I've been playing around with my new 50mm prime lens. For portrait it seems that about F5 is perfect to give a well blurred background while still sharp on the subject. Here's a test shot of Annika at the park.

Unfortunately it was extremely cold that day, after just having a nice week in the 60's it was about 33 degrees so we only stayed at the park a few minutes. This was the best of the shots.

The Olympus Zuiko Digital F/2.0 is a sweet little prime lens. Being "prime" means that it doesn't zoom. Ever. It's locked in at 50mm - which on the Olympus 4/3 system is equivalent to a 100mm lens on any other camera. This photo was taken at around 6 feet from the subject. This lens will also do macro photography, i.e. flowers, bugs, dust mites, etc. lol.

This shot was taken at F/5.0 which seems to be the sweet spot for portrait photography with this lens. It will go all the way out to F/2.0 but the depth of field drops off significantly.

I shoot all my pictures in Olympus RAW format, and do most of my conversion and most of my editing with LightZone for Linux. Occasionally though, I may have several dozen photos that I want to treat like snapshots and just make quick JPEG images from them.

The Olympus RAW format hasn't been too compatible with most of the open-source Linux tools. The standard dcraw utility gave less than stellar results, leaving exposure and color slightly off and hard to fix. I did install ufraw and gnome-raw-thumbnailer so I could get nice thumbnail images in Gnome of my raw images.

For those images I want to do a quick and dirty bulk conversion to JPEG, ufraw-batch is the right tool for the job. From a command line, while in the directory with your images simply do:

ufraw-batch *.ORF --out-type=jpeg

All of your raw images in the directory will be converted to a high quality jpeg image. There's additional options that can be added, but I found it sufficient for snapshots. And, you still have the RAW image if you ever want to clean up that one shot and print a poster!

My Olympus 11-22 wide angle lens just arrived. Here's my first three pictures taken with it, all in one shot:

That's a DigiSlave 3000 with a blue gel behind the monitors triggered by a povertywizard.

Desktop: Ubuntu 8.04 with dual 20" widescreen monitors, RawTherapee and Gimp.

I'm trying to play around with RAW image photography instead of JPG, but I've been finding Linux not very cooperative with my Olympus E-510 camera.

Then, I stumbled on a Linux beta version of something called LightZone. This thing is awesome.

Read on for a few sample images and details of my issues.My default was to try to open my RAW images in The Gimp, but I quickly found that every image was garbage, regardless of what raw image library I installed. And when I say garbage, I mean... literally just random noise.

A quick poke around Synaptic package manager presented me with something called RawStudio. Wow, if this thing worked properly, I could imagine it being the be-all end all of open-source RAW management and basic adjustments. Unfortunately this is the best it would produce:

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Just a side note on today's weather. Taken with an Olympus e-510 DSLR camera at iso 100 shutter 1/100th and aperture of f/5.6. Post processing and conversion to B&W using The Gimp.