Another day, another post about a box with a hole in it that takes photographs. This one has some different features to the E-M1:

A fixed five-element F2 lens. Ten frames a second, and then the camera will analyse and present you with what it consider to be the best shot. A flash system that analyses the scene and then uses two flash lights to deliver a calculated colour temperature flash to match the scene. 1080P HD video at 30fps (same as E-M1) 120fps slow-motion video in 720p. 28 megapixel panoramas. Image processing and full social media integration built-in.

Found this rather bedraggled specimen on the balcony this morning; perhaps reminding me that I need to go on another macro hunt now that the rains have arrived.

Another day, another post about a box with a hole in it that takes photographs. This one has a few additional features over the pinhole camera I featured yesterday:

It’s the Olympus E-M1, previously substantially leaked, finally released today.

Cue outrage from various web pundits, complaining that it is too big (these are the same people who complained that the E-M5 was too small). But stick the optional grip on the E-M5 (as I do), and the E-M1 is slightly wider but a little bit lower.

A long time ago (about 2,500 years) in a land far away (China) a man by the name of Mo-Ti observed that light passing through a small hole projected an image on a surface. And that was the start of photography.

Over the next couple of thousand years, this idea was employed mainly for the study of the heavens, with astronomers and scientists building elaborate structures, or annoying their wives by taking over the living room, and then lighting a wall from a small hole that let in the light. In the seventeenth century Johannes Kepler decided it would be useful if these dark rooms with holes in them should have a name, so he called them camera obscura (camera=vaulted chamber in Latin, obscura=dark). By this time, the camera obscura was being used with a lens rather than a pinhole by artists who wanted to project an image and then draw it. Indeed there is some conjecture that some of the great artists were tracing their masterpieces inside a camera obscura rather than drawing from observation; the cads!

The lens based camera obscura became more popular; but the basic pin-sized hole technique retained a following and as is so often the case, it took a Scotsman, Sir David Brewster, to give this technique a name: pinhole photography. Although Sir David only invented the pinhole bit, the word photography had already been coined by Sir John Herschel (if you didn’t have a knighthood, you weren’t allowed to name things).

In the early part of the last century, pinhole photography died away a little, but has seen a resurgence since the 1960s as people come back to the most basic form of photography, a box with a hole in it.

I like pinhole photographs. Some pinhole photos (none of mine) are extremely evocative and artistic. I bought a Pinwide pinhole “lens” for Micro Four Thirds and I play with it occasionally; but it is not the proper pinhole experience. Pinhole photos should be taken on film using a camera with minimal controls. There should be considerable uncertainty as to the outcome. The camera should not be a modern metal contraption, it should be made of wood. It should be something like this:

A diet based on fresh fruit and veggies is all very well; but sometimes you just NEED a rhubarb crumble:

It’s all very well consuming vast quantities of fruit and vegetables; but this costs money and you have no idea how many chemicals have been chucked over or fed to your food before it is finally rinsed down and displayed for sale. How much better it would be if we could grow our own produce. Maybe one day, when we have a house and a bit of land, we will do just that; but for now we are limited to what can be produced on our condo balcony.

It’s not an ideal location. It doesn’t get much sun; but it does get more than enough salt-soaked wind to batter and discourage anything that might be attempting to grow.

As an experiment, I purchased a packet of tomato seeds and stuck a few in a pot. Some stuck their heads above the ground, so I picked the most perky and have been lavishing it with love and care (and water) for the past couple of months.

Craig, who knows about these things, reckons I will never get any tomatoes from it; but it has finally produced some flowers.

It’s almost a year since I said nice things about Sony and their willingness to innovate in the camera industry. It’s time to praise them again, although I am not sure that their current idea is going to fly.

The most popular cameras in the world are now those set within phones. They are popular because they are convenient, not because they are particularly good cameras. But if you want to stick a photo of your lunch on Facebook, you don’t need a Leica. In fact you probably don’t need a Leica for anything, but that’s another argument.

Just returned from a day trip to she who must be obeyed’s home town of Ubon Ratchathani where she was required to go and sign some papers for a bank loan to buy a house. As this required rising at 0400 to catch the early morning flight, I rather hoped I could stay at home “to keep the cats company”; but it was decided by management that I better come along in case I also had to sign something. She had a point; there are many stories of foreign husbands having to sign a waiver when their wife acquires property which states “this is nothing to do with me and it’s not my money and I promise I won’t start whinging about it in some point in the future on the Thai Visa forum”. This is actually the case with this transaction; it’s just another acquisition for she who must be obeyed’s rapidly expanding property portfolio and nothing to do with me. My money is allocated for more fruitful investments (cameras, IT gear etc). After she had completed the transaction, I pointed out that she now has the full set of a house, a condo and some land and that all she has left to buy is a boat. I caught a small glimmer of acquisitive excitement and had to explain it was just a joke.

I believe I have previously declared my love for the Total War games. Deeply strategic, turn-based gameplay, with real time battles on an epic scale when diplomacy is no longer an option.

It’s thirteen years since Shogun Total War arrived on my PC and absorbed too many of my days and nights. Next was Medieval Total War which did not impress me as much as Shogun. But then came Rome Total War and that soon became one of my favourite games of all times. I still have memories of some of my campaigns around the shores of the Mediterranean (yes, I am pathetic). “Empire” and “Napoleon” followed; but I wasn’t really hooked again until the original game was revisited and along came Shogun Total War 2.