“Downtown” – Tiffen Black Pro Mist 1/4 + CPL Filter Test.

Hi everyone,

A photo walk on a cold but very sunny morning in Bognor to try out my new Tiffen “FusionPOL” Black Pro Mist 1/4 + CPL filter which finally arrived yesterday. Olympus PEN-F camera and M.Zuiko 17mm f/1.8 lens. Let it not be said that I’m not doing my small bit to bolster the U.S economy. 🙂

A small point maybe but I tested before I went out with my computer monitors and again in the field and I like that Tiffen have put the “Tiffen” lettering at the point where one gets no polarising effect so one can easily see it and align it unlike some CPL filters where they either don’t have any marking or a very small mark that’s often hard to see. Assuming that one is at right-angles to the light source rotating the filter 90 degrees either way from a position where the lettering is at the top (or at the bottom) gives the maximum polarising effect and one can easily see it by the relative positioning of the “Tiffen” lettering. I thought I’d do a couple of full-on contre-jour shots to see how well the mist effect performed.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the filter, I’ll leave it on for while to test it out more. I’ve always been a firm believer in lens hoods and a screw-in hood does make rotation of a CPL filter a lot quicker and less fiddly especially with gloves on apart from protecting a not inexpensive lens and filter from knocks and finger marks. Just try and remember to rotate it anti-clockwise so as not to risk gradually unscrewing it. 🙂

Best wishes,

Leigh

“Another Canal Shot”

November 18, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Landscape, Leigh Kemp, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Another work from my recent return visit to Chichester Canal.

Kind regards

Leigh

Whilst I’m waiting

November 17, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Landscape, Leigh Kemp, photography, Photography equipment | 6 Comments

Hi everyone,

Whilst I’m waiting for a Tiffen fusionPOL combined 1/4 black pro mist and CPL filter to arrive which seems to be stuck on a very slow moving boat from the U.S.A, so slow it would appear that it’s being propelled by oars, I decided to pop my Kenko 0.5 black mist diffusion filter onto my Marumi Super DHG CPL filter and headed off for the nearest foliage that I could. Unlike the weather of late it was a pretty cold but bright sunny morning with only a few whispy clouds in an otherwise clear blue sky. Dressed like a cross between Nanook Of The North and the Michelin Man I set forth for the local park. In the sunshine I was overdressed, out of it I most certainly wasn’t. Even though I own quite a few I’m not an habitual user of filters but thought I’d try out this combination. My camera choice of the day my Olympus PEN-F and TTArtisan 23mm f/1.4 lens. On my way home I spotted this great eccentric car. 🙂 . The park also has the highest concentration of crows that I’ve ever seen, in places it looks like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. 🙂

Some shots:

Kind regards

Leigh

“All aboard”

November 16, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, photography | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Funfair ride, Bognor Regis, OM-D E-M1 mk 1 and M.Zuiko 12-45mm lens.

Best wishes,

Leigh

“Simply Pretty” (How does your garden grow?)

November 8, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Landscape, Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | 2 Comments

A painterly autumnal work of Bishop’s Garden Chichester. PEN-F camera and TTArtisan 23mm f/1.4 lens @ f/8.

Full-size image here : https://flic.kr/p/2rEfcgs

Kind regards

Leigh

“Solitude and a sandwich”

November 8, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, Paintography, photography, Travel | 4 Comments

Hi everyone,

Taken this morning on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning in Chichester.

Best wishes,

Leigh

Colourful Busker – Littlehampton

November 1, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, photography, Street | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Taken this morning with my Olympus PEN-F camera and TTArtisan 23mm f/1.4 lens and 1/4 strength black mist filter. This combination makes for a nice walkabout street camera. It doesn’t look anywhere near as intimidating as a large DSLR and zoom lens and using zone-focusing it works really well. I like the colour rendition and it doesn’t have the clinical sharpness of my other lenses. Gives a nice retro pseudo-analogue vibe which I really like.

Kind regards

Leigh

Chichester Cathedral 950th Anniversary Illuminations

October 28, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Leigh Kemp, photography, Travel | Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Some of my shots from yesterday evening. Chichester Cathedral 950th Anniversary illuminations which were pretty spectacular. Taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 mk II camera, M.Zuiko 12mm f/2 lens and K&F concept shimmer diffusion filter at or around f/2. I chose this filter in preference to one of my black mist filters as I wanted to keep the halation effect to a subtle minimum and not reduce the sharpness too excessively, just to add a little bit of atmosphere. Because of the lighting and to work around the crowds I chose to shoot with mechanical shutter and LCD screen, two things I don’t habitually do as I prefer silent electronic shutter to save shutter wear when shooting HDR and the electronic viewfinder most of the time.

Best wishes,

Leigh

“Pretty in the park”

October 23, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Landscape, Leigh Kemp, photography, Travel | 4 Comments

Hi everyone,

Another of my shots taken yesterday in the park with my Olympus M.Zuiko 12-50mm lens. Hard to believe that it was taken in late October!.

Kind regards

Leigh

“Pictures in the park”

October 22, 2025 by Leigh Kemp - UK-based "Paintographer" in Landscape, Leigh Kemp, photography, Photography equipment, Travel | 2 Comments

Hi everyone,

I visited a local park this morning for a photo-walk and with the express purpose of trying out my new camera rain cover modification. Although the weather forecast mentioned a possibility of rain that wasn’t really what I was interested in so much as the effectiveness of the modification in keeping the cover firmly in situ whilst walking around and taking shots. As things turned out and such is the somewhat unpredictable nature of British weather it was a beautiful sunny Autumnal morning with blue sky and wispy white clouds about which I’m certainly not complaining. 🙂 . I took my EM-5 mk I camera and M.Zuiko 12-50mm lens. Purchased years ago with my original EM-5 I camera this lens has seen relatively little usage over the years. I quickly, possibly too quickly, moved on to other lenses in this zoom range like my faster M.Zuiko 12-40mm and 12-45mm PRO lenses and my trusty workhorse Lumix 12-60mm but it is well suited for occasions like this. It’s lightweight and the construction of the lens is such that it doesn’t change length when zooming unlike the “trombone” type zooms, ergo it doesn’t cause the cover to bunch up and jam when zooming and is thus ideally suited for use with a rain cover.

I think that this lens has attracted some unfair criticism and you can pick them up very cheaply used, It also features a customisable lens function button on the lens like many of their pro-series lenses which I’ve used to quickly switch between normal aperture priority mode and a pre-programmed HDR mode, variable-speed electromagnetic zoom mechanism and manual zoom, a minimum focus distance of 20cm and a useful pseudo-macro capability. I’m not a pixel-peeper, I’ll leave that to others with nothing better to do 🙂 . I’m very happy with the rain cover modification which performed exactly as intended . Although both the camera and lens were sold as weather-sealed I’m more than reluctant to totally trust the seals after so many years but it does potentially offer another layer of protection, below some shots with minimal editing, I set out to try and capture some of the beautiful Autumnal colours in the foliage and anything else that caught my eye. I broke my cardinal rule about always fitting a fresh battery and memory card before shooting in the rain which, as things turned out, didn’t matter. The last thing one needs is having to break off shooting and find a dry sheltered place do so which puts a bit of a dampener on things (pun intended). 🙂

All the best,

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.

Anthropics Technologies: Landscape Pro Studio 3 and Portrait Pro.

EyeQ: Perfectly Clear

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.

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.