Photography
- A small Lowepro pouch
- A Maxpedition pouch. I bought it a few years ago for a different purpose.
- My Ricoh GR IIIx HDF
- SD card, 128 GB. There is no chance that I will fill this card.
- Two batteries — one in the camera
- A slightly damaged card reader that I can use with my phone, infrequently used since I rarely edit photos “on the go”. I normally use my iPad and a better card reader.
- A small old power adapter
- A short USB-A to USB-C cable, used for charging batteries in the camera if needed.
- A short USB-A to Lightning cable to charge my phone.
- Some small pouch that I bought 15–25 years ago.
- A small flash from LightPix Labs.
- AA-batteries, in flash.
- Some filters that came with the flash
Going wide
No, I’m not talking about my stomach … although it’s also widening … unfortunately … I’m talking about lenses. It appears that the older I get, the wider I go.
When I bought my first SLR as a teenager, I considered a 135 mm a wide lens and preferred a 200 mm or 400 mm. When I bought my first DSLR I used something like a 24-120 zoom for almost everything, later I’ve become fond of prime lenses, first a 90 mm, then 85 mm, then 50 mm, then 40 mm and the latest lens I bought was a 28 mm.
I don’t understand why this has happened, but I find it interesting that this happened. I still use my zoom lenses a lot, but I’m increasingly drawn to prime lenses. Currently, my favorites are the 85/1.8 + 28/2.8 for my Nikon, and the 40/2.8 on my Ricoh IIIx.
I wonder what I will be using in two-three years 🤔
My mini camera bag
On YouTube, there are many “What’s in my photo bag”-videos, it’s both silly and fascinating … so I can’t resist making a “What’s in my photo bag”-post. I’m actually going to make several posts, since I use different gear for different situations.
My mini bag
This is my mini bag, I usually put these two bags in my workbag, or toss them in the car when I’m going somewhere. The GR IIIx is my everyday camera, it’s a quite fantastic camera in a tiny body. To be completely honest, I typically only have the GR IIIx in a pocket, and nothing more.
So what’s in the photo?
The Lowepro bag is strictly a “transport” bag, i.e., it should protect my camera when I have it in my workbag, or when I throw everything in the car. If I expect to use the camera, I remove the bag and put the camera in my pocket. And if I expect to be out and about for a longer time, I put the Maxpedition pouch in a pocket.
My mini bag, deluxe edition
First, I very rarely use this, but I’ve actually tried doing indoor sports photography with acceptable results. Not something I would actually use, but it can be done.
What’s added to the setup is
As you can see, the flash is small, but it’s fairly powerful. One thing that’s not obvious from the photo is that it’s possible to remove the “hot shoe”-part of the flash, and use it to remotely control the flash.
This makes the flash really powerful since I can use it off-camera. While it’s a completely manual flash, I find it not too difficult to get a decent exposure. I wouldn’t hesitate to do some portrait photography using this setup (I would improvise some kind of reflector and a diffusor).
So the whole setup looks like this when packed.
My new wide-angle lens
Yesterday I got my new wide-angle lens, new and new … it’s an old second-hand lens (14-24/2.8) from MPB, and it’s a giant piece of glass. Compared to my other lenses it’s “silly big”, I’m starting to get a bit worried if I can fit it in my rucksack!!
Anyway, I went out today to test it and here is my first shot … and it’s going to take some time to get used to this lens. When I took this photo, I could almost touch the sign—I’m not used to that.
I then tried to take some more “open landscape” photos, and it’s really different from my other lenses. I was standing right beside a tree, not visible in the photo, and the branches from it were visible in the frame, so I took a step forward and made a second attempt … and the branches were still there. Not until I walked up to the tree you see, it’s almost within touching distance, I was able to get the branches out of the frame.
This photo is more the kind of photos I expect to take in the future. This one has an obvious flaw … the branches melts together with the background. But what really amazed me was that it felt like I had the camera below the tree … I still got the whole tree in the frame with room to spare.
The final photo was taken with me crouching down right beside the track and the snowmobile passing me just 20-40 cm away.
It was fun to take it out to see how it works, I really need to practice a lot, to learn how to best use this lens. It’s quite different from the other lenses I have for this camera.
Being an idiot
Every so often, I wonder if I need a larger working memory. A couple of days ago, we went on a short trip to visit family, since it was a short family trip, I decided not to bring any serious photo gear. Instead, I would just take the GR IIIx (almost always in my pocket) and the Lumix GM5 with the small 12–32 and 35–100 zooms (fits easily in a pocket). My idea was to take a walk or two and try to capture three landscape photos.
Right before we were leaving home, I realized that I had forgotten the 35-100 and ran in to fetch it. Then we left home and after a couple of hours of driving we arrived at our destination.
After eating lunch, I decided to take my walk before the sun disappeared, and I started to dig in my bag to get the GM5. After about 30 seconds, I realized that I had forgotten to pack it … what an idiot I am!!!! So I had the tele zoom but no camera, great !!
Fortunately, I had the GR IIIx in my pocket, so I was able to capture some photos … but not what I had planned.
Older computer
This isn’t as much about photography as it’s about post-processing. Some time back, I discovered that Lightroom Classic on my desktop didn’t display all the options that the program has. When I looked closer, I discovered some small text that basically said, “your computer is too old and feeble, so you can’t use the fancy stuff”. Yep, my computer isn’t the latest model, not even the previous model … or the one before that … in fact, they are probably right. My computer is a bit old and feeble, it works quite nicely for anything else than processing images.
To be honest, I get the impression that it spins up the fans if I hold up a memory card from my Nikon Z7 in front of it 😁.
Anyway, yesterday I started to play with ON1 Photo Raw and experienced lagging, we are talking about 1–3 seconds when I try to create a mask using the brush. So, I sent in a support request asking if there was something I could do to improve the performance. The answer was something like “you have an older Intel chip set (hey, at least it isn’t a 68K processor 😁) with not enough graphics memory”. They didn’t write it, but between the lines you can read “get a new computer”.
My wife has been saying the same thing for quite some time now. It feels like the whole world is conspiring against me 😜.