Photography in one’s advancing years.

Hi everyone,

I found this very interesting video and as I’m inexorably nudging towards 70, I can fully identify with what he’s saying. My own minimalist camera choice closely resembles his. A small camera bag, one camera body, a spare battery, a small filter pouch with an absolute maximum of four small diameter filters, a lens cloth and, in my case, a couple of very small and lightweight zoom lenses which weigh in at a combined lens weight of 288g or approx. 10 oz!.

As someone who doesn’t habitually shoot many shots at telephoto focal lengths if I’m going to carry a “what if” lens, particularly when travelling, it has to be the smallest, lightest, most compact telephoto that I can pack and at 133g with a length of 5.6cms that’s my Lumix 35-100mm (70-200mm equiv.) f/4-5.6 lens which fits in the palm of one’s hand. At this weight I can live with it even if it only gets used very occasionally. It’s small size means that it’s an eminently pocketable lens which is useful. This lens nicely compliments my equally small and lightweight M.Zuiko 9-18mm (18-36mm equiv.) f/4-5.6 lens which I more than often find myself using at or towards the long end.

In the flashy promotional gear videos you always see a young, fit-looking guy bounding up the rocks with the waves crashing effortlessly carrying a backpack full of gear and a tripod with a heavy camera and lens hanging from his neck. Nowadays I couldn’t even climb up the rocks let alone do so with camera gear. 🙂 So at the end of the day it boils down to a simple choice, adapt to one’s physical limitations or give up. In total honesty do I feel slightly aggrieved that I’m not that man in the videos?, absolutely, will it prevent me from pursuing and enjoying my photography?, absolutely not!.

Kind regards

Leigh

Two Boats On The Beach

September 29, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Photography | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

A new work taken in Worthing.

Best wishes,

Leigh

The Taylor Swift Look :)

September 28, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, Photography, Photography equipment, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

I recently discovered that Taylor Swift, another Olympus/OM Systems user’s favourite look for her Instagram page is using the Olympus Vintage 1 art filter. As I shoot RAW most of the time and Olympus’ Workspace software allows me to add the art filter in post I thought, for fun, and as I couldn’t find any obliging celebreties, I’d give a few of my recent street shots of Worthing the “Taylor Swift Look”. I never thought I’d have anything in common with Taylor Swift. 🙂 All shots taken with my Lumix 35-100mm f/4-5.6 lens and Pen F camera.

Moving swiftly on, sorry couldn’t resist the pun, I’ve ordered a new filter from Japan, one that I’ve been interested in for some while now. More on that when I’ve received it and had a chance to try it out but, suffice to say, I’m quite excited to see the effect this filter has.

Kind regards

Leigh

Photo walk in Worthing with Lumix 35-100mm f/4-5.6

September 22, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, Photography, Photography equipment, Travel | 2 Comments

HI everyone,

As it’s been a beautiful, sunny, hot day I thought I’d take my 35-100 (70-200) mm lens and my PEN-F camera for a walk around Worthing. This lens is so tiny, light and sharp and it’s a real joy to use. Although street photography isn’t my genre it was fun, I particularly like the shot of the lady dancing to the rap music coming from the boom box. 🙂 I processed these shots with various Teal and Orange LUTs. Below, a few shots:

Best wishes,

Leigh

Thanks Andrew

September 18, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Photography | Leave a comment

Thanks to Andrew Bowness at Rigu for his reciprocal link to my blog from his blog.

Kind regards

Leigh

Thinking ahead (M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens).

September 17, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Photography equipment, Travel | 4 Comments

Hi everyone,

After feeling a bit “down in the dumps” following the enforced cancellation of our trip to Canada my thoughts have turned to our hopeful short city break and what lenses I might take. As it’s a city break and, as always, I want to travel as light as possible, I think that I’ll take my Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens as a main walkabout lens. This lens has strangely only ever travelled with me once before and, looking back on the trip, I took some of my favourite shots with it. At its widest end it’s a very useful ultra-wide angle 18mm equivalent well suited for architectural, interior and scenic shots and at the 36mm equivalent end a classic street photography focal length. Unlike other wide-angle zooms it doesn’t have a bulbous front element and therefore one can fit filters to it.

It’s not fast, it’s not weather-sealed and it’s plastic fantastic but it does punch well above its weight and I’ve found the image quality to be more than acceptable. I’ll probably pack a couple of other lenses like my Lumix 20mm f/1.7 and 35-100mm f/4-5.6 lenses, all equally small and lightweight as well a small selection of filters and a couple of spare batteries and that’s it. I’m also hoping to get some nice night shots.

Here’s a few shots taken with this lens:

If this lens interests you search YouTube and you’ll find some excellent reviews by well-respected photographers including Peter Forsgard, Robin Wong and Emily from Micro Four Nerds amongst others all of whom rate the lens favourably. Actually Peter and Emily have each done two reviews this lens.

Kind regards

Leigh

I’m still here.

September 11, 2026 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Photography | 4 Comments

Hi everyone,

I’ve not had a very productive Summer for many reasons that I won’t bore you with here. Our long-awaited photographic adventure trip to Canada to see my elderly 89 year old father and my sister and her family had to be cancelled at relatively short notice, fortunately I hadn’t paid out for the airline tickets and travel insurance. My wife went for a cataract operation on one eye earlier in the year and was told that they’d do the other eye a few weeks later. Every time she rang them to see when they’d be doing the other eye she was told that the clinic didn’t have the funding from the NHS. As things turned out she went for her second op. a couple of weeks ago and she can’t travel for six weeks after the op. and after being given the all clear by the optician. We are all pretty disappointed as it’s been forty years since I was last in Canada. We might be able to go for a short city break somewhere before the year’s out. I do enjoy these trips, like Prague, Bruges/Ghent, Brussels and Rome. So Hopefully I’ll be able to salvage something photographic we might try Krakow or maybe Budapest. We’re also planning to re-schedule our trip to Canada for the Spring of next year, fingers-crossed, all being well, third time lucky!.

Hope everyone’s keeping well,

Best wishes,

Leigh

As I sit here looking at my modern digital cameras I’m reminded of my first camera and, in particular, the first photograph that I ever took. Nowadays we take cameras and camera technology pretty much for granted but when I was a child I can’t remember many photographs. The only time our camera saw the light of day, and it had to be the light of day, as there wasn’t a flash, was on a few family occasions, the usual thing, school sports days, birthdays, etc.. My interest in photography didn’t start until my grandfather “loaned” me his camera to take with me on a week-long school trip, sleeping under canvas, in Snowdonia, North Wales. It was a somewhat battered old twin-lens reflex camera in which one looked downwards in to the viewfinder when taking a photograph.

I remember being very excited at being entrusted with the family camera, film wasn’t cheap and I had very little to no idea how to use it. The experience must have made some kind of impression on me as, after all these years, I still remember taking my first photograph. The coach stopped en-route at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill and it became the subject of my first photograph. Although, sadly, like my other photographs from the trip, it has long since disappeared, however, I really don’t need the photograph to remind me as the experience is indelibly etched on my mind. I wonder if this is perhaps where my interest in landscape photography stems from but that’s probably too much of an assumption. As far as I remember I was the only kid on the trip to have a camera, that’s how different things were, nowadays, just about everyone has a camera of some sort built in to their mobile phones. It also taught me to be disciplined to the point of being frugal when taking photographs as the trip was for one week and I only had a 12 exposure black and white film in the camera.

Some years later I really got the photography bug and bought my first camera, an Olympus OM-1 35 mm film camera and I went on to own their OM-2 and OM-4ti cameras and a range of lenses. Film was still pretty expensive considering I earned about £20 a week in my first job so I got in to developing and printing my own black and white and, later, colour films to help keep the costs down and make things more affordable. Not only did this experience teach me an awful lot about image-making start to finish, many of the techniques and skills that I learned in my makeshift darkroom, a small room adorned with genuine World War 2 blackout curtains fitted to keep out the light, another hand-me-down from my grandfather, these skills would re-surface and be invaluable some years later when I started working on processing my digital images.

I put myself through University as a mature student and I badly needed the money so I had to very reluctantly part with all my photographic equipment, but needs must. After I graduated I bought my first digital camera, a small fixed lens Kodak compact camera, reduced in a sale. It had, by today’s standards, a laughably small maximum image resolution of 640×480 pixels or, to put it another way, a stunning 0.4 Megapixels!. For all of this and further equipped with screw on wide angle and telephoto lens attachments, it proved to be a fabulous little camera which I took all over the place with me. Put simply, digital photography was a revelation, to me, no requirement for film, no real running costs and a lot of image capacity on a small memory card which I found absolutely liberating.

A few years before that I had discovered some free graphics editing software on the cover disk of a computer magazine and that started off my real passion for working with graphics and, ultimately, photo processing. So I then had all the tools I required to develop, pun intended and further, my interest in digital photography. Processing is where the magic starts for me, I am totally absorbed in and fascinated by the range of options that digital processing affords me. It encourages me, if, that is, I ever need encouragement, to constantly experiment with new styles, new techniques and is such an important part of my enjoyment and interest in photography.

I went on to own several DSLRs but, as I got older I began to find that they were simply too heavy and bulky. I switched over back in 2013 to Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses. My choice of MFT system was heavily influenced by my experiences with my Olympus film cameras, maybe it was, in truth, part based on nostalgia that I decided on their OM-D system. As a landscape/travel photographer I have to carry my gear around all day and the weight and bulk saving is highly significant. I’ve been very impressed with the image quality of my Micro Four Thirds equipment, it has traveled with me extensively, never let me down and I have never had cause to question my decision to go over to that format.

So my 50-plus year photographic adventure has led me from twin-lens reflex and single-lens reflex film cameras to digital cameras, from stumbling around in a dimly-lit darkroom to working with my images on my computer. I’ve heard it said on occasions, including a comment I read some while back by a very famous photographer, that cameras being so much an every-day item now and available in mobile phones etc. devalues photography. I feel quite the opposite, I firmly believe that it empowers everyone with affordable technology to take photographs and enjoy photography and that, in my opinion, is fantastic. Although I’ve very much enjoyed my personal photographic journey I do confess to feeling a slight tinge of regret that the technology wasn’t available when I started out but one can’t put the clock back and I intend to keep on embracing all these great technological advancements, experimenting and enjoying my work.

Cameras:

Olympus: OM-D E-M5 Mk II (titanium) & HLD-8G grip, OM-D E-M1 Mk I (black) & HDL-7 grip, OM-D EM-5 Mk I (silver) & HDL-6 grip, PEN EPL-5, PEN EP-5 (silver) +VF-4, PEN E-PL8 (Silver) +VF4, Tough TG-5 (red), PEN-F (silver), Canon Powershot G10, Nikon Coolpix A100

Lenses:

Olympus: M.Zuiko: 12 mm f/2, 17 mm f/1.8, 25 mm f/1.8, 45 mm f/1.8, 30 mm f/3.5 macro, 9 mm f/8 body cap fisheye, 15 mm f/8 body cap, 9-18 mm, 12-50 mm, 12-40 mm f/2.8 PRO, 14-150 mm II, 40-150 mm II, 12-45mm f/4 PRO, MCON-P02.

Sigma: ART 60 mm f/2.8.

Samyang: Manual focus 7.5 mm f/3.5 fisheye.

TT Artisan: Manual focus 17mm f/1.4, 23mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4.

Panasonic Lumix: 14 mm f/2.5, 20 mm f/1.7, 12-32 mm x2 (black and silver), 12-60 mm, 14-42 mm II, 35-100 mm, 45-150mm.

PEN E-P5, 9-18mm,12-32mm, 40-150mm II. A lightweight kit with virtually continuous coverage from 18mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto.

OM-D E-M1 I, 14-150mm II, 12-40mm PRO. . Heavier than my other kits but with complete weather-sealing. Coverage from 24mm wide angle to 300mm telephoto with some overlap for backup.

OM-D E-M5 II, 17mm, 35mm, 12-60mm. A balance of two fun manual focus lenses with a weather-sealed body and zoom lens.

PEN E-PL5, 9mm, 15mm, 25mm, 60mm, 12-50mm. Another lightweight fun kit with a zoom option.

TG-5, OM-D E-M5 mk1, 7.5mm, 12mm, 17mm, 45mm, 30mm macro. M-CON.

PEN-F, 14mm, 20mm, 12-32mm, 35-100mm. Probably my favourite lightweight day-to-day kit. Two fast primes and two zoom with almost continuous coverage from 24mm wide angle through to 200mm telephoto.

Software:

Corel: Paintshop Pro Elite 2020 & Video Studio 2019.

Skylum Software: Aurora HDR 2019, Luminar 4, Luminar AI and Luminar Neo.

DXO Labs: PhotoLab 5 Elite, Viewpoint 3, NIK Collection 6, Film Pack 5 and PureRAW 6.

Anthropics Technologies: Landscape Pro Studio 3 and Portrait Pro.

EyeQ: Perfectly Clear

ON1: Photo MAX RAW 2026

Topaz Labs: Studio 2, Sharpen AI, A.I Gigapixel, AI Clear, AI Adjust, DeNoise AI and Various legacy plugins.

Adobe: Lightroom.

GreenScreenWizard Studio Pro.

Serif: Affinity Photo

Microsoft: Image Composite Editor (Free).

Darktable (Free).

Olympus: Olympus Capture, Olympus Workspace and Olympus Webcam (Free to Olympus owners).

Sony: Movie Studio Platinum.

Datacolor: SpyderExpress display calibration device and DisplayCal software.

Lighting Gear:

Godox TT350o flash, Godox X1T radio flash trigger, Godox Lux Junior flash, LED ring flash, GVM RGB LED light, Olympus MAL-1 Macro Arm Light. Two Godox LED36 lights, Godox Litemons LED6R light. Three Bowen studio flash heads, barndoors, honeycombes, umbrellas and flash meter.