LX3 with a viewfinder

As we all know the Panasonic Lumix LX3 is a fine point and shoot camera. It has attracted lot of attention over the past few months for a number of reasons. It's small, yet produces good quality images. Its lens is versatile and sharp. It can go as wide as 24mm (equivalent to full frame), and is f/2.0 at this focal length. It's such a nice camera, that Leica is selling a rebranded version with its name on it. It's called the D-LUX 4.

And I personally love it, except for one thing. It's still a point and shoot, and it's hard to get away from that. When shooting in manual mode, a lot of the controls feel fiddly on such small body, and somewhat unresponsive. However, that isn't my biggest complaint. That would be the fact that composing an image on a point and shoot always feels unnatural. Holding a camera at arms length and at chest height invariably results in me not getting the image I want. This is no doubt somewhat of a personal gripe, but I find that in order to get the shot I want, I need to have the camera to my eye.

And so I purchased the following:



The viewfinder you see above is one made by Zorki. They are relatively inexpensive on ebay, and are much cheaper than the official viewfinder made by Panasonic. The barrel can be rotated to 6 settings:

28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm and 135mm.



The viewfinder slips into the hotshoe nicely, and feels natural to use. However, it does obscure the pop up flash and would not allow the use of an external flash when used.

This has changed this camera for me. I am now shooting (more or less), what I see. And I love it. It has, however, had a few side effects that I did not expect.

Like primes
There are only 2 settings that are within the focal range of the LX3. The range of 24-60mm only leaves 28mm and 50mm as choices. Therefore, I tend to use either at the extremes of the lens' capabilites with these two settings. Essentially it feels like I'm shooting with primes again, and this I like. When using my SLR, I exclusively use primes. I enjoy the way they make me think, and I feel so much more at home using them.

However, many would find this a disadvantage, and this should be considered before acquiring one.

Parallax
Because you are no longer looking through the lens when composing images, you can get parallax errors, such that when you pull the trigger, what you see is not exactly what you get. This manifests itself in two ways. Firstly is the framing itself and secondly is leveling. Fortunately the viewfinder does offer ways to correct for this.

Parallax errors are most significant when dealing with subjects close to the lens. Therefore, in order to help compensate, the viewfinder can be adjusted slightly by rotating the barrel by a given offset:



This makes a big difference, however leveling errors are still prominent. In order to get the correct horizon, I've taken to fixing them in post production. Adobe Photoshop Elements offers a nice horizon fixing tool, as I'm sure most pieces photographic processing software would.


However, despite these issues, I would strongly recommend trying one out. It makes street photography much more discreet and can really change the way you use your LX3.

Olympus Trip 35 - Initial Impressions

If you search ebay right now, you can probably find a number of these cameras on sale. I've seen them go for as little as £5, and reckoned it would be a nice first foray into the world of rangefinders.



In many ways this camera directly competes for my attention with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. As you can see below, they are of similar sizes, and both have a nice portable form factor. They both make a welcome change from the chunky DSLRs in terms of weight.



One of the reasons why the rangefinder has been so popular in the past 50 years, is due to the fact that it is a very discrete camera to use. It's because of this, that journalists in the field have often chosen rangefinders for the kind of work that requires them to get close to their subject. The Olympus Trip 35 definitely fulfills this roll. The small size, extremely quiet shutter and zero startup time make this camera very discreet. Your average point and shoot just cannot compare.

The Olympus Trip 35 also has a very distinct focusing mechanism. There are 4 focus zones marked on the barrel, each representing a rough distance to your subject. These focus zones are reasonably forgiving, and as a result you can pick the appropriate one very quickly, and spontaneous street photography becomes very easy.



The Olympus Trip 35 will never run out of batteries. That's because it doesn't have any. Light is metered using a selenium photo-electric cell. This controls aperture and hence exposure. Film is advanced mechanically by hand, and focus is handled manually too (as described above). The light meter has one added feature. If there not enough light for an exposure, the shutter will not release. Instead a red flag will move into view in the viewfinder, indicating that there is insufficient light. This has the bonus effect of preventing accidental exposures during transport, simply by attaching the lens cap.

There are, however, a few drawbacks. The most notable of which is the rather slow, but sharp, lens. Unless you mount a flash gun, low light photography is impossible with this lens, as there is no ability to lengthen exposure time. It's also fixed focal length, limiting composition options in tricky situations.

But these complaints are minor, and if you are finding that you are missing these features, you are probably missing the point of this camera. It's about taking it anywhere and everywhere, and shooting quickly and spontaneously. It's so cheap and robust that it's the camera you take to places you would never take your SLR or your shiny point and shoot. It's about quick and dirty street photography when you haven't got time to rigorously compose and focus.

That is where this gem of a camera shines, and for that reason, I cannot recommend it enough. Just check out the results from this flickr group. http://www.flickr.com/groups/olympustrip35/

Are you too tall?

I feel compelled to add my voice to the growing number of people who are unhappy with the relationship between the Police Forces and photographers in the UK. A number of stories have cropped up over the past few months describing how police constables and community support officers have been harassing photographers, using laws intending combat terrorism (for example, this and this).

The most recent of which is this incident reported by The Register, where a photographer was arrested during being questioned by a Kent WPC. The individual had been stopped in order to explain why he was taking pictures of the area. Apparently, during these questions, he took the WPC's picture. This, combined with his height, was found to be threatening and led to his arrest.

It almost feels like that Met has an ongoing war on photographers. Recent publicity campaigns involved ads designed to induce fear of photography. For example:



The reasoning behind the police's apparent distrust of photographers is unclear. There has been no evidence that photography was involved in the September 11th or July 7th acts, and I am unaware of photography having been linked to any major terrorist plots. What is clear is that the adversarial stance that has been taken by the police is causing an increasing number of problems. It prompted the recent publication of these guidelines:

http://www.met.police.uk/about/photography.htm

However, these guidelines do little to define what can be classified as suspicious behaviour, to the point where justifications of being of an intimidating size could be considered enough to be stopped and have your images searched.

It is important to remember that despite the attempts that the Police Forces might be making to clamp down on journalists and amateur photographers, it is very important that photographers' rights are defended. Not only does photography play a crucial role in journalism, but in cases such as Ian Tomlinson's death, it illustrates how photographs from members of the public are key in matters of public justice, particularly in cases involving members of the Police Forces.

Company Away Day Time Lapse

It's rare when my hobby of photography and my job in software development coincide, but recently the company I work for had an Away Day and one of my colleagues put together a team of people to record a time lapse video of the event. I was part of the team, and this is what we made:



It was definitely a lot of fun to do and hopefully we'll be able to do something similar again next year.

Don't use Java primitives

Java syntax evolved from C's and as a result has the primitives:

byte short int long float double boolean char

These primitives can be considered to be the building blocks for all other value objects within Java and allow users to hold data as fields and variables. However, I would argue that they are not useful and a good rule of thumb is to not use them at all. Instead Java provides the classes:

Byte Short Integer Long Float Double Boolean Character

These are classes for fully fledged, immutable, value objects which can be used in much the same way as the basic primitives, but offer the following advantages:

1. They can be used in generics. This is possible:

new ArrayList<Integer>();

But this is not:

new ArrayList<int>();

2. They can still be passed into library functions that demand primitives. Auto boxing means that a method signature with int can still be called with an Integer objects transparently. Likewise, a function returning an int can be assigned to an Integer.

3. They offer all the expected methods for use in debugging and collection handling, such as toString, equals and hashcode.

4. They can be null. While there is a lot of discussion as to whether applications should be passing null around, it is still sensible to ask the question what should be returned from a method such as getIdIfPresent if there is no ID. With primitives, you'd be forced to return a value that represented a nonexistent result, such as -1. WIth real objects, you have the option of returning null.

5. Primitives in java are passed by value, whereas objects in java are passed by reference. This may not have a huge impact on how you would handle Integer vs int, however. This is because the objects that represent the primitive types are immutable, and therefore you cannot change the value of any of the parameters passed. Despite this, I would recommend using objects over primitives, simply because it means you don't have two kinds of behaviour represented in your code.