Switching grooves

When I started taking photography more serious, I mainly shot black and white photos. I loved a good black and white photo. To be fair, I still do.
And I also still love when I see a subject or scene that I know exactly how to capture in black and white.

But still I have noticed a change in the photos I post here on my site. A while back, the majority were black and white, now most of them are in color.

The reason for this is quite simple. I have switched groove. I am now primarily taking pictures of animals, either in the wild or on various zoos.
Animals usually have strong or distinctive colors, and while some animals photos can work in black and white, most of them deserve to be in color.

Switching grooves is not a bad thing. It is an evolution. The next step.
Instead of keeping in the same groove and starting to repeat yourself, or growing tired of what you do, you can try something else. It doesn’t mean that you can’t switch back to your old groove if you want to at some later point.
And if you switch back, maybe you will have learned something new, that takes your work to another level.

At the moment I still have a strong urge to photograph wildlife, but I can also feel a beginng yearning for the old days of picking up my camera, put on a 35mm lens or a Lensbaby, and go out exploring and capture new black and white sceneries.

Goodbye POTN

When I first started getting serious with photography, I would have all kinds of issues that puzzled me, or that didn’t make sense to me. So, I did what I always do in such cases, I looked for like-minded online.

I quickly found photography-on-the.net (POTN). At that time a forum for Canon users. It was a forum populated by nice and helpful people, and it seemed to have answers for almost all my questions and funny interactions and comments as well.

later on POTN opened up for all kinds of cameras, and even then, no Brand-wars broke out.

Over the years I spent hours on that forum, slowly noticing that the interactions changed. Instead of a lot of post about people asking for help, it would be posts about specific cameras, lenses, bird photography etc.

I guess the people looking for answers were going elsewhere, or that all questions had already been answered.

Now Pekka, the guy who runs POTN has decided to shut the forum down, apparently around February 2024, to free up time for his other interests, and while I understand and respect his decision, I can’t help to feel a little sad, that a good forum with a lot of good users will now dissappear.

Goodbye POTN, you will be missed.

I’ve reached a Milestone

Today, while uploading a picture to Flickr, I noticed that, for the first time, on of my images had reach the milestone of 10.000 views.

Even though this is probably nothing for some people, it is still amazing for me to think that 10.000 people have looked at this picture.

The EOS R makes my EF lenses shine

Now that I have really started to dig into the features and capabilities of the EOS R, I am surprised again and again about how much difference the Dual Pixel Autofocus system makes, compared to having a separate autofocus sensor like I had in my EOS 6D.

It is not that the 6D were bad or had trouble focusing. Far from. It was really good at focusing, even in bad light.
But I had to micro adjust every single one of my lenses to get the most out of them. And sometimes, no matter how much you adjusted, there would still be times where the focus seemed a bit off.

My Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM is the perfect example. It is a lens that is notoriously known for being hard to adjust correctly.
On some lenses, mine included, you would be challenged to find a micro adjustment that were spot on, both when focusing close to infinity and close to the near limit.

A whole new lens

I actually managed to adjust it to a point where both ends were acceptable, but from time to time it would just miss focus.

On the R, it is like having a whole new lens. It is sharp at all distances, focus is spot on every time. And I didn’t even have to micro adjust.
You can’t even do that on the R because It uses the image sensor to focus, instead of a separate sensor.

This is perhaps one of the most overlooked advantages of this new mirrorless prodigy.
It wasn’t a feature I had given much though before buying the R, but it really is a big deal.
Not only can I use all my EF lenses (and even EF-S lenses) using an adapter, but I can use them with better or as good results as I have been used to on my native EF Mount 6D.

The image in this post is taken with the EOS R and Sigma 50mm f/1.4.

The Controller

I recently bought a Behringer X-Touch Mini, to use when editing images in Lightroom.
It literally took minutes to set it up, and then I were up and running.
I am still making minor adjustments to the individual knobs and buttons, but mostly everything is where I want it now and I have gained a much more organic workflow, when editing.
As a side-effect, the time spent on each image has been brought down.

What now?

Once again, I have ended up in this frustrating situation where I feel like I am going nowhere.

I feel like I haven’t taken a decent picture in ages. Hell, to be honest it feels like I haven’t had time to pick up the camera in ages.

Obviously this leads to a situation where I am picking my weekly pictures from my backlog, to keep up the “Post 1 picture each week” tradition that I have been practicing for close to eight years now.

As I strive to be better and better it feels frustrating having to use some of the older pictures that has been postponed because I (at the time) had better pictures to choose from.

What now? Where do I go from here?

I guess I’ll have to try to free up time to create time slots where I can take the camera for a walk. Sadly this means something else needs to be pushed back…

What do you do to free up time to do the things you want to do? Write me back in the comments below…

Thoughts on how to become anxious

The Minimalists have written a short but very precise recipe on how to become anxious.

I think it is spot on… ..especially the “go to the mall” part 🙂

..and yes.. I know it was written back in March, but it is still relevant!

I like the Minimalists.. they really know how to drive home the point in short Minimal Maxims. This is one of my favorites:

Forcing yourself to make money from a hobby is a great way to kill your love for that hobby.”

Why are you posting pictures?

I recently wondered “Why am I posting pictures at all?” It does not make me rich. Or famous. So why bother?

I guess part of the answer is a need to be recognized. But the sad truth is that the Internet is flooded with pictures and the chance that mine would stand out is quite small, no matter how hard I try. So why bother?

Another part of the answer is that photography is about creating. And if you create you want the stuff you create to be “used”. If not, why bother? Creating without purpose doesn’t really make sense.

So, even though posting pictures to this site, or social medias doesn’t make me rich and famous, it does serve a purpose. To keep my desire to create alive.