zoom and turn

I learned this from Freeman Patterson's book,
Photo Impressionism and the Subjective Image.
Freeman is probably one of the best photography
teachers anywhere and his several instructional
books are terrific.
You hold the zoom steady and rotate the camera
90 degrees while doing a two second exposure.
Simple and fun. You may have to underexpose a
bit.

shooting video on the Panasonic GH2

I just had a one to one lesson with a person who
had a new Panasonic GH2 camera. The camera
can shoot HD video and what's amazing is that
it has a feature which acts like a teleconverter, that is,
a camera lens designed to be fitted in front of a standard
lens to increase its effective focal length. A teleconverter
gives you a longer lens length but it also diminishes
the picture quality and it requires that you open
the aperture more. With the GH2, however, in the
extra teleconverter mode, there is no loss of light or
distortion of the image. It's like having a 5 times longer
lens, so the 40 mm becomes over 200 mm.
What will cameras do next?

abstract photos

zoom and turn

I went out in the rain with an umbrella and made
some photos of my street. Sometimes it's fun to
turn the camera or zoom or do both at the same time
while shooting colourful subjects like cherry trees.
Use a long exposure of 1/2 second or 1 or 2 seconds.
Underexpose a stop, that is, use your +/- button and
put in -1 to make the pic a bit darker.