No, not that old girl. I'm referring to my G1, with which I've been photographically partnered with since December of 2008.
This last Sunday I took advantage of the opportunity to document the Albuquerque Marigold Festival and Parade, part of the week's Dia de los Muertos celebrations. I brought my G1, 14-45mm and 20-f/1.7 lenses, along with an old Vivitar 285 flash.
I started out using the 14-45 in the late afternoon, then as the light faded switched to the 20. I attempted some flash shots toward dark but, as many owners of the G1 may know, doesn't play well using non-automatic flashes without some manual fiddling with flash power settings and camera aperture adjustments. And the camera's built-in flash acts like a non-automatic flash in all modes except iA, rendering automatic flash adjustment in aperture priority mode unavailable.
I limited my ISO to a range of from 100 to 800; although a newer camera or larger format may provide me with better high-ISO, I'm of the opinion that the interesting subject matter, and using the camera you've come equipped with, are more important concerns. Someday I might "upgrade," but I enjoyed using the G1 on this day, and came away satisfied with the images.
I was accompanied on my photo shoot by a friend who recently acquired a Fuji X100. We both had lots of fun. I ended up with about 450 RAW files, from which I processed and culled out 88 shots worthy of posting to my Flickr stream.
I process the RW2 files in Silky Pix, and have come to the point of deriving a personal style, over the last 3 years, that employs high contrast with brilliant colors, something that seems to work well with the subject matter in the southwest US, although it may not be favorable to everyone's taste. My aesthestic background comes from an appreciation of B/W street photography, and some images in this set I've converted from the RAW files. But, for the most part, I retain them in color, in deference to what works best for the subject matter at hand.
I've also taken to cropping many images to square format in post, depending on the subject matter; which in comparison to competing camera formats goes a long way toward minimizing the differences between micro-4/3 and APS-C formats (their respective sensors are similar in height, differing mainly in their widths; cropping either format to square reveals images of similar pixel size).
Please take a look at the results in the Flickr slideshow,
here.
I've also written a piece about my shooting experience, on
my blog.
~Joe
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