E-P1/E-P2 with a dash of Hasselblad

I just came across some interesting bit of news from DCwatch via 4/3 Rumors. There’s an accessory for your E-P1/E-P2 and perhaps E-PL1 as well (I can’t read Japanese, so don’t take my word for it!) that will give it more than a passing resemblance to a Hasselblad. See for youself:

Images courtesy of DCwatch

It does present a certain use scenario too. One problem E-P1/E-P2 users face is that they can’t use any flash in conjunction with the (amazing) VF-2 viewfinder. So what do you do if you’re outdoors on a bright sunny day, your LCD is nigh useless, and you need a little bit of fill-in flash to light up your subjects? That’s where I suspect these will come in handy.

More pictures are available at the DCwatch article. It’s in Japanese, mind you, but it’s well worth a look. And if anyone can point out as to where all of us can get our hands on one and for how much, we’d greatly appreciate it.

Micro 4/3 resources online

For those who don’t already know, I am one of the latest to fall victim to the micro four-thirds (from here onwards abbreviated to mFT) camera system. Prior to my pulling the trigger, I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find out anything and everything about the system.
For the benefit of those who are considering joining the mFT crowd, I’ve decided to compile some of the information resources that helped influence my final decision.
So without further ado:

• Four Thirds – Official website run by Olympus with good basic information on the FT and mFT systems with offerings from both Olympus and Panasonic.
• 4/3 Rumors – Find out about leaks and rumors and lots of actual news relating to the mFT world.
• mu-43.com – A website on all things mFT. More importantly, it has a forum with oftentimes valuable bits and pieces of information to maximize your mFT investment.
• e-p1.net – Also a forum on mFT and also a good place to look and ask for information.
• MFlenses – Go here if you fancy investing in classic (and cheap!) manual focus lenses for your mFT camera and you need some user opinions.

Of course, that’s not everything. For a comprehensive review on mFT cameras, you can go to Digital Photography Review. Flickr is always a good place if you’re trying to decide on your next mFT lens, particularly for the more obscure MF lenses. And if all that’s not enough, there’s always Google.

Upload directly to Flickr from Adobe Lightroom

Just came across a useful plug-in today for exporting photos from Adobe Lightroom 2.x straight to your Flickr account. The plug-in is created by Jeffrey Friedl and it’s a “donationware” as he calls it i.e. you can choose to pay as much or as little as you want. You can try it for free for 6 weeks, after which you’ll get reduced functionality until you choose to register the plug-in.

As it is a donation-supported plug-in: you can choose to pay as little as 1-cent—just enough to cover the PayPal fee. PayPal is required for registration, but you may contact Mr Friedl directly if you don’t have a PayPal account but still wish to continue using the plug-in.

It’s very neat, I’ve tried it a couple of times now today and it appears to work without a hitch. It even goes so far as to export the tags and metadata you’ve assigned to your photos in Lightroom. But the biggest benefit is of course the huge time-savings in your workflow especially if you’re a heavy Lightroom user AND you upload your work to Flickr. Flickr’s own Uploadr is all well and good as a standalone, but if you’re already using Lightroom, why not save yourself the trouble and use this plug-in.

To get the plug-in go to: Jeffrey Friedl’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom plug-in.

Mr Friedl also supports other photo-sharing sites such as SmugMug or even Facebook which you can find at his Lightroom goodies page.

Third time’s the charm

You may have noticed that all my previous posts are gone and there’s a different look to the blog now. If you ask why, well I felt the direction it was going in over time was rather uninteresting. Almost static. Now I’m no longer interested in just sharing photos—I paid for a flickr pro account for that so there’s little point duplicating it on a separate blog when flickr can handle that just fine, even better in fact!

I’m aiming for something more, something different than what I’ve been doing. As I surf around in photography forums and websites, I tend to pick up stuff: bits and pieces of information that I felt were very useful and worth sharing. This ranges all the way from photography techniques, post processing, and even equipment reviews if I ever get suckered into buying something. Unfortunately that happens all too often.

Mind you, this also means updates will only happen if and when I have something to write about. So short of checking back every now and then, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed. The website itself might see some further changes over the week so do leave a comment if you find something is amiss or you’d like to see a particular function on the blog and I’ll consider it for addition if my limited html skills allow and it’s in line with the blog’s new purpose.

So until the next post then. Cheers!