Reader Inspiration

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Reader Inspiration: Victor Hernandez

Posted by Matthew Durr on February 7, 2013
Posted in: Reader Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

I always look forward to hearing from readers on my site, whether they like a post, have questions regarding photography, or are even excited to get into “higher” photography by moving away from the P&S snapshot style.

Victor Hernandez is one such reader. We’ve been in contact for a little while now and through some constructive conversation we’ve settled on the NEX-6 to help jumpstart his journey into photography. He’s still getting used to focus peaking, balancing colors, and composition, but things can only improve from here. 🙂 Here’s a small excerpt from our recent talks:

Hello Matthew…

I’m BohemioVic and have been following your blog avidly…. You might recall I recently got a NEX-6 and have been asking you various questions… Thank you so much for your responses and advice… I’m digging photography so much!!!! Just a lil background of myself: I have over 17k pictures on my Mac that I have taken with P&Ss through the past 7 yrs… YES, I love photos and specially the memories… If you recall from your blog and our conversation, the NEX-6 was my big jump to real photography! Your blog has been instrumental on my approach.

This past Friday I finally received my legacy lenses; a Minolta Rokkor 58mm f/1.4 and MD 50mm f/2… Yesterday I got the Fotodiox Pro Minolta MD-Sony… Took a few shots and have been getting use to the Focus Peaking feature that the NEX offers…Here are some pics I took with the new lenses:

50mm, My friend and her daughter

50mm, My step-son

58mm, My pregnant girlfriend

Keep it up Victor, I hope to hear from you again soon!

P.S. To my readers, there will probably not be a weekly update this weekend. I’ve been bogged down with exams, an out-of-town conference, and an overall lack of sleep. 😦 As always though, I will post when I can. Take care guys and gals.

Reader Inspiration–Jason Chein

Posted by Matthew Durr on October 31, 2012
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Now that my website has been around for a fairly long amount of time, it has started to become a worldwide resource for manual-focus lens reviews—specifically when used on today’s mirrorless cameras. Though I have slowed down recently, thanks to an overload of school-work which will surely last me until Christmas, my fairly good list of reviews still keeps many coming back to compare affordable and amazing legacy optics to slap onto their digital camera. One such reader has followed my lead on going back to manual focus for sports photography (albeit with a DSLR with those awful flapping mirror boxes!). I’m glad to see the results he’s getting, they remind me of the first time I took my Tokina 80-200 f/2.8 AT-X on a d300. At the time I had NO IDEA what I was doing (compared to now, anyway), but I remember the few shots I nailed focus on through that tiny viewfinder were like magic:

Hi Matt,

Until recently, I had been looking for a solution to indoor sports photography on a budget.  Then I found your website.  Your use of affordable Nikon manual lenses for sports photography inspired me to consider trying such lenses.  Initially, I was somewhat reluctant because I shoot with a Nikon D7000, which as you know, does not have the much praised focus peaking technology for manual focus lenses.  Still, your sports photos were so sharp, so I acquired my first manual lens, a Nikon 105mm f/2.8 Ai-S.

I’ve attached a few jpeg photos from a recent swim meet, straight out of the camera with only crop edits.  All of these were shot at 1/500 sec iso1600, so the noise is definitely appreciable.  In addition, the Nikon manual focus “dot” was not the easiest to use. Nevertheless, I was able to capture a few action shots in focus using various prefocusing  strategies.

Using a manual focus lens for sports photography has injected a new challenge into my sports photography.  I can honestly say that this is now my favorite lens for short-course (25 yard) swimming photography.  I have already acquired the 180mm sibling of this lens, which I cannot wait to use for long-course (50 meter) swimming photography.  Thank you so much for using your website to breath new life into manual focus lenses.  It is a basic photographic skill that one can still enjoy and hone in this era of high tech photography.

Keep up the great website!

Best,

Jason Chien

Here are three of his attached photos I found particularly great:

Through skill, luck, or a bit of both, Jason has got “the eye” needed for eye-popping sports photography—capturing the action and the emotions of the athletes is done well in these examples. I’m flattered to hear his story as a result of coming across my own sports photography experiences. Jason, I wish you well on your manual-focus sports photography endeavors, keep up the great work! Keep in mind that some cameras, *cough* NEX-7 *cough*, handle these old optics like a charm. 😀

So, the question remains, have YOU been inspired by some of the happenings on this photography website? If so, I’d love to hear your story and see some of your work. Drop me a line at my email, I’ll get back to you real quick. 🙂

(Re-Blog) Dancing to Sculpture

Posted by Matthew Durr on October 22, 2012
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Since the following reader didn’t send me any photographs directly, I’ll have to call this post a re-blog rather than a reader inspiration. 🙂 Either way, give this guy a look:

Hi Matthew,

Since I check in with your blog every other day, I thought I’d take the liberty to tell you I have started one myself, as if anybody needs another one! I’m brand new at this so I’d really appreciate some feedback. I’ve been a photographer for many years, and now am teaching digital photography in high school. My preferred topics are travel, rock and roll, architecture, abstracts and many other things. Hope to hear from you in the near future. The site is located at www.dancingtosculpture.blogspot.com

Thanks,

Chris Bradford

Chris’ blog, Dancing to Sculpture, is an upstart photography blog started only back in September. Don’t let this fool you, Chris has some amazing photos already on his site, in areas of photography I have only started to delve in to. His street photography and abstracts are superb. In particular, I loved his three-photograph post from when he was in Havana and Trinidad, Cuba in 2009. That this extremely experienced photographer finds helpful information from my site brings a smile to my face, and really prompts me to want to get out there to take more quality photographs to share.

To that notion, all my readers, I am still consistently taking photographs. However, the busyness of school along with the non-artsy venues I am getting assigned to photograph make it very difficult to post quality material here. I have come to the realization that it is indeed no longer summer; for the time being I cannot keep up my old routine of a post at least every other day and a new lens review about every two weeks. “Real life”, as they say, is requiring too much time right now. I hope this will change soon, but for now, I will post material whenever I can simply find the spare time.

That said, you guys stay awesome, thanks for dropping by, and have a great day. 😀

Reader Inspiration–Norbert Lümmen

Posted by Matthew Durr on October 8, 2012
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In all my busyness that has fallen upon me lately, I sometimes lose track of my reader base around the world. A sizable chunk of the unique views to this site are from a non-native country, from New Zealand to the many countries in Europe. When some of those readers reach out to me with an e-mail sharing their side of photography in the world and how my website has helped inspire them, I always get a little happier inside. Recently, one such reader, Mr. Norbert Lümmen (click here for blog), sent me this encouraging email:

Dear Matthew,

During summer, when I did some research on mirrorless cameras, I stumbled across your blog and have been following ever since. I rarely comment blogposts but now I thought it was time to give you some feedback on how your series on old Nikon lenses on your NEX-7 has inspired me.

In the end of my research on mirrorless cameras my choice fell on the Olympus OM-D EM-5 together with a 17mm/2.8 and an adapter to be able to use the Canon EF-glass I already have before investing in more specific micro-4/3-lenses. There I thought especially about the EF-50mm/1.8 because I wanted to mainly use large-aperture prime lenses with the OM-D to use it in a way different to what I have done for the past few years with my Canon 50D, which had almost exclusively zoom-lenses with different focal length intervals attached to it.

So recently it was time for the first outing with the OM-D/50mm-combination and it was to a Jazz-concert on a Saturday afternoon in a local cultural center. I had to get used to the manual focusing first and it was not always easy to get it spot on. The EF-lenses don’t have an aperture ring, so the aperture was always wide open. After a lot of missed shots I got it (almost) right, at least somehow used to it. Fortunately the musicians did not move too much and if there was movement it was a good thing to try and capture it like, for example, the drummer short before hitting the cymbals or the pianist’s fingers flying over the keys in a solo.

I have attached some pictures from that concert and you can find more in my own blog and the most recent post there: http://blog.norbertluemmen.com/#post32

Best regards from Bergen in Norway

Norbert Lümmen

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