mirrorless
This is it. This is the one. I’ve found the one! Actually, the one found me! The Samsung NX1. If you’ve been holding out on investing in the mirrorless market because of your trepidations as far as performance as compared to traditional DSLRs, now’s the time to let go. It’s been exactly a year since Samsung invited me into their Imagelogger program, and in that short year, everything changed. I mean everything.
Read MoreIf you’ve ever gone on an extended hike or backpacking trip, you know that every single ounce of weight counts. An extra strip of beef jerky may not seem like a lot sitting in your pocket at home, but you WILL notice and feel every single gram of it as the sun-scorched miles move beneath your boots. So when you're packing for such a trip, weight and consideration and bare essentials are a constantly compromised necessity, and, obviously, for photographers, food and clean socks come in a distant second to camera gear. Lucky for us photographers, the new breed of mirrorless systems has changed EVERYTHING. Gone are the days of having to trudge 10-15 pounds of DSLR gear and lenses to get solid professional high-quality images. Now you can make top-shelf images AND pack an entire bag of beef jerky.
Read MoreDay 3 of this unplanned impromptu journey into the Eastern Sierras thing was a tough choice. While I was happy with what I got in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows yesterday, now that I knew the lay of the land a bit better, it couldn’t hurt to head back again, which I would have been absolutely HAPPY to do. However, I was also dangerously close to Mono Lake, California, another one on the bucket list, so I had to decide whether to turn this into 2 days of Tuolumne or 1 day of each, Tuolumne and Mono Lake, both of which, in my opinion, would have been WIN! I know, I know, tough decisions…
Read MoreSo as many of you know, I embarked on a nature and travel photography trip this past Spring to the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve shared all those pictures here and all my social outlets. This so happened to be my first photo trip in which I left the DSLR behind and employed mirrorless cameras exclusively, namely, the Samsung NX30. While this post will forgo all the reasons behind that (click here if you want to see those posts of that journey), now that the dust has settled and some time has passed, I’ve been able to reflect a bit on the incredible experience, which has proven to be a personal milestone in many ways in my photographic journey. So I figured I’d take this opportunity to share with you a few of the lessons I learned on that trip:
Read MoreSo this is just a quick wrap-up post to the Pacific Northwest Photo Trip series. As you all know by now, I have been fortunate enough to be chosen as one of 50 Samsung Imageloggers, essentially, a brand ambassador for Samsung’s line of mirrorless camera systems. And as you know by now, this is the first trip in which I battled with myself beforehand on whether or not to bring the DSLR I’m so used to and that has been the crux of my work for several years. And, well, I was pushed by my peers to challenge myself…so I did.
Read MoreToday is the day that the first part of this trip ends and the second part begins, and it switches gears a bit. While the connection to Mother Earth has been the primary focus for the past 7 days, the next several days focus on the connection to the beauty of the human emotion. If you follow me on Google+ or Facebook, you might recall a post about a month or so ago about a close friend - one of the strongest, purest, most beautiful warrior souls I’ve ever known was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She rushed into surgery soon thereafter and she began chemotherapy the very week we were up in Pacific Northwest. Seeing as how she was with her family just across the state in Spokane, Washington to begin her battle with the ‘big evil,' I jumped on the opportunity to take the 7-hour Amtrak journey from Portland to spend a few days with her
Read MoreFor the final couple of days, we returned to some of the same general areas we were at the first couple of days. This time it was raining fairly heavily and didn’t let up, so we took this opportunity to actually capture scenes with the pitter patter of the rain hitting the leaves of the trees on it’s way down, the drops dancing on the miniature tide pools and ponds surrounding the river. After a few hours playing around on the riverbank bordering Lucia Falls, we decided to head across that bridge you saw in the second post in this series near Moulton Falls, and we got on the other side of the river, which ended up just being another magical playground of various floras and faunas flanked by a grove of douglas firs.
Read MoreSo we decided that day 4 was going to be our "takin’ it ‘easy for all them sinners” day (extra points if you get that reference…). After charging it pretty hard the past 3 days from sunup to well past sundown, we were understandable a bit groggy this morning so decided to sort of ease ourselves into the day and let the day play out on its own, especially since we had already got more footage than we expected in the can. We decided to play it close to home and started off by heading into the Forest Hills Park that spoons the city of Portland from the west side.
Read MoreThe second complete day of this thing was a bit of a lesson in just going with the flow and seeing where it takes you, even if it means thwarting your original vision and plans, especially when conditions that are beyond your control dictate those decisions.
Read MoreSo this was the first full day of this thing, and the weather forecast told us it was going to be 100% chance of rain. Not exactly what we wanted to hear, but, well, that part of things we can’t control. We headed out to our first location anyway to see what would happen, and the fact that it was hailing and there was ice induced accidents on the side of the road were not encouraging signs. However, once we turned off the main highway onto Lucia Falls Road towards Moulton Falls, our first destination, divine intervention stepped in and it started to clear up. Literally, the clouds parted, and the sun began to shine.
Read MoreI'm absolutely humbled to have my second Featured Image on the Photofocus homepage. This is crazy. Thanks to Melissa Niu, Scott Bourne, Richard Harrington and the entire Photofocus team for this ridiculous honor.
Read MoreSo when he called and said he needed a ‘wingman’ for a video and photography project, I was already in. When he said he’d pay me, I lost my frickin’ mind…literally…the gig I’ve been dreaming about for…well…ever. Yes. Done. Let’s go. Can’t talk too much about the project just yet, but essentially, the man behind bringing the world’s best magicians to the forefront, Murphy’s Magic’s Director of New Product Development Jason Brumbalow, who I also worked with at VectorMount for GoPro, was recruiting me to go help and guide him through making a series of nature videos and photographs in the Pacific Northwest for a personal project. I was humbled and I was immediately in.
Read MoreSo for those of you not in my Google+ orbit, I wanted to share a set of images made last week when I went to check out the Ansel Adams exhibit at the The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. While we were prohibited from taking pictures in the exhibit itself for very valid reasons, I highly recommend checking it out if you're around...standing in front of a perfect silver gelatin print of "Winter Sunrise" almost brought me to my knees.
Read MoreSo this weekend marked a milestone in my photographic adventures - I went fully 100% mirrorless. As a participant in Samsung's Imagelogger program, I've been playing with their NX300 for the past several months and I must admit, I was extremely surprised and pleased with the quality of images it was producing. However, while I used the NX300 to produce most of my personal images, I had always brought it alongside my normal DSLR kit that I was using for jobs. However, things may have just shifted.
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A lot of you already know that I’ve been playing with the mirrorless cameras lately as one of Samsung’s Official Imageloggers. They started out by sending me the gorgeous brown leather skinned NX300 and a myriad of lenses to play with and I’ve had a lot of fun with those buggers for sure. Well, in this next stage of the program, they’ve sent out the brand new NX30, and I couldn’t be more excited! As much as I love the NX300, the one thing that my old-fashioned mind couldn’t quite get past was not having a viewfinder, so, well, that alone sold me. This one might actually get me to finally Ditch The DSLR after all! Can’t wait to share some images from this fine feller...
So I’ve been curious about them for at least a year, and have been hearing more and more about them especially in the last several months, and now I finally get to experiment with the new mirrorless camera systems myself…in a very unexpected way. Samsung reached out to me to see if I was interested in joining their Samsung Imagelogger program. Basically I’d get to be one of 50 lucky buggers who are getting cameras and gear from Samsung over the next half year or so to experiment and play with and report back on and post images from. Uhhh…YEAH!!
Needless to say, I’m pretty hyped on the opportunity to get intimate with the latest mirrorless systems and see what these things can do.
So as of Wednesday afternoon, I’ve got the first camera they’ve sent out to us in my hands, the NX300, and we just had our training session, so I preemptively apologize if my posts hit a slight overdrive. Since this is the first new camera system I’ll be using in about 2 years, as well as my first foray away from Nikon DSLRs, and, of course, my first adventure into the mirrorless space, it should be interesting to see where and what brain circuits this experience might fry or invigorate.
Anyhow, the header image above is one of the first images taken with this mini-beast, and the camera itself? Well, I must say, the brown leather color scheme is pretty shnazzy! It took me a few minutes to get acquainted with this thing (the biggest adjustment being not using a viewfinder), but once I got the hang of it, I had a blast. Anyway, only got to use it for a few hours between gigs today, but there will be much more to come soon.
If you want to follow along to all the images taken by myself and the other Imageloggers (trust me, you’ll want to follow along…The Candid Frames' Ibarionex Perello, The Giving Lens' Colby Brown, renown pro photographer Valerie Jardin, and the most unique father blogger you might ever run across, 8BitDad's Zach Rosenberg, are amongst the shutterbugs that’ll be contributing), check out www.DitchTheDSLR.com, where they’ve set up a crazy interactive map of the country as a home for the photos taken by the Imageloggers. It’s fresh now, but it’s gonna start filling up with eye-candy in a hurry!
Below are a selection from the first batch of images that came out of the NX300 in my hands.
Ok…let’s do this thing!
