A.D. Drumm Images, LLC – Landscape, Portrait, and Fine Art Photography in Rochester MN Photography

March 30, 2015

Our First Cruise and the Olympus OM-D E-M10

Filed under: General photography — Tony Drumm @ 4:46 pm

Stateroom on Enchantment of the Seas

We just returned from our first cruise, a short four night adventure from Florida to the Bahamas. Our ship was Enchantment of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean vessel. We didn’t know what to expect, but it was fun and a different experience from other vacations we’ve taken.

Centrum

Being in the latter half of March, we found ourselves on board with many college students on spring break. So, there was that! And, I do believe many had opted for the drink package add-on. But the ship is large enough to find respite in various places.

Lynne

It’s sort of a mix of land-based tourist sites. There’s a casino which is not open all the time and is relatively small. There are pools, indoor and outdoor. There’s a rock climbing wall and some sort of bungee bouncing thing. There are shows, live music, karaoke, lounges. And our stateroom, though small, was remarkably quiet.

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We had two ports of call, Coco Cay – owned by the cruise line – and Nassau. At the former, we were tendered to shore in boats that I estimated could hold about 250 people or more. At Nassau, we docked which is certainly more convenient.

Magenta Skies

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you may have seen my post a couple years ago about using the Canon SL1 on a vacation (it’s here). I’ve been on something of a long quest for a travel camera – something that will be easy to cart around when photography is secondary but good enough to allow me to take the photos my head sees.

Cruise Show

The SL1 is a fine little camera. It’s a Canon, so it’s also familiar. Although the ergonomics are different from the higher level cameras (no wheel on the back, for example), it makes sense to me, the menus are pretty similar, and I know what Canon calls various features. One thing it lacks that newer cameras provide is a Wifi connection.

Coco Cay

So, I’ve been looking at other options. The top contenders were Fuji, Sony, and the micro-four-thirds cameras of Olympus and Panasonic. One criterion was cost – I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on a “fun” camera. Cost and some other factors ruled out the Fuji. Sony’s A6000 looks like a pretty good contender. I had a chance to hold one and play with it a bit. It feels good in my hands, and the reviews of the focus system are very positive. I was a little annoyed that it doesn’t have a touch screen.

Tender Back to Ship

On the SL1, the touch screen implementation is terrific. The Q screen showing most of the major settings lets you touch and change them, and the playback mode for reviewing your shots works just like we’re used to with our phones.

Storm Clouds at Sea

One other factor that entered into my thinking was the format. The Sony and the Fujis (and the SL1) are all APS size. While this allows for smaller lenses for the same field of view than my full-frame 5DIII, they are only moderately smaller. The micro-four-thirds cameras, on the other hand, work with much smaller lenses. The field of view is half – so you double the focal length to get the corresponding 35mm lens (e.g. 25mm is equivalent to a 50mm lens) – and the circle the lens needs to cover is so small, the lens can be quite small and light. That was an attractive quality.

Little Towel Guy

I ended up settling on the Olympus OM-D E-M10. And, indeed, it’s small. Very small. There are little bumps and things to help you grip the camera, but it still feels maybe a bit too small. It’s hard to hold it correctly with my left hand, for instance (palm up, thumb to the left). But it is light and very capable. It has a touch screen, although it is disappointingly much less useful than Canon’s implementation. It has Wifi, although it’s quirky and I’m still not quite sure why it only shows me some of my photos for downloading to my phone.

All the photos here were taken with the Olympus. For a tiny sensor, its low light capability is pretty decent with tolerable noise. I figured out how to set it to back-button focus. Sort of – changing focus modes seems to revert the focus to the shutter button. I also purchased the Sigma 30mm f/2.8 lens. This lens worked very well, is nice and sharp, and focuses quickly. It’s one of Sigma’s new Art series of lenses.

In Port in Nassau

Things I like:

I often want to shoot a series of bracketed photos for HDR especially inside buildings. The Olympus can do this, but it also has an HDR mode. I was about to dismiss that, since I want to process my HDR photos myself where I have full control. But in the HDR menu, there are options to just take bracketed shots and the camera automatically shoots them in continuous mode. So, you set it to take five shots, for instance, and when you press the shutter, you just hold it down and it takes five shots and stops.

There are two good dials to adjust exposure. There’s no fumbling for another button to override a single dial. This is actually a big deal for me and partly what sold me on this camera.

The size and weight is pretty good. The camera is pretty solid feeling, so it’s not uber-light. Mine weighs 14.3 oz without a lens.

The tilt screen is nice. Fully articulated (with a selfie mode!) would be great, but the tilting is useful.

Cake Decorating Contest

Things I don’t like:

The Wifi quirkiness. I figured out that it won’t just process and transfer a RAW file. I always shoot RAW. But it does have RAW processing built-in, and I was able to do that to produce a JPEG that did appear on my phone’s download list. But when I did another photo, it did not appear. Huh? Then another day, I processed a third shot. That appeared on the list but neither of the first two. I swear, those JPG files are still there on the card! I may try shooting RAW+JPEG and see what that does. You can also control the camera from the phone app which seems to work fine. The manual is pretty slim about all of this.

The sometimes-touch screen. It’s sort of a touch screen and sort of not. If I can use it to change settings, I haven’t discovered how. In playback mode, it lets you move around a zoomed image, but there’s no pinch-to-zoom. Instead, there’s a zoom bar you can slide your finger up and down.

The electronic viewfinder. The EVF has some nice features, but it has more negatives than positives for me. The most prominent of those for a vacation is: it is totally useless when wearing polarizing sunglasses. Completely useless. With my glasses, I had a large black cross from the top to the bottom, left side to right side. I had to push my glasses aside to use it, which meant I also lost my correction (prescription glasses). I will sometimes pull up my camera to look at a scene even before I power it on. None of that with an EVF. When I’d take a shot, I’d see a review pop into the viewfinder. That can be nice, but mostly it’s distracting. I can probably turn that feature off.

Battery. Battery life is poor, but that seems to be pretty common among all the current crop of small cameras. I’ve also grown fond of the smart battery technology in my 5DIII. When it says I have 50% remaining, I’ve learned that really honestly means 50% remaining. Here, I’m back to the “it’s full” to “it’s about to run out” sort of display.

Depth-of-field. Small sensor means f/2.8 is more like f/5.6. So, even my “fast” Sigma lens doesn’t provide a very shallow area of focus. I knew that going in, and I figured for the most part, the types of photos I’d be taking with it wouldn’t really require shallow focus. Still, sometimes… And, I have to think more about it, where it’s more second nature for me with the larger camera.

It’s all about trade-offs, I guess. Having a light and capable camera is so much easier to cope with when vacationing. With the light lenses, I’ll be able to pack a couple or three and still have a lightweight kit. By the way, I bought a Thinktank Mirrorless Mover shoulder bag for the Olympus, and it worked great.

Centrum Seating Area

There you are – some shots from our cruise vacation and probably more than you wanted to know about my review of the OM-D E-M10. I definitely need to explore its settings some more and spend some time with the Wifi to understand that better!

March 22, 2015

The Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing, MN

Filed under: General photography,Theatre — Tony Drumm @ 12:36 pm

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Located in the heart of Red Wing, MN is this amazing early 20th century theatre. There was a certain elegance about the performance venues during this era. You’d walk in and immediately feel you were about to experience something special. Very different from the clean lines and blank walls in such places built today.

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I was there to photograph Phoenix Theatre’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but I took the opportunity before the rehearsal to walk around the theatre and capture a few images. My friend Lindsay told me I’d love the theatre and would likely want to take photos of it. She knows me well!

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When I see one of these old theatres, I recall going to such places as a young child to watch movies. In Columbus, we had a couple old theatres where movies had replaced live performances. Through the 1960s, they became rundown and were nearly destined for demolition. But in the mid-1970s, a couple there were saved and renovated, most notably the Ohio Theatre. It’s a rather enormous and grand place that central Ohio is lucky to have.

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The Orpheum in Minneapolis, though smaller than the Ohio, has that similar feel to it. So, in Red Wing, here is another of these theatres. Smaller, as you’d expect to find in a small town, it is still a remarkable place.

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I shot these photos all hand-held using an HDR technique I particularly like for architectural interiors like this. I was pretty close to my limit for holding the camera steady unaided, but it seemed to work okay. I was a little torn regarding how saturated to keep the colors. The color, especially the walls and the painting above the stage, provide some of the feel of the place. But for this last photo, I decided to give it a desaturated, “older” treatment, which I must say I kind of like!

December 2, 2014

Tutorial Tuesday – My Exposure Tutorial

Filed under: General photography,Tutorials — Tony Drumm @ 2:07 pm

OverUnderExposed

I have been asked a few times about exposure – how do you set it, what do the settings mean, why take the effort to select any particular settings rather than just letting the camera do its thing by itself. At its core, it’s pretty easy to grasp. We can pretty easily tell when a photo is too dark or too light. The controls which determine exposure help us achieve the level of brightness we want in a photo, but they also play an important role in creating a mood and conveying to the viewer the image we have in our mind.

I started to write a blog post about exposure, but I didn’t finish it. Sometime later, I again attempted to write such a post. And again, I left it unfinished. I like my posts to present something you can quickly peruse and spend just a few minutes reading and (hopefully) enjoying. And I like to sprinkle in some tidbits about the craft as I see it.

However, it turns out that just doesn’t work in this case. Exposure is a central component to the art of photography. It’s something every photographer should understand, at least to some level. And I just decided I couldn’t do it justice here in the blog. So I scrapped that idea and decided to write something more comprehensive.

I took some time, took a handful of photos specifically to help explain the concepts visually, and wrote what I referred to myself as an eBook. But, it’s not all that long – only 11 pages – so I guess it’s more of an eEssay!

I enjoyed putting this together, and perhaps if folks find it useful, I’ll tackle one of the other core concepts. With Christmas coming, and the possibility of a camera under the tree, I hope this will be timely information.

Go to the page here to download the PDF!

October 29, 2014

Fright at the Farm 2014

Filed under: General photography,Theatre — Tony Drumm @ 11:02 am

Welcome!

Once again, Rochester Horror is presenting their Fright at the Farm at the History Center of Olmsted County on West Circle Drive. It seems each year, they expand, now covering most of the barn main and lower levels and lots of the grounds around it.

Dollmaker

Each area includes live actors performing as you’re guided from one “set” to the next.

The Pirate

I’ve shot these in the past, and each year I try to find a way to light the scenes while keeping the feel of the scene intact. I tend to use gels to mix with the existing lighting. Unlike stage lighting, these scenes are dimly lit generally, so I’m trying to boost that, get some light on faces and enhance what’s there.

This year, I used two to three speedlites for most of my shots (all off-camera, of course). The skeletal pirate in the cave was one of my favorites. I matched the existing red light in the back with a gel’d speedlite and balanced a bit of CTO gel from the front.

Graveyard

As we were leaving, the misty graveyard with it’s spooky mausoleum was looking pretty cool, so we stopped and shot a few frames. Here, I left the ghost to its own lighting and adjusted the exposure as needed.

They’ll be there one more weekend. It’s a fun way to spend a cool evening!

October 25, 2014

The Myth of “Straight Out of the Camera”

Filed under: General photography — Tony Drumm @ 1:04 pm

Back when I was first dipping my toe into the photography water, I had a friend who was something of a mentor to me. He recommended the camera I bought (Canon AE-1) as it was relatively affordable to a college student and had an inexpensive power winder that I needed. He shot a couple Olympus 35mm cameras at the time and had a great eye.

He would tell me it was both less expensive and more interesting to shoot transparencies – slide film like Ektachrome and Kodachrome – than shooting negative film. Developing was somewhat more expensive, but you didn’t have to pay for prints (and Ektachrome was pretty easy to develop at home). But more important, when you viewed a slide, you would see more plainly the skill of the photographer. In the process of printing, one could adjust for a less-than-perfect exposure, do dodging and burning, etc., cropping, and even alter the color balance. When you sent your film to be processed and printed, you would also lose some information about how you did. Is this print dark because I underexposed or because they printed it that way? (This assumes you aren’t color printing yourself.)

My Girls

Shooting transparency film in the early 1980s.

I took this to heart, and for many years I shot almost exclusively slides. I learned that slides really are less forgiving than, say, Kodacolor negative film. The latitude – the range from lightest to darkest – was compressed and contrast was pretty high. I eventually set up a color darkroom and printed onto Cibachrome, a color reversal paper designed for printing slides. I learned then the darkroom techniques that could let me alter an image more to my liking. Still, the original slides were pretty much a product of what I did with my camera.

Let’s now look at digital. A term widely bantered about on photography discussion sites is SOOC, an abbreviation for Straight Out Of the Camera.” The implication is, this is the unaltered image, just as I took it, with no – zero – manipulation. Sometimes this is used as a before image to compare to the after image produced using editing software. Sometimes it’s shown as the “see what I can do without using Photoshop or manipulating the photo” sort of bravado. It’s basically trying to be analogous to a slide.

But, let’s look at this more closely. When you press the shutter, your camera collects a set of data from the sensor. Each sensor site – pixel – stores a numerical value representing the amount of light it has received. That light has passed through a red, green, or blue filter. These are laid out in a pattern, and now something – a computer – must interpret this data and make sense of it. It is not yet a photo until all the data is assembled into a photo. And the choice of how the various red, green, and blue pixels are combined to make a particular color is yet to be decided.

Suppose you are shooting in JPEG mode – you direct the camera to store JPEG images on the memory card. If we look at one of those photos, is that photo SOOC? Well, strictly speaking it is literally SOOC. But, does it represent an unaltered, unmanipulated photograph? No. There is no such thing. In order for the camera’s computer to write that JPEG file, it has to interpret the sensor data and manipulate it according to the settings you provide. My camera has several modes like Camera Neutral or Landscape. The color rendition will be dramatically affected by this choice. It has noise reduction and sharpness settings which again have a noticeable effect. If they didn’t have a noticeable effect, they wouldn’t bother creating those settings. I can choose sRGB or AdobeRGB color space which will affect how the red, green, and blue data are combined.

To say this photo represents the scene as I saw it, with no manipulation, is disingenuous and wrong. Were those beautiful rich greens actually there or enhanced due to saturation settings and using Landscape mode?

If instead of shooting JPEG, I shoot RAW, then little has changed. Now, instead of the camera’s computer assembling the sensor data into a viewable image, we just move that operation to a computer running Lightroom or Camera Raw or one of the other RAW editing programs. There’s no avoiding it. Even if you set the program to its defaults, you have made a choice that affects the image. And if you use different RAW processors using different algorithms, you’ll see different results.

In fact, with a RAW file, you can’t even produce a photo that is literally SOOC (aside from the tiny imbedded JPEG the camera adds to the RAW file). The RAW data is just ones and zeros, there is no photograph until that data is processed.

What, then, does SOOC mean? Not a lot, I’m afraid. If you want to show before-after comparisons, that’s fine, and one can see what you did between the two. And, for the most part, the adjustments and manipulation done in-camera or during RAW file import tend to be globally applied, so we can know that.

But, if you want to brag about your photography chops and disparage those who want to use all the brushes in the paint set, don’t bother. Or, shoot transparency film. Oh, and we’ll view those on a light board with a loupe – any scanning or printing will, you know, manipulate the image.

October 2, 2014

The Italy Trip

Filed under: Beautiful Earth,General photography — Tony Drumm @ 11:35 am

Atop the Duomo of Milano

Lynne and I traveled to Italy for our first visit to this amazing and old country. We began our trip separately, as Lynne attended a retreat in the hills north of Rome, while I headed to Milan to attend the Italian Grand Prix Formula 1 race. It was my first Formula 1 race and one of those on my bucket list.

Milano Duomo

When arriving in Europe, it’s usually morning and your objective is to stay awake until around normal bedtime. After I landed in Milan, I made my way to the central train station and, from there, my hotel. The hotel was about a block and a half away – convenient for arriving and departing, but also for traveling the short distance to Monza, the site of the race. I was able to check in early, then I headed back to the station and took the subway downtown to the Duomo area.

The Milan Duomo is an old Gothic church. It’s an amazing site, and their museum across the piazza was great. The top photo was taken from atop the church – lots of opportunities there for great black and white photos.

Bank of Electric Cars

Small vehicles rule Europe. Milan apparently has some sort of electric car deal going on. It reminded me of the bikes-for-rent things here.

Milano's Stazione Centrale

The central train station, Stazione Centrale, was build during the 1930s by Mossolini – it’s grand and spectacular, a symbol of the nationalism that serves as the hallmark of fascism. It was hard to capture in a photo, and I never did grab a shot of the exterior.

Racetrack and Park

I arrived in Milan on Thursday before the race. The cars start running for practice sessions on Friday. Qualifying is Saturday, and the race is Sunday afternoon. There were a couple trains to Monza per hour – although I didn’t figure out the second one until Sunday – and they offered a special deal single ticket per day good for the train ride plus a bus from the Monza train station to the track, Autodromo Nazionale Monza. The track sits inside a huge park. It’s historic – built in the 1920s and served as the home of nearly all the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix. It’s where Mario Andretti watch races as a teenager. (Mario is amazing – he’s won the F1 World Championship, won the Indy 500, won Daytona.)

From the bus drop off, you have a good mile walk to the track. Once inside the track boundaries, I had another mile or so to get to the stands with my seat. On Friday, I wandered around the track. It really is a park with park-like paths, some wide, some narrow, some paved. The back part of the track is surrounded by woods. There once was an oval track with severely banked turns. Those concrete banked sections still exist. The current track runs under them in a couple places, and the roads/paths also drop below them here and there or run alongside these old sections. They haven’t been used in decades, but they were featured in the James Garner film, Grand Prix.

Fernando Alonso

The home team in Italy is Ferrari. They also have quite a history and have raced in every Formula 1 world championship. So, you see lots of red Ferrari gear and flags all weekend. The Italian Ferrari fans are known as the tifosi, and they are everywhere. For this race, I joined them. They’ve had a few tough years and unfortunately had some troubles in the race with Alonso having to retire his car. I did manage to grab a decent shot of him in his Ferrari. Panning as these cars fly by at close to 200mph is definitely a trick – one I’ve not quite mastered!

Italian Grand Prix's Winner, Lewis Hamilton

Each day, Friday to Sunday, there were more people at the track. I figured it would be lighter for practice on Friday, but it’s surprising how many people come out only on race day. Besides the F1 race, there are support races with the GP2 and GP3 open-wheel cars – many up-coming young drivers may well drive F1 some day – and a Porsche class. So, there are things going on on-track throughout each day.

At the end of the Grand Prix, the fans jumped the fence and scrambled to get a glimpse of the podium ceremony. It stands out over the track near the start/finish line. By the time I got close, most of the ceremony and interviews were done. I was somewhat behind the podium and someone’s huge Ferrari flag on a 30 foot pole kept blowing and obscuring the view. But before winner Lewis Hamilton left the podium, he turned and held up his trophy and grinned to those of us in back. It was great, the flag dropped for a moment, and I had a shot. Thank you, Lewis!

Venezia, Italy

On Monday after the race, I headed to Venice where Lynne and I were to meet up. Since I was only a couple hundred yards from the train station, my trip was fine. Arriving in Venice, I just had to make my way to our hotel from the Venice train station. This involved riding one of the vaporettos, a water bus. Venice is a collection of islands. There are no cars, no scooters. The only bicycles I saw were being ridden in a piazza by children. So, you take the water bus or you walk. Often, you do both! After stepping off the water bus, I had a bit of a walk which wasn’t particularly far but involved crossing three bridges. With suitcases, this isn’t terribly fun.

Venezia, Italy

Lynne’s travels were not as smooth as mine. That’s an understatement, but she did make it to Venice on Monday. I had checked in and wandered about waiting to hear from her. As I walked through the narrow streets and across countless canals, I kept thinking, “I wonder if I’d ever be able to find this place again?” Maps are hugely important in Venice. It’s so easy to lose your way, although by the time we left, I at least had a pretty decent idea how to get around the area surrounding our hotel.

While there, we actually found out some friends we haven’t seen since we left upstate NY in 1992 were also in Venice, and we arranged to have dinner together. It was an incredible happening, and it was fun to catch up with them. Sometimes, it really is a small world.

Firenze Duomo

I really loved the uniqueness of Venice. But we soon left for Florence. Lynne had already had a bit of a tour of downtown Florence on her trip from the country to Venice. She in fact took a train from Florence to Venice as the final part of that trip.

Florence is a beautiful city with tons of great art including Michelangelo’s David. This is an imposing sculpture, 17 feet high, and it’s incredible. After viewing many sculptures from ancient Rome to others from his time, there is something just different about his work. David’s face, in particular, had a life and expression others do not.

Florence has its own Duomo with the largest dome of its time, quite an engineering feat. We bought Firenze Cards which get you into many of the sites in the city and also let you skip the long lines. We jumped to the front of the line entering the Duomo, but didn’t realize until we walked inside and saw stairs that we had found the entrance to walk to the top of the church. That was over 460 stairs. I’m sure the many miles I walked at the racetrack, around Milan, and in Venice helped me make it up there. Lynne managed to make the climb as well. The view of the city was great. We later traveled across the river and up the hill to the south of the city center for another remarkable view.

High View of Firenze, Italy

From on high, you can see that the city lies in a valley surrounded by hills. It’s rather spectacular.

From Florence, we headed to our final destination, Rome.

The Coliseo in Roma

In my head, I feel Milan and Florence had a similar feeling to them. Venice was different, of course. But Rome felt mostly just big. Walking the streets of Rome was akin to walking through Manhattan. Except in Rome, vehicular traffic runs on different rules. Maybe, you could say, one rule: Stay mostly on your side of the street. Lanes are something made up on the fly. There didn’t seem to be many if any lane markings. And, like much of Europe, motorcycles and scooters just go wherever there is room.

Crossing streets can be a trick. They do seem to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalks, but you have to be clear you really are attempting to cross. And some streets are so big with so much traffic, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to attempt crossing even in a crosswalk. We managed our way across one roundabout more by finding the place with the least traffic and an island of parked buses.

Foro Romano

There is much ancient to see. I think the Coliseum was particularly noteworthy. The nearby forum was pretty amazing, too, and it appears that archeological digs are still active. To think back to the times these places were built and the amazing civilization that existed, amazing building that took place – it’s all rather hard to envision.

St. Peters in Vatican City

Nestled within Rome is the smallest country in the world, Vatican City. We took a guided tour of the Vatican museum which ends in the Sistine Chapel. I really didn’t realize how much artwork resides there nor the breadth of it from ancient Rome and Egypt to modern. Once again, I was blown away by Michelangelo’s work in the Chapel. You can then walk into St. Peters where his most famous Pieta resides. It’s so unfortunate the security that’s been needed to protect this sculpture after someone broke Mary’s hand off with a hammer. I saw it much closer and pre-damage at the New York Worlds Fare as a child with my parents. I still remember that experience.

St. Peters in Vatican City

St. Peters is quite the cathedral – huge, beautifully decorated. And, at least by American standards, old. The plaza in front of the church was filled with platforms and seats. We were there on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, Pope Francis would make his usual appearance.

My grandparents immigrated from Italy, and my mom and her relatives all considered themselves Italian. Not Italian-American, although that would be the term today. Just Italian. She never made the trip to Italy. I think she was never fond of the idea of a boat trip across the ocean or, later, a plane trip. I thought of her a lot during my time in the “old country.” Maybe more so in Vatican City. I think she’d have loved to see that (and to see the pope).

I certainly want to travel to Italy again. Next time, I’d like to go south to Foggia and to Roseto, birthplace of my grandparents. Hopefully, that will happen some day. Meanwhile, I have terrific memories and some decent photos!

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