Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Protected from any sudden silence

I took these photographs on Saturday at Tremanskärr forests and swamps. I'm learning to know the area quite well, in fact so well that it is becoming impossible to get lost in the forests and swamps. Oh, I miss those days when I walked lost in a circle in the dense forests south of lake Kurkijärvi, when everything there was new and precious.

But still, this is a nice area, the only drawback is the noise from the road, which carries surprisingly well, and from aircraft which fly over at low altitude. Nuuksio is better in this regard, and especially Meiko, which is great indeed with the absense of man-made sounds.

Maybe I should say a few words about how I process my photographs. I import photographs into Aperture on the iMac with my standard settings, which don't do anything drastic except add a little bit of clarity to the jpegs from the LX5. In the LX5 I do the opposite in the jpeg settings, avoiding too much contrast etc.

Then I go through the photographs one by one, and delete those which don't generate any positive response. About 90-95% of the photographs get deleted right away. Sometimes there is a delay of several days when I have a lot of photographs to process. And this is my post-processing. Next I upload the photographs to Flickr to wait for a posting with a selection of the photographs to appear at some point.

Usually I don't do any manual post-processing at all, such as cropping or changing exposure/contrast etc. But sometimes there is a batch of photographs with severe underexposure, and then I may change the exposure for these photographs before deciding which I should keep. Aperture is rather efficient in this kind of use.

The LX5 has continued to work reasonably well. The earlier problems may have been due to some moisture inside the camera, as the problems have kept away now that the weather has been dry. But still, I sometimes worry that the LX5 gets really broken.

Speaking of cameras, Andreas wrote a nice posting about the new Olympus Pen E-P5. Occasionally I think about cameras with a bigger sensor than on the LX5, and the E-P5 is such a camera, causing gear lust. But equaling the versatility of the LX5 (or the LX7) would mean carrying a lens set with the camera, and I'm not really into carrying much gear with me.

(Posting title is from the poem Earbud by Bill Holm.)

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