* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #860 / Revived #080 on 2024 10 09 *

Yes, I agree. I think I prefer the first as the simpler composition does not distract from the complicated flower.
The "speckledy stuff" distracts a bit, once seen, mainly because it is at odds with the otherwise smooth and attractive background, but it is not severe enough to ruin the shot.

That's a great description, Kumsal, and I really like the photo, Chris.
Others have mentioned how it conjures thoughts of imprisonment, which is true, and the fact that life is brought to the image by the bright colour of dead objects is food for thought too.
The image is strong graphically and gives food for thought and interpretation too.

Can only add my agreement to what Mike and Roel have already written. Tempting though it is, I wouldn't enhance the colours or the detail, as I think it would quickly become too much of a good thing, and a slight understatement is better. If you can call bright orangey-pink an understatement!

Yes indeed. I too like the people, although I can follow the thoughts of others, who find them distracting and prefer the ambiguity without them. So two interesting images for the price of one!

Yes, this one is superb. Even when my brain thinks it has a theory on what is being shown here, I enjoy continuing to look and trying prove or disprove the theory and simply enjoy the blue tones and mesmerising lines. Sigh!

No matter how much high or low art was used in making this, it is very attractive, in shape, in texture and in colour. You have managed to convey its shiny surface without big patches of blown highlights. It really needs to be touched and stroked, but even a good photo cannot provide that!

I can only guess how this works and I tried to understand it while I was there. Firstly, everyone is walking on a floor of mirrors (warnings are given before entering the chamber.) There are thousand of vertical strings of closely packed lights. The lights are arranged equally on all the strings so you get repeating vertical and horizontal lines of light that stretch to infinity. You walk around in narrow lanes between them. Then there are mirrors on walls and above. Then the lights keep changing in pattern and colour. You feel suspended in space. Major Tom comes to mind. Then you go nuts and try to find a way out. And when you get out you are into another chamber playing different games with your head.
Here's a couple more from the infinite crystal world space.

Hmm. Looking at these when posted they re a fair bit darker than the originals looked on my screen before posting. But you will get the idea
Please don't edit these without permission.

I cant say that the DPR Big Year birding challenges are a definitive sample. However I think I could fairly say that they are very much a representative sample.

During the submission and voting phases, neither the name of the photographer, the equipment used nor the camera settings are displayed. So results are not skewed by brand / format / settings / poster.

www.dpreview.com/challenges/ChallengesFinished.aspx?Page=1

It is interesting to note that the vast majority of Big Year first place results (and indeed top 5) are taken with OM 1.1 or OM 1.2.

The last challenge (#53) was the anomaly where the top placed OM1 was 6th - and indeed a joke reference was made about that on the m43 talk page. Looking back over the last 8 (and I know from other comments that it is across the board) it is not just that more OM1s win / place than any other camera - it is that more OM1s win / place than all other cameras combined!!! It can't be said that this is because there are more OM1 users than other brands / formats. The other forums on DPR are far more populous / active than m43 talk.

So m43 is definitely a viable format for wildlife especially when longer reach is required.

I can proudly claim a 5th place in the best non-bird challenge (2024 #34)

www.dpreview.com/challenges/Entry.aspx?ID=1250382&View=Results&Rows=4

It is not that I need to think my kit is superior in any way. As mentioned to Fireplace, the acquisition of my kit was the result of upgrading within a budget. I had no knowledge of the fact that, coupled with a long lens, an m43 camera would get me what it does, although comments did sway my lens purchase.

Some objective inspiration

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndzRIV644Xs&list=PLftsgqGE1dmbWy7xrv6IT2QWYcuA8WF5H&index=8
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-hGaV7ijuQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOmIJEsKSQ8

If you consider all the photos of birds on the www, the number of photos of birds in the DPR challenges is minuscule and therefore definitely not definitive or representative.

I still have no reason to use smaller than aps-c for birding or any other genre.

Re-visit statistics. Out of millions of voters, a correctly structured sample of 1000 can be representative. It doesn't matter how many photos of birds exist on the www. What matters in this case is that repetitive samples correlate. The larger the number of samples, the higher the correlation.

It's not that one can't get good wildlife shots with a larger sensor. It's what gives the best chance of good shots in a dynamic, challenging environment.

If you owned a FF camera, you would poo-poo everything with a smaller sensor including APS-C. You don't so you poo-poo everything smaller than what you have.

For me the proof is in the pudding. Where are all these birding photos you speak of?

Thank you Pete. I agree 😊

If the "speckledy stuff" bothers anyone they can blur it themselves to suit.

Bryan may well be correct. The micro 4/3 cameras have a particular feature that has made them popular with photographers of wild life of all forms. The latest OM cameras have built on this and argue that they are staking out this segment of the market.
The micro 4/3 cameras are about more than just sensor size. They are about the balance of the whole package. When m4/3 was created, there was a reason. FF and APS-C formats were based on the old 35mm movie film. Using this film made sense because it was widely available an alternative to the larger roll and sheet fil film formats used at that time. And so we had the development of 35mm cameras. The dimensions were based on film availability.
When digital arrived, camera makers wanted the new tech to be picked up by owners who already had expensive collections of lenses. The sensor size was based on the proportions of 35mm film and gave rise to APS-C and then FF.
Olympus and Panasonic went back to the drawing board. They suggested that there was no need to be tied to film proportions that were now irrelevant. Images formed by lenses are circular. Oly and Panasonic suggested that different proportions could in fact better utilize the circular shape of images and this would result in less loss of the image edges that occurs when circular images are cropped to give straight edges on the rectangular frames and that this would also mean smaller lenses could be used for much the same image quality. That was the origin of the micro 4/3 format. Oly and Panasonic separately developed cameras using the calculated format and they agreed on a common mount so the lenses could be shared between the cameras.
The point for wild life photographers is that considerably smaller lenses can be used and if you are out chasing wild life, this is a real plus. The next advantage was developed by Oly. Oly specialized in still photography while Panasonic has more emphasis on video. Oly therefore was more interested in stabilization via Ibis while Panasonic tended to in lens stabilization. The smaller mass of the Oly lenses gives them a big advantage in IBIS where the senor is rapidly moved. I haven't looked for a while but it used to be the case that Oly IBIS was easily the best in the business. The extra stabilization compensates for the better performing sensors in later models from competitors.
It is probably true that the sensor development (and that has to be done by the big sensor makers like Sony, and can't be done by the smaller camera makers) has not kept up with the sensor improvements on the mainstream formats. Sensor development is expensive and you have to sell a lot of them to cover the costs. Even so, m4/3, especially Olympus, has a lot more going for it as a birding system than is apparent from thinking only about the sensor size. Consider the size of the whole camera/lens package to be carried hiking into inaccessible places. Consider the image stabilization they have on the tele lenses. It's a formidable package for that purpose and the advantages of that package is widely understood by those who specialize in such things.
A couple of further thoughts. Not sure on the following. I think it was Oly who first came up with on sensor points to read AF rather than the older and nowhere near as effective contrast based system. Sony bought into Oly at that time and then came up with something similar. Pinched? Possibly, I don't know, but the AF of Oly at that time was the best around and would have been a selling point to wild life enthusiasts.
Finally, I'm not a micro4/3 user, I'm in the Sony camp and have been for many years. I have watched micro4/3 and Oly in particular with considerable admiration over that time. If I was primarily a wild life shooter, especially if I hunted my shots in the wild, I probably would have settled on the Olympus micro 4/3 system.
Another thought occurs. One of the photographic world's acknowledged master printers is/was a bloke in the USA called Ctein. Not sure if it is still available but he wrote quite a bit about the micro4/3 system and the maths of why it worked so well. If I get some time I'll try to track it down.

An edit note. Having seen how these came up, no idea why they are so dark, but if anyone wants to edit them by brightening a little, feel free.

I do like to make photos that contain visual tricks. And indeed it is challenging to shoot the gators because they seldom come out to sun till past noon, and only on days with direct sunlight, which leaves me shooting into the sun. Gators (and turtles) are highly reflective so I am forced to underexpose. Then the problem of noise. On the other hand, they hold their positions quite well for long intervals so I can take a lot of shots. Unfortunately, most of them are bad.

Topaz and I have a mixed relationship. I enjoy its tools for noise and detail in some of my elevated ISO photos or those I have to raise exposure in, but I have not yet learned how to control the tools, or perhaps they are not controllable. Old Topaz programs had that same problem - not enough user control to tame what the programs did. I really prefer the On One denoising tools but am trying to learn Topaz since it is all the rage. Hoping Adobe improves its tools enough to rely more on them.

Thanks Pete. I agree with you on all the Topaz points. I joined the Topaz AI party late and half heartedly, as I've never been satisfied with the level of user control their programs offer. I'm still trying to learn how to rein it in when and where I want to. So far I'm resorting mostly to layer masks in PS which seems onerous when you're paying that much for an add on program.

Here's the most recent article ctein offered up theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2024/03/back-to-basics-by-ctein.html which would be considered by some to be utter heresy.

I am an m43 user, and was a 4/3 user before that. My OlyEM1v3 is old by camera standards, but it has a few neat features that work well for birds and other fast moving critters like 15 year old soccer players. It's weird name is pro capture and it allows you to begin capturing photos before you press the shutter, a handy trick since my reflexes aren't quick enough to catch a sudden but unexpected movement. Some other brands have probably added it by now, along with another oddly named thing called Live Time which I won't even try to explain. It also has an appropriately named thing called Starry Sky which makes shooting night skies as easy, even handheld, as an auto mode (oddly, the camera has no generic auto mode at all). Newer O cameras have even more and better toys inside.

These sorts of innovations, along with the significant weight advantage of a kit with camera plus 5 lenses (the weight savings are mostly in the lenses) covering 12-300 at less than 5 lbs, have led me to tolerate the m43's shortcomings and learn ways to mitigate for them. (Of course I have not learned how to mitigate for my own personal photographic shortcomings). I've been tempted to get a larger sensor camera, and one day may do so, but I have used a friend's full frame Sony and didn't get any more to work with than I already had. That may have been because I didn't have full familiarity with that camera and/or lenses, but I was shooting my dam birds with both cameras bearing a 75-300 lens. By the time I cropped the full frame shot for my heron to be equal size to what he was in my m43 shot there wasn't a huge amount of difference in quality. If I'd been using high ISO's maybe there would have been more difference.

This photo is so good.
I would never think to try to improve it.

Everyone will know which camera is good for their purposes.
I don't like general statements, every sensor size has its advantages.
I suggest something to you:
Starting tomorrow, you could share your wildlife shots with your FF camera with us and I'll share my photos taken with a Lumix G9 here.
Then everyone can see whether you are aware of what you are claiming.