Whenever my friends and family visit me in Amsterdam, I get to show them all of the best places in the area. The more often they come, the harder it is to find places they haven't been to before. But in the first few visits, the list is easy. One of those early on the list is Kinderdijk. Unfortunately, most times I have been, the weather has been terrible. Thats what made this day even more special. This time it was with my parents and we had a perfect day.
It all started with a single blog post on TheLeggett.com. A post about a new lens coming out from Noktor, a 50mm/0.95. Incredible. The images that he linked to were pretty cool, but they used this system I hadn’t shown any interest in up until then: micro four-thirds. I know nothing about it. So I started researching a little. Nothing really jumped out at me until I noticed the Panasonic GH1. Hmmm…
In the background, I have been impressed with some of the amazing videos coming out of the Canon line of cameras; always hoping that Nikon would finally get into that game as well. But it just doesn’t seem to happen. As the owner of a few incredible Nikon lenses, I really wasn’t interest in jumping ship for something that I am sure Nikon will eventually wake up to. But still, those videos are incredible.
And that’s why the GH1 looked so interesting. The GH1 does full HD: 1080p at 24fps. Hmmm. But new lenses…ugh. And then it got more interesting. There happened to be a post a little while ago talking about the new adapters from other mounts to the micro four-thirds. In fact the Nikon version even has an aperture ring to accommodate for the newer Nikon G lenses, like my 50mm/1.4. Well, that becomes very interesting. So then I started looking around for good examples of the GH1 in use with both the stock lenses as well as either Canon or Nikon SLR lenses.
One of the first that I saw was this amazing film by Philip Bloom that was part of the GH1 launch:
Wow. But then I looked for videos by normal people. People not in the film making business.
One of my favorites on YouTube turned out to be this amazing little short
Then I fell upon a few videos on a site called Exposure Room. In fact the series that totally sold me on the GH1 was a trio of videos from Joshua Morin’s Christmas vacation trip to Egypt. Here is the first one, but I definitely recommend going to the site and looking at the other three.
When I saw that one of my preferred shops in Amsterdam had it in stock, I decided to take the plunge. Now this was about 6 hours after I initially learned of its existence. I stopped by Fotobooms about 20 minutes before they closed and walked away with the GH1 with the kit lens, a 14-140mm/4-5.8. Time to start playing.
I have now had the kit for about 3 days. Its fantastic and I am shocked that the videos it produced came from my hands. But I clearly have no idea what I am doing. I am using different video editing programs and I have even less of a clue about how to edit anything. But I made a first attempt at a video and have posted it to Vimeo. Its about 4 minutes long but really should be cut down to 40 seconds…but I posted it so that in 6 months I have a starting point I can reference to see how far I (hopefully) have come. Check it out here:
I think it was just the day before that I heard there was going to be a long distance ice-skating race over in Almere in the Netherlands. This doesn't happen that often, so I figured I should go and check it out. The race was supposed to start at 7 or so in the morning so I left at 5 hoping I would beat the crowds. Somehow I had forgotten that the Netherlands is a tiny country and made it there well before 6. I was one of the first to arrive, and the only English speaker. And it was COOOLLLDDD!!! The race was pretty incredible to see, but I had to leave after a few hours because I was frozen. I had never stood on ice before and was definitely under-prepared.
The camera I had with me was my D70. At the time it came out, it was an amazing device. But compared to the D700 I bought a few months later, its low light capabilities were horrible. This was obviously hand-held and anything over ISO 1600 got awful results. Compare this to the current camera which gets better results at ISO 6400. Oh well, I still really like this shot. The streams of light in the fog remind me of a picture I took when I was 14 in one of the dining areas at Yosemite. I'll have to find that and scan it in.
This image was taken on a D70 with a 20/2.8. Topaz DeNoise and Adjust applied.
Over the last few days I have been bringing all of my old photos together to a single managed location. It's a job that's going to take ages to do, but I figure it needs to start sometime, so might as well be now. One of the groups of photos was from an international team meeting in 2006. This was on the walk from our game of laser tag to dinner. It was a 20 minute walk through an interesting part of Utrecht, which was the closest big town to our office at the time. The sun was setting and I managed to capture a few shots out of my Canon IXUS 50. Later in the evening we had dinner and I took a few shots of the table. Its amazing to see how different the table would look today. Over the last few years, our company has gone through lots of changes. And another day is done, but I am still here.
Monday, August 30, 2010 at 2:18PM 
