thank you...

Antje-20101217-118
Originally uploaded by edopix

The discussion goes on as to whether it’s a good idea to be on Twitter or not. I don't want to sway anybody's opinion, you are all entitled to yours, but here is my story:

Since joining Twitter I have made quite a few friends. Most of them are certainly friends only in the realm of my and their timelines, and our acquaintance is limited to what we are prepared to divulge about ourselves ‘out there’. Those are not close friendships in the conventional sense but I have learned an awful lot through following discussions between tweeps and links posted by people who know much more about subjects I'm interested in than I do. Many of them have been very helpful when asked direct questions, too.

Many thanks.

Most of my earliest 'followers' and people I followed back were other photography enthusiasts or even professionals in London, and so I slipped into monthly or other regular meetings in town that allowed me to get to know all those Twitter 'friends' in real life and yet more people through them at those events. They all helped me advance my photography skills and as a pleasant side-effect also enriched my social life. Apart from those regular gatherings, I have met up with people I originally knew from Twitter for drinks or meals in town and have even been invited to some of their homes and have welcomed some of them to mine in return.

Thank you.

Some people (or organisations) I follow without expecting any reciprocity. I’m just interested in direct access to what they have to say. Some people I chat with because I find what they say intelligent, witty or just plain interesting, and they help me pass idle down-time pleasantly. I even found someone I went to school with back in Germany, although we didn’t really personally know each other back then!

Thank you, too.

I am normally rather shy when surrounded by people I don’t know and will easily stand in a corner all night, leaving in the end without having talked to anyone. I find the Twitter banter a wonderful way to break the ice.

Finally, I met someone very special on Twitter (who kindly allowed me to use this recent portrait of me for this blogpost). A person who was initially a great mentor to my mentee, like he is for many other people every day (and yes, the word does exist!), and later became a close and caring friend who helped me through some difficult times in the last year and a half and has been there for me with technical advice and emotional support ever since.

A very special thank you to you. :-)

In summary, to me Twitter has been an enriching experience. I’m not saying my life has become wonderful since I joined and that I will live happily ever after but it certainly opened doors and windows for me, and it’s up to me to do something with it. I’m not leaving anytime soon. But as I said, that’s just my story.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year. :-)

one week of Nokton joy...

I have had my Voigtländer Nokton Micro 4/3 25mm f/0.95 for a week now, and it hardly ever came off my Olympus E-P2 during that time. Being a girl, I may be allowed to first of all comment on what a beautiful lens it is. It feels solid, no least thanks to its weight of 410g, but not chunky, and it certainly doesn’t look chunky, either.

The Nokton being a manual lens, I was looking forward to taking more control again over the images I take. Initially it means that fast-paced street photography gets harder as my manual focusing skills are not what they used to be before I bought my first autofocus camera. Of course, I'm also still getting to know how this lens works and how it interacts with my camera. Anyway, I relish the challenge and left all the autofocus lenses at home when I travelled to Germany to visit my parents over the holidays. It has to be said, though, it's really nice to have an aperture ring instead of having go fiddling with the camera’s menu options. At least it makes setting apertures quicker and easier.



The temptation initially was obviously to play around with the amazing shallow depth of field at the aperture of 0.95. At this setting, the camera is easy to focus thanks to the amazing amount of light that it allows in. The electronic viewfinder is very bright, and due to the shallow depth of field of the wide aperture, the area in focus literally pops out. On the images, the area in sharpest focus is a touch soft at that aperture, looking fantastic given the creaminess of the out-of-focus areas of the image.



Focusing at narrower apertures is still easy enough but due to the wider area in focus, it’s a bit harder to find the sharpest pane. However, help is at hand by using the manual focus assist option which on the E-P2 is accessed by pressing the info button twice or until you get the green focus rectangle in the viewfinder. Pressing ‘OK’ zooms in to what’s within the rectangle, something the E-P2 does automatically for its own lenses when the focusing ring is touched and lightly pressed. Once in this mode, turning the dial around the OK button changes the zoom ratio from 7x to 10x and back. Pressing OK after focusing takes you back to the normal viewfinder image. If you thought I was clever enough to figure that out myself, you are wrong. I was just clever enough to find it here.

I personally find it bit harder to focus at higher ISO settings as the EVF image becomes quite noisy itself. I’m not an expert on this but maybe this issue could be resolved by somehow filtering the ISO noise out of the EVF image or by having a hybrid viewfinder which overlays an optical viewfinder image with the electronic data we’ve become so used to.

The aperture ring moves easily but positively clicks into position with a range from f/0.95 to f/16 with two steps from each aperture marked on the ring to the next, i.e. from 0.95 to 1.4 and so on. The focusing ring is easy to grip and turn and moves smoothly with focus from 17cm to infinity in pretty much a 270 degree turn. It offers enough resistance to avoid any focus creep.

The lens has 10 blades which allows for as round an aperture as practically possible. Judge the bokeh yourselves.




When I took some pictures of the snowy landscape on a drive in my dad’s car, I noticed some vignetting in the very edges of the image. I had used the widest aperture then to counter-act the speed at which my dad was driving - despite the snow. :-( However, seeing as the image was still taken at 1/2000 of a second, I could have afforded to stop down more, thus eliminating the vignetting, and besides, I would probably have added it later on, anyway, to make the image pop a bit more. Just thought it was worth mentioning.



I am so far very happy with the lens, the way it works, the way its cool metal casing lies solidly in the hand, and the pictures it produces. It’s early days but I’m sure I’ll be using it a lot in the future. At some point it would be great to have a lens of this optical quality with the extra speed of autofocus but until then it will help me become a better photographer by making me do the work by myself, and I’m sure all three of us, the Olympus PEN, the Nokton and I, will take some smashing pictures on the way there. So watch this space. :-) For now, I leave you with my Nokton images on flickr so far.



Merry Christmas!