For Photographers

The photography community where I live is composed of masters, enthusiasts and learners, all willing to share their ideas, skills and favorite shooting locations.  Clubs are in Sun CIty Lincoln Hills, Auburn California and Sacramento.

My Kit - a once over lightly summary

Camera System:
Simple, portable, and relatively inexpensive.  Lumix G9 for general use and a GX85 for street and travel photography.  Common micro 4/3 lens mount.  Lenses (full frame equivalent): 24/70mm f2.8, 70/200mm f2.8, 200/800mm telephoto.  50mm f1.4 prime lens.  I rarely use my excellent and versatile Manfrotto travel tripod because of 5 stop Lumix image stabilizations.  But a need for extra careful composition, HDR, panoramas, composites and focus stacking bring the tripod out of the bag.

Why this works for me: The Lumix system with superb 5 stop image stabilization allows for low shutter speeds and offsets the noise limitations at high ISO.  I concentrate on composition and limit cropping to maximize the use of the relatively small 20mp micro 4/3 sensor.   I am able to make the occasional 20x30 prints at 300 dpi to my satisfaction.  The Lumix menu system and controls ergonomics while very full featured is among the best in comprehension, ease of use and navigation.  The micro 4/3 system has perhaps the largest range of lens choices of any system camera.

Cons: The Lumix system is nearly unacceptable for milky way captures.  With practice and careful menu setup it is quite workable for birds in flight, but it is not its strength.  It's all about tradeoffs.  

Post Processing Software and Hardware: 
​ON1 Photo Raw on a Mac Book Pro 2019 13" 16GB memory and 512GB SSD.  The 20mb image files are easily handled by this configuration and the limited on CPU Intel graphics.  I use Apple Photos with iCloud and Google drive in addition to Time Machine for backup.  I plan to use Carbon Copy Cloner as well. 

​Apple Photos and the iPad work well for importing images when traveling.  Images migrate from iPad via iCloud and Photos library to my Mac, then easy file export to ON1 when at home.  ON1 will soon have an iPad version and cross device cloud integration.

ON1 has most of the key features of Lightroom plus focus stacking and more, eg. layers and blending as in Photoshop.  All this in one package with an easy to follow interface.  Its digital asset management is simple and is based on the operating system file system with supplemental side car files and a catalog to record edit history, keywords and albums.  Fast and easy.  Can edit immediately off of any folder, even the SD card.  No importing step, just cull from a folder.  

ON1 is likely to meet my needs and encompass my likely skill level for some time.  Other packages such as Adobe's and Capture One no doubt would have their advantages and limitations as well.  I look forward to the iPpad version of ON1 and cross platform file access due in Spring of 2020.