results. The above shot from Morocco required a lot of correction from an almost blue starting point, even though it was a bright sunny day.. The only thing I can think of is that the cameras are thrown by the effect of the polarising filter, but that’s not something I’ve seen before.

It looks like the best approach is to set auto white balance, but then apply a fixed manual value when generating the JPEGs to stitch. I may not yet be using “auto everything”, but it’s just come a step closer.

I’m finally getting round to the first pass (!) on my Morocco photos. Work, my app development and the slow release of Capture One support for the Panasonic GX7 have all got in the way.

Here’s one from our second day in the Medina. We spent a lot of time peering down dark alleys, waiting to see if we could catch someone walking through a patch of light. It’s rather like shooting in a slot canyon – the position and the nature of the light changes incredibly quickly, and within about 10 minutes this light had disappeared. However while the light was right our patience was rewarded by the appearance of this nice Moroccan lady.

I continue to be amazed by the image quality of the GX7, and how Capture One handles it. Without adjustment this was almost a two-tone image of blown highlights and black shadows. Just using the “HDR” sliders of Capture One fully recovered almost all the highlight areas, and brought the detail in the shadows up to a level I like. That’s about all that was required.

More as they emerge from the shadows.

My transition from Canon cameras to a lighter micro four thirds system is proceeding rapidly. In the last two weeks I’ve sold off the Canon 550D and Panasonic GH2, which both moved very quickly, my Panasonic flash and my CF cards, as everything is now SD based. Interestingly some Canon lenses are so far proving harder to shift. No-one loves the 15-85mm lens – I guess that like me others have uncovered its weaknesses including weight and uneven focus performance. Fortunately if all else fails the excellent Wex Photographic have offered me a trade in price which will cover a replacement flash for use with the Panasonics.

I will be sad to see the back of the Canon 10-22mm and 70-300mm IS lenses. As I’ve stated many times on this blog the latter was always a firm favourite: optically excellent, fast and accurate to focus and with very effective image stabilisation. Hopefully the second hand market shares my view.

Update: yes it does. My 7 year old 70-300mm sold within 3 hours of listing it! It’s just the 15-85mm which is unloved.

I do feel slightly ambivalent about moving from the Canon system: like the end of any lengthy relationship it’s difficult to be certain, and I’ve been a Canon SLR user for almost 30 years. There’s also nothing wrong with the Canon system per se, it just stopped being what I wanted to use. By pure coincidence on the day I sold the 550D The Online Photographer posted an article essentially reaching the same conclusion, that Canon products are no longer “fun”, and I have to concur. Canon have waited too long to replace their APS-C systems and weighted the originals too heavy.

At least from a high point of 7 cameras in the house I’m down to a slightly more sensible 3.

I have now had a chance to give the Panasonic GH4 a good workout on action photography, and it seems to deliver. It is blazingly fast, especially if you use the electronic shutter, but for best results you need to pay careful attention to shutter speed and auto focus mode. The “follow focus” mode is probably great for dogs and kids, but relatively slow. Continuous focus works well, and is probably good for trying to capture the peak action with a subject moving quickly towards you. However for most moving subjects the trick seems to be using single shot auto focus, tracking the subject and holding the button down. If there’s a lot of transverse movement then electronic shutter move will generate some “rolling shutter” effect, but nothing like the GX7.

Battery life is also impressive. I’ve taken about 1000 frames already, but I think I’m still on the first charge! I was getting through 3 batteries a day with the GX7 in Morocco.

I also love the fact that I have a genuine choice of lenses. The Lumix X G Vario 12-35mm f2.8 is without doubt the best standard zoom I have ever used, and only weighs about 300g, but the tiny 14-42mm power zoom loses little in effectiveness, and is not much heavier than a lens cap… I have now used my sale proceeds to order the X 35-100mm lens so I will also have the same choice in moderate telephoto.

I did toy with the idea of getting another tilt/shift lens, but instead I’ve invested in a copy of Helicon Focus, and I’m going to use focus blending when depth of field adjustments on a standard lens are simply not enough. The example above shows this should work well.

However, enough about kit. I now need to get out and make some images. If the Panasonic kit supports that as well as or better than its Canon predecessors I will be doing well.

After the less than excellent photo on the previous post, here’s one I’m quite pleased with. We did a trip to The British Library and St. Pancras Station on New Year’s Eve. Here’s a fascinating detail from the great statue at the entrance to the station.

Since I got the Panasonic GX7 I’ve been thinking about whether I could switch entirely from the big Canons to smaller cameras. Two things were stopping me: the GX7’s poor performance with action, and the fact that occasionally I need a more rugged camera, and neither of my existing Panasonics has any real sort of environmental protection. However with the announcement of the Panasonic GH4 there was a potential solution to both these challenges on the horizon, and I was gently thinking about getting one later in the year.

That was before last Friday, when out of the blue a close friend asked me “are you selling your Canon 7D”? He’d managed to dunk his in the Winter floods, and fancied buying a second-hand replacement of known provenance to tide him over until either the 7DII has arrived or the new Nikon D8100 has come down in price a bit. Of course, my answer had to be “yes”, especially when I established that Wex Photographic now have the GH4 as a stock item.

So on Sunday I started selling off my Canon kit, and on Monday the GH4 arrived. First impressions?

• Same superb stills quality with static subjects as the GX7. Panasonic say that the two sensors are slightly different, and the RAW files are very slightly larger (by about 0.5% in each dimension) but I’m damned if I understand why as otherwise things seem to be identical.
• It’s a nice size, very slightly larger than the GH2 and GX7, and fits very nicely in my hands.
• It feels like a “professional” camera, capable of taking the odd splash or minor knock without problems. With the 12-35mm lens on it’s officially splashproof and dustproof, although just as with the 7D I’ll probably still put it in a rain cover in very harsh conditions. Also I suspect we won’t be auctioning off 50 year old examples held together with sticky tape, unlike a few Leicas of note…
• It has a great electronic viewfinder, which really is not much different from using an optical one. However I’m not convinced that the colours in in-camera JPEGs completely match the viewfinders, which I thought was supposed to be one of their strengths.
• The ergonomics and haptics are an improvement on the GH2 in some respects, but have ended up as a bit of an odd mix of physical switches, physical buttons and soft buttons or menu choices. Some are an odd compromise – there’s still a physical switch for focus mode, but you have to switch between “single shot” and “follow focus” in the menu system, which is very poor. Overall I much prefer the cleaner model of the GX7, but when I get the programmable elements of the GH4 set up to my satisfaction things may be better.

It’s too early to judge action performance. The frame rate seems to be as high as promised, but I haven’t yet been able to confirm whether the autofocus does the job. I tried shooting some dogs and rabbits last night, but in very low light, which meant even at ISO 6400 I was wide open on my lenses and at too low a shutter speed. The above was probably the best, but certainly won’t be submitted for any competitions. More practice required!

At least I won’t be struggling with software. After the long wait for GX7 Phase One delivered Capture One support on Monday, a few hours after the camera was in my hand. No complaints there…

Watch this space, and eBay if you want a lightly used GH2 or Canon 550D!

I’m sorry things have been quiet on the blogging front recently. I got back from my very restful holiday in Barbados expecting to take some time to find new work. Within two hours, before I could do anything, I had a query out of the blue from an ex-colleague I hadn’t seen for 10 years, and I was back under contract in a couple of days. (OK, technically that qualifies as “some time”, but you know what I mean…) I can’t say too much, but it’s a very exciting web- and service-based initiative in the automotive sector, which is new to me. It’s very interesting, but hard work between learning a new business, sorting out a problem project, and travelling backwards and forwards between the UK and Germany.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed when things settle down, but no sign yet!

Between last weekend’s storms, Frances and I managed to capitalise on the one sunny and dry session to visit Loseley Park. I took the Panasonic GX7 and the Lumix G Vario 12-35mm/F2.8 lens. This is far and away the best “normal” lens I have ever owned. Despite its relatively small size it really is just like a series of high quality prime lenses in a single box, sharp at all lengths and apertures and with vanishingly little aberration, even before processing. If and when I get a Panasonic GH4 the pairing will also provide me with a “rainproof” micro four thirds kit.

Photographing other busy bees at work requires a bit of patience, as they are constantly on the move, and I had my share of blank frames! However when I did get the subject in frame and in the focus zone, the hit rate was fairly high. Even though the 12-35mm is not a dedicated macro lens, you can see individual pollen grains on the bee’s back, which can’t be bad.

Enjoy these, and I hope you are busy enough, but not too busy.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been very impressed with the Panasonic GX7, which is a remarkably capable little camera. It did the bulk of the work on my Morocco trip, and I have seriously been considering whether we have got to the stage yet where I could operate with just a Panasonic system and get rid of the big Canon kit which works well but is so heavy. The main question mark has always been over the Panasonic system’s ability to handle action. Unfortunately I can now confirm that this is not something the GX7 does very well.

As a deliberate experiment I took the Panasonic GX7 and GH2 rather than the Canon 7D and 550D on our latest trip to Barbados. (I did take the Canon S120, which is turning out to be a very capable little camera, but that’s a separate story.) For pictures of buildings and flowers, the GX7 works well, and as already established, in very low light conditions or where a “small” camera has a practical or psychological advantage it betters the large cameras. Then we took it horse racing…

I was prepared for the moderate frame rate of around 5fps, which while slower than the Canon 7D is a reasonable match for most other cameras. The slight lag of the electronic viewfinder was also expected, but is not a major problem and would be mastered with a bit of practice.

Beyond that, however, the GX7 displays two very different failure modes depending on how you operate the shutter.

With the traditional mechanical shutter in use, the cycle is as follows. First the shutter closes, and the camera resets the sensor. Then the shutter opens for the required time, exposing the whole sensor. The shutter closes and the camera reads the sensor, then the shutter opens, and the camera updates the display/EVF, metering and focus. In burst mode as soon as everything is stable the cycle starts again. The trouble is that the autofocus is either insufficiently quick or insufficiently accurate to hold a moving target, and the “miss” rate is very high, exceeding 50% in my tests so far.

The GX7 also offers an electronic shutter mode, in which the mechanical shutter stays open, continuously driving the display, metering and autofocus, and to take a shot the camera resets the sensor, and reads the data after the required exposure time. For some purposes where the subject is essentially static, like an HDR bracket or trying to capture a changing portrait expression, this works very well. However with a moving subject it fails miserably. The problem is that the camera resets, exposes and reads the sensor progressively, starting from the top and working down, and takes over 1/10s to do so. If during this the subject has moved you get an effect I have termed “The Lartigue” as it resembles the “leaning back” look common in action photos from Jaques Lartigue and other early 20th century pioneers of motion photography. Track the subject, which is something Lartigue and his contemporaries could not easily do, and the result is a “Reverse Lartigue” – see example above.

Oh well… I always knew that this would be a stretch, and taking the GX7 to a sporting event was a deliberate experiment with some risk of failure. Also I’m setting the bar very high by comparing with a Canon 7D, which despite being a five year old design is still near the top of the class in this respect. I did get a few decent shots, but the conclusion is that the 7D stays for now, and gets an outing at least when I know the subject is action. What will be very interesting is to repeat the experiment with the new Panasonic GH4. Watch this space…

When I purchased my Panasonic GX7 on the day of release, I did expect there to be a slight delay in getting software support (see here), but I got frustrated when no fewer than three versions of Capture One came and went without it.

However my patience has finally been rewarded with V7.2.1. This not only delivers full support for the GX7, but has also dramatically upgraded the support for my equally new Canon S120. This produces RAW files which at the wide end of the zoom have very dramatic geometric distortion, so strong it was impossible to correct manually, but in the new version the built-in C1 support corrects them perfectly, with neither geometric nor chromatic aberration evident even at pixel peeping levels.

While I’m still slightly peeved about the time it took (a grand total of 6 months!), I’m very impressed with the results.

OK, here’s the black and white version. A couple of interesting challenges here. To get enough contrast I had to take the yellow component in the mix right down to zero, and also go for a much “darker” look overall (as otherwise the white patches of lichen on the trees were overwhelming). What do you think?

Sadly, this isn’t my own quote, but it is very apposite. I decided to break my journey back from Kingston Lacy in Salisbury, and took a quick walk before dinner down from my hotel (apparently the longest continuously operating hostelry in the world!) to the cathedral. I popped the Panasonic GX7 with its new 12-35mm lens over my shoulder, and I’m glad I did. The cathedral is floodlit, although not to excess, and I caught it when there was just a hint of blue left in the rapidly darkening night sky.

In the past a photo like the above could only have been created with a tripod and patience. No more. The GX7 produces fine quality at ISO 3200,and the stabilisation of the lens allows it to be hand-held down to about 1/10. I didn’t even have to exploit the f/2.8 aperture, which would have given me another stop. Essentially we have now reached the point where if I can see something, my newer cameras can photograph it.

Next time, photography through the lens cap!

I had a day off today from work, chasing contracts and Android development, to focus on photography and writing. The core was a workshop with the famous and venerable landscape photographer Charlie Waite, at the even more famous and venerable Beech Avenue near Kingston Lacy.

It was a good group, and we had an excellent day of discussion about photography, how we do it, why we do it, and what we need to improve. Unfortunately as for so many others this Winter the weather let us down, and we managed a grand total of about one hour on location, getting buffeted by strong winds, pelted by rain and battling a combination of ambient temperature and wind chill which together netted out the wrong side of freezing. I ended up using the same gear and clothing as I was using at the top of Kerlingfjotll (“Bitch Mountain”) in Iceland – not what I was expecting from the Dorset Beech Avenue.

I went prepared for intensive activity, with a total of about 48GB storage across two cameras, or enough for well over 1500 shots. I took…  34, including about half a dozen “technical test shots”. Ansel Adams used to complain that 35mm film photography was in danger of leading to an excess of quantity over quality of photography. Had he survived to see digital, while he would undoubtedly have mastered the technology quickly and effectively himself, his concerns about quality vs quantity would have multiplied manifold! At least today I kept the quantity down.

Quality did suffer a bit. I had hoped after Charlie’s pep talk to go out with camera tripod mounted and take a slow, considered approach to photographing the avenue. Instead i took a series of fairly hurried “grap shots” mopping everything down between shots. Inevitably the rain has also reduced contrast and clarity of the trees in the distance.

However I’m not unhappy with this shot. The composition is exactly what I wanted, I like the tonal range (although ironically I’ve actually toned down the saturation!), and clarity is OK, if not perfect. I might try a black and white version as well…

When I bought the Panasonic GX7 on the day of release I realised there might be a short delay before it was fully supported by third party software. A few weeks on and there was support from Adobe and some unexpected sources, but no sign from Phase One. Fortunately the in-camera JPEGs are absolutely excellent and I cheerfully blazed away in Morocco while waiting patiently.

Come December my patience was wearing thinner, with three months’ RAW files ready and others stacking up. I took to checking daily for new Capture One updates, and was finally rewarded on Monday by the release of v7.1.6. That was the first good news.

To my frustration, the release notes stated that the GX7 support was “provisional”, although Phase One had managed to deliver full support for pretty much every other recent new camera. The primary limitation seems to be the lack of any lens correction, even manual, which is a rather substantial issue for a micro four thirds camera. Any shots taken with the wide ends of my zooms will have to wait… That’s the bad news.

</moan>

There is, however, some really good news. The image quality is simply superb, much better than I have been able to achieve with Adobe Camera Raw, and a dramatic improvement on all my other cameras at high ISO. Images are essentially noise-free at ISO 1600, and not much worse at ISO 3200, suggesting I was unnecessarily pessimistic limiting myself to 1600 in Morocco. At ISO 6400 there’s a bit of noise, but essentially correctable. I would probably choose to use a lower sensitivity for something critical, but for general use it’s absolutely fine, as long as I don’t try to pull the shadow exposure too far. I might even be brave enough to use 12800 in a pinch.

So my Christmas present from Phase One may be arriving in instalments, but it’s looking really good for the latest compact system cameras.

The above shot gives you an idea of what can be achieved, and is also suitably seasonal. My very best wishes to all my readers, and hope that we all have a successful and satisfying 2014.

Here’s the list of the main kit I took to Morocco:

• Canon 7D body
• Canon 550D body
• Canon lenses: 15-85mm,  17-85mm, 70-300mm, 10-22mm (The 550D and 17-85 were basically “spares”, although both got a small amount of use.)
• Panasonic GX7 body
• Panasonic lenses:14-42mm (power zoom), 14-42mm (kit lens, spare),  45-175mm, 100-300mm
• Olympus lenses: 12mm f/2, 9-18mm
• Gitzo GT1540 tripod with Gitzo ball head
• Around 96GB each of SD cards and CF cards
• Three battery chargers and one or two spare batteries for each camera
• Polarising filters in each of the following sizes, and protective UV filters in almost all: 37mm, 46mm, 52mm, 58mm, 67mm, 72mm, 77mm
• Lens hoods for most, but not all of the lenses
• Remotes for both systems, including an intervalometer for the Canons (ironically the GX7 has one built in) and an adapter cable because the Canons have different connectors
• Shoulder bag for around town and tiny bag for GX7 as well as my large backpack for travelling and the desert trip

While I liked the flexibility of this selection, I would be the first to admit that it meant carrying more than ideal in terms of both weight and value. It’s also almost in danger of becoming my standard kit for any trip, which is vaguely ridiculous. However it’s not obvious how or even whether I should pare it down for a future similar trip.

Firstly, apart from the spare Micro Four Thirds normal zoom, each lens and all three bodies saw real use (although I could realistically have substituted either of the others for the only outing of the 550D and 17-85mm lens). However following my experiences in Cuba and Iceland I wouldn’t forego carrying a spare body for the “main” camera and a spare mid-range zoom, although by carrying two different “systems” I doubled up both elements on this trip.

I don’t think there’s a single shot I took with either Canon I couldn’t have taken with the GX7, but that might not have been true if there was more fast action, and I might have got one or two shots I missed if I had had the 7D with its fast performance and 6X standard zoom ready in my hand. The Canon lenses are definitely a bit more resistant to flare, but in most cases I didn’t find that an insuperable problem with the MFT kit. Whether the Panasonic batteries would have lasted the desert trip and frozen night shoots is an unknown, but the third party batteries for the Canon weren’t great either.

Conversely I definitely got several shots on the GX7 which exploited the GX7’s unobtrusive nature, silent operation, the wide aperture of the Olympus f/2 lens or the remarkable reach of my new 100-300mm lens. These I might not have got with the Canon.

As I’ve said before, the Panasonic GX7 is the ideal camera for wandering around in towns, or exploring cramped interiors like those of the older buildings in Morocco. I’ve read other reviews which liken it to a smaller Leica rangefinder, and if that’s true then I finally “get” the rangefinder aesthetic. Where it scores over other such cameras is that it is not limited to one mode, but moves seamlessly from point and shoot (composing on the rear display), or “twin lens reflex” (using the same panel tilted), through rangefinder and on to a high performance shooting mode best described as “mini DSLR”. I find myself increasingly using all those modes, whereas with my previous cameras live view has been only for situations where I genuinely can’t reach the viewfinder.

I also find myself using the multiple aspect ratios as a positive composition aid, and the live preview as a visual exposure guide in a way I have not done before.

The sheer physical size has an impact on subjects. In our financial argument with the snake charmers one of them went through our group saying “you have big camera, you have big camera…”. He got to me, raised his finger, and stopped dead. Something similar happened a couple of times.

Could I have managed with just the Canon kit? Probably, but I would have had to work harder, both physically and to get what I wanted from some of the subjects.

Could I have managed with just the Panasonic (with my GH2 as “spare body”)? Yes, but I would have been a lot more nervous about the desert trip. I happily sat on camel back with the 7D bouncing in the saddle. At one point I dropped the 7D in the sand from several feet up, but just dusted it off and carried on. That might have been a more serious incident with the smaller cameras.

The solution might be to extend my micro four thirds kit with a weatherproof lens and body, such as the Panasonic GH3 and 12-35mm lens. Morocco wasn’t that hard on kit, although I didn’t know this beforehand, and that pairing would have managed fine in the desert.

Unfortunately the harshness of a location is something which is hard to predict on a first visit: Iceland was much harder on equipment and even some of my heavyweight Canon gear did not survive – the wear on smaller cameras would probably have been unacceptable.

The alternative view (although it’s from Kirk Tuck, a man who changes his cameras almost as often as I change my socks) is that we just accept that the cost of smaller, lighter kit is that we wear it out more quickly, and that this fits with the gradual obsolescence due to technical advances. While I partly buy this argument, I’m not keen to completely wreck and write off equipment, and it brings the risk of a trip where both the primary and spare equipment die before the end. That would be a real disaster.

So for now I have moved one step closer to travelling light (or at least light-er). For trips to “easy” destinations I may be prepared to go MFT-only. For more physically challenging locations, if there will be a lot of fast action, or if I need the visual impact of a “big” camera I take the Canons. For trips with a mix of both, I remain a beast of burden.

While my memory works tolerably well, and as I suspect I’m about to enter one of my periodic phases of camera replacement, I thought it would be interesting to write up a list of the cameras I have owned and how my photographic capabilities (but not necessarily my skills) have evolved with them. Read the article here.

As a tail piece to my Morocco blog, and as a service to anyone else considering a photo trip there, here are a few notes on what worked, what didn’t, and how you might increase your own chance of a successful outcome.

What Worked…

This was the second trip I have done with Lee Frost of Photo Adventures (who also ran my Cuba expedition). He works hard to make sure you have a good time, with a balanced itinerary which gets you and your camera in front of lots of great subjects with a good chance of decent light. He’s also a fun and inspiring group leader and tutor. You just have to learn that he will always want “just one more shot” when the customers have all had their fill! Highly recommended.

Lee partners with someone who manages the local logistics, and on this occasion it was his regular co-leader in Morocco, Carolyn Hunt of Journeys Elite. Carolyn is a specialist in tailor-made Moroccan trips, and this reflected in faultless arrangements plus the ability to smoothly handle minor problems and variations. She was also a fun member of the group, and as a photographer in her own right understood our requirements well. Another strong recommendation.

Plumbing and toilets! I had some concern that toilet facilities might be a challenge, but completely needlessly. The Moroccans have a simple system that pretty much every cafe, hotel or other roadside stop has toilets which are freely available to use for a small donation from non-customers. Pretty much without exception these were in good order and spotlessly clean, often well above the standard of the British equivalent. (However, see note about showers in the “didn’t” section…)

The roads were all pretty good, well surfaced and with a capacity reasonably matched to the traffic (although I accept that I was seeing this in the low season). However it has to be observed that Moroccan drivers have a nasty habit of not worrying about which side of the road they use until an impact is imminent, and cyclists and moped riders are as much a menace as anywhere. While I would have been fairly comfortable driving outside Marrakech, I couldn’t have coped with either the poor signage in the larger towns, frequently only in Arabic, or the amazingly frequent speed traps and police checkpoints. Fortunately we had an excellent driver, Mohammed, who took all this in his stride, and was always happy to help in any way.

Morocco has very good telecoms services. My mobile worked everywhere, even in the middle of the desert. There was also free Wifi at almost every stop, although the speed varied substantially (and was not obviously correlated to distance from a major centre). I did have an odd problem that I couldn’t reliably send mail via my own SMTP server, but webmail worked fine.

It makes a welcome change to report that all my camera kit worked reliably and survived, although my Canon gear is going to need a very careful clean after the desert trek (and see note below about batteries).

I’m extremely pleased with the Panasonic GX7. This is the perfect camera for wandering around towns, whether they are packed or abandoned, and for taking high quality photos without the visible and audible imposition of a full-sized DSLR. It also makes brilliant high definition video, even in minimal light. At its limits it may not quite match the speed or the stabilisation of the Canon 7D, but I was not often left wanting. I do need to confirm its higher-ISO capabilities when Capture One support arrives, but the initial indications are good.

I’m also very pleased with the Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm lens. This fist-sized lens is pin-sharp and can pull details out of scenes which would demand major cropping with even huge lenses on full frame or APS-C cameras. It also stabilises well to cope in quite limited light. I now have hand held shots of the Moon filling half the frame, revealing detail which my eyes alone have never seen.

All that said, my Canons also had a key role. It was absolutely the right choice to take the 7D into the desert, where its heavier build and better sealing reduced worries substantially. If your trip covers a similar range you may also need a composite solution. I also used every lens except the “emergency spare” Panasonic 14-42mm zoom. I’m going to write a separate blog about how I might do a similar trip with a single camera system.

Much of the photography was in dark alleys or “open interiors”. This is very similar to outdoor photography in slot canyons and similar locations. Light is often best in the middle of the day, but changes rapidly. Inside the Kasbahs it takes on wonderful warm colours after being reflected from different surfaces. However overall light levels will often be low, and be prepared for very high dynamic ranges if you have a mixture of direct and indirect light. I got good use from my wide angle fast prime lens (f/2, 24mm-e), and took HDR bracket sets in several cases.

Morocco is dusty, and even out of the desert keeping optics clean is a challenge. My solution is a sacrificial UV filter for every lens, which I am prepared to replace after the trip. First indications are that I will have to do so for the two “standard zooms”, but the others will survive for another day. I have noticed a little vignetting on shots taken with the Canon 15-85mm when I had both UV and polarising filters in place, but this should be fairly easy to fix in the RAW processing, and it looks like the other lenses were fine. I also followed Lee’s suggestion to wrap cameras and lenses in plastic bags for the desert trip. There’s no way to tell how necessary this was, but it seems like a sensible precaution.

The food was a little repetitive and had a very high bread content (which I like but is not good for my waistline). However it was usually fresh, well cooked and tasty.

Cerberus, my invention to support multiple charging points from a single socket and cable worked very well, although I have realised that it can be further developed to also power my laptop from the same source. I have found a suitable C8 adapter for £3 on eBay, which will improve things further for the next trip.

For Geologging I now use Ultra GPS Logger by Holger Kasten. I have worked with the developer to optimise this excellent piece of software, and the results from this trip seem to be very effective.

French really is the best language with which to interact with the Moroccans. It helps to have the standard pleasantries in Arabic (yes, no, thank you etc.), and you occasionally find someone with usable English, but French is the right solution. Unfortunately mine was very rusty, and only started to work effectively at the end of the trip, but c’est la vie…

What Didn’t…

My precautions against the Caliph’s Revenge were ineffective. I avoided salads, kept my hands clean, drank only bottled water, and still suffered. My companions were fine. Go figure…

Showers – this is maybe slightly unkind, as every hotel had a device which produced a spray of water, usually at a reasonable temperature. Unfortunately almost without exception the mount on the wall was either absent, broken or, in an impressive display by the most expensive hotel, mounted so high that it both restricted the flow and ensured that what did come out flooded the entire room!

The haggling associated with some activities was unpleasant. It left a bad taste in the mouth to have a good shooting session and then end it with an argument about money. It doesn’t help that in the more popular areas some tourists and photographers are being more generous, which is pushing expectations up. Strangely this seemed to be much less of an issue south of the Atlas – whether this was due to a difference in culture or just less tourism is hard to judge.

If possible, try and agree a price for everything beforehand, and be prepared to walk away if the price is not right. I was successful in getting the price I wanted for all my souvenir purchases by this tactic.

Photographically I only had one problem. Both my spare Canon 7D battery and one I borrowed from Lee died very quickly in the cold of the desert nights. It might be significant that they were both cheap 3rd party ones – original Canon batteries and my Panasonic batteries for the GX7 seemed to fare better.

While you don’t go on a photographic holiday to lie in every morning, it would be nice to get the odd opportunity, and Lee usually obliges. However Morocco didn’t – 24×7 cockerels, mezzuins calling at 5 am and sub-zero temperatures all made their contribution! Oh well…

Conclusion

Morocco is an inspiring feast for the eyes, and a great photographic destination. With some planning, basic preparations and sensible precautions it’s not a hard one either. Enjoy it.

I’ve tried processing my star trail shots from Morocco, and the results are better than I expected. The above is from my first night in the Erg Chebbi. With a full moon the foreground is perhaps a bit overexposed, but otherwise this has worked quite well. I was slightly off on my aim, but at least I got the pole star (just) in shot!