Another non-photographic post. New gear arriving soon to make up for it, but in the meantime - more guitar porn!

One of the reasons I moved to the Panny GH-1 was that it has great video capabilities (though all DSLR's have moved into that camp these days it seems). What's great about the GH-1 now is that the firmware has been hacked to provide vastly improved bitrates, as well as lost of other useful improvements (particularly if you're in the EU like myself). Checkout DVXuser.com :: The online Community for digital filmmaking for the daily improvements that this camera is getting.

This is a...

Sorry - another non-photographic blog post...

I recently had a neck pickup rewired on my oldish (1980) les paul custom. I love it .

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This is an attempt at getting a sort of butterscotch effect on my lovely old Tokai tele. The body was originally a bit battered, so I stripped it using a mouse sander and smoothed out any wrinkles. From my understanding, this model was built using Alder, so the grain is not that obvious. It still shows through nicely enough though.

I used a white tint and then a yellow tint (nitro based). Found it quite tricky to get an even coverage, but all in all it looks quite nice. Maybe a bit...

I've had my Strat Elite for around 15 years or so. I'm sure some know of this particular model. Fender only made them for a year or so in the early Eighties. It's was quite a radical and bold departure from the norm. Some great features, and some 'what the?' design decisions. There's very little info out there on the web about this model. Maybe Fender were embarrassed about it . At least they were prepared to try something new in those days. Now it seems they're perfectly happy to just sit back...

So what's this got to do with photography, I don't hear you ask .

Well, nothing really - but I'm currently listening to my new active nearfield A7's playing some music over wifi via my squeezebox and I finally feel I've found the perfect nearfield monitors. Brilliant dynamics, that unique Adam ribbon tweeter, and - very unusually - controls on the front of the monitor!



These are really transparent...

Apologies for the 'Fox News' title, but doing lens tests is so tedious that one needs to hype them up a bit .

Right, so for this little test the mission was - gather all the Zuiko Digital Olympus lenses in my possession that can be used at a 50mm focal length. I omitted a few MF lenses that can be used via an adapter. I also omitted lenses that I have on my Canon 5D as the reason for this test was to see how the lenses performed, not how the body performed.

Methodology:...

This is the conundrum I'm faced with now, after picking up a nice 12-60mm from my usual grey market US importer.

I've always liked the 11-22mm as it's a fairly tight zoom range so you always know what you're going to get with it. It's also very sharp and has little pin or barrel distortion to comment on. However, the new 12-60mm does have a lot of nice features that overlap somewhat with the 11-22mm, and especially with the 14-54mm. On the E-3 it's a revelation in how quickly it locks...

This is a set of images that I created to examine the ISO and resolution differences between three Olympus Four:Thirds DSLR's - the five megapixel E-1, and the ten megapixel E-3 and E-400.

I was interested in how far Olympus have come with regards to one of the main criticisms of the original E-1 - high ISO noise. I think these tests show that Olympus have made great strides since the introduction of the E-1. I would be happy to rely on Auto ISO in the E-3 right up to ISO 800, with...

I present for you here a fairly rough and ready test - more to try out the new blog features on Photocamel as much as anything else .

It's often been said that one of the things that the Olympus 4:3rds system would struggle at is ultra wide angle due to the smaller sensor requiring very wide angle (in 35mm terms) lenses. The ZD f/4 7-14mm was an attempt by Olympus to dispel this myth, and largely it does do that. Conversely, a common criticism of DSLR's using the full frame (35mm)...