Shutter.Stutter

“Be the official Groupie photographer and take photos like never before.

Olympus and Groupie are giving you the chance to win a job as the Groupie photographer for a month, trialing the brand new Olympus PEN Camera.

You’ll get two tickets to shoot for Groupie at up to eight gigs, including acts such as Art vs Science, The Cassette Kids, Children Collide, Yves Klein Blue and Wolfmother!

We’ll also give you a one-on-one session with professional photographer Chris Samuel, to give you some hints and tips on how to take the perfect gig photograph.

With your Olympus PEN Camera and your Official Groupie Photographer pass, you’ll be able to get amongst it and take photos like you’ve never taken before.”

Sounds pretty good hey? The only catch is that you would have to use the pen camera. I think I would be pretty frustrated at these gigs with an AAA pass in one hand and a teeny camera in the other.

Oh the upside, I read a few reviews on the Olympus Pen and it’s not as point-and-shoot as I thought. It certainly looks good.

Quick specs:
Model: Olympus EP-1
12.3MP Live MOS Sensor
Built-in Image Stabilisation
3in LCD
Micro Four Thirds Mount
100-6400 ISO
1/4000-2sec shutter
HD Video 720p
Lenses: Pancake 2.8 17mm (or standard 35mm) and 3.5-4.5 14-42mm (roughly 28-80mm)

Here’s a more detailed review.

I got my first car in April (watch out pedestrians!), and woe is me, I got my first speeding ticket this month. I’m blogging about this because, well, despite having to pay a fine, I’ve never had my photo taken like this. And first-times are always exciting.

What’s annoying is that I was only going at the granny speed of 62km/h (38miles/h)! And at noon on a Saturday. The RTA is being really sneaky with it’s 50km/h zones…

Oh, and I got a Wacom Intuos4. The fact that it’s bigger than my monitor says that I really need to upgrade my system…

CS4 ROCKS! That is my official verdict. Not that I’ve actually gotten my grubby lil hands on a copy yet, but I did go to the CS4 Roadshow at the Convention Centre this week. The new features blew my socks off.

Don’t worry if you weren’t able to attend - you can watch videos of the shows on either Adobe TV or Creative Sweet TV. Or if you prefer the live deal, Canberra is hosting the event on March 10th.

In addition to the roadshows, Adobe is also holding a series of eseminars. They’re conducted online, but are live, and presumably you can ask questions too. There’s a whole series tailored to design, photography, web and mobile devices. Sign up here.

Here’s what I love most about CS4.

Adobe Illustrator:
Multiple Artboards (long time coming)

Adobe Photoshop:
Isolation capabilities in RAW (yippee!)

Adobe Fireworks:
Codes your CSS and HTML from a wee .psd file

Adobe Indesign:
Export to .swf and automatically animates the page flip

Adobe Flash:
Eases are in and keyframes are out!

A couple of months ago I got my hands on a Ricoh GR-1 from eBay. It’s basically a very very well made point-and-shoot film camera, 28mm f/2.8 glass lens and all.

The camera came loaded with a roll of Kodak Portra 400NC - a portrait film. I had never heard of this film the time, and thought nothing of using it for landscape photography.

Surprising, the results weren’t too bad. The film seems to have a warm greeny-yellowy tint to it, along with very low contrast. So instead of the harsh light and shadow I was expecting, the photos had a soft dreamy quality. Unexpected, but not unwelcome.

Another surprise was that my little flatbed Epson 4180 Photo, as slow as it is, did a pretty good job of scanning the film. Here’s one shot from the roll, will attempt to keep scanning this weekend.