Gear

At the moment, our household owns four cameras, one film and three digital.

My main camera is an Olympus PEN E-P1, with which I use the following lenses:

My other regularly used digital camera is a Leica M8, which I am currently using with the aforementioned Zeiss Biogon T* 2/35 ZM lens. The M8 has been a fancy of mine since I first got in contact with Leica M rangefinder photography, and for my birthday this year I granted myself the M8 plus one lens as a special present. I have since deeply fallen in love with rangefinder photography and am using the M8 substantially more than the E-P1.

The film camera – which I use when I want to relax from the digital hassle – is a Yashica Electro 35 GT rangefinder film camera. It features a 45mm f/1.7 Yashinon DX lens and a large and bright parallax-corrected rangefinder.

The third digital camera in our household is a Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR, which my wife uses from time to time (which is why the battery lasts so long ;-) ).

Previously, I used/owned the following cameras:

  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ30 (a great tool with a superb Leica lens, regrettably sold to fund the Olympus)
  • Pentax ME Super with SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7 (a decent and compact film SLR, also sold to fund the Olympus)

My “digital darkroom” consists of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 beta 2 (for RAW processing), NeatImage 6.0 (for getting rid of noise) and Paint.NET 3.5.2 (for further adjustments, mainly resizing for web).
My workflow is:

  • Import RAW files into Lightroom
  • Adjust white balance
  • Recover shadows/highlights
  • Adjust tone curve
  • Apply sharpening and noise reduction (If LR’s noise reduction routines fail (e. g. on the M8′s higher ISOs), I export a TIFF and denoise it in Neat Image.)

Sometimes I also adjust some colors, convert to b&w, reduce fringing and add or remove vignetting.
Lately, I’ve found that developing one color and one b&w version and then merging them in Paint.NET can yield some very nice effects.