Tag: 12-40mm

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Oxford Instameet

Oxford has a very active Twitter community, and I’ve probably made more friends through Twitter than any other way since living in the area.  It won’t surprise you to learn that many of my Twitter friends are also photographers (I feel a Venn diagram coming on…), and naturally Instagram has a growing community in Oxford.

So when I heard fellow Instagramers Natasha (aka Candy Pop) and Rosie (aka Oxford Rosie) were organising an Instameet, meet up of Instagram folk, I just had to go along. 

I met up with Natash, Rosie, and lots of people I’d never met before at the Jam Factory.  After a coffee we set off and walked along the canal and into the Jericho part of town.  I saw lots of bits of Oxford I’d never seen before – doing this with a group of people makes you feel a lot safer when you’re walking around viewing the world through a lens.

Although Instagram is a mobile photography platform I decided to take my ‘proper’ camera to get the most out of the day.  So I packed my Olympus OMD E-M1 along with 12-40mm and 70-300mm lenses, knowing that I could use the wireless function on the camera to transfer photos to my phone for editing and uploading in the Instagram app.  

As Instagram photos are square (no, I don’t believe in the new-fangled non-square formats!) I set my camera to take photos in a 1×1 aspect ratio so that I was composing correctly.  For the photos of flowers, below, I used manual focussing with the focus peaking function to get the focus and depth of field correct.

My ten photos from the day are below, and if you’d like to follow me on Instagram you can here.  

If you’d like to see the photos others took, search for the hashtag #oxfordinstameet or look up @shotatanangle, @candypop.uk, @ibasicallytravel, @jazza, @charis.magick, @annamundayox, @independentoxford, @kinshipofoxford, @benm.photo, @igersoxford, @makingforliving, @byvanessaleigh, @bazmund, @gemblina, @lifesasneeze.

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Goodwood Festival of Speed

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a big fan of cars – new, old, fast, slow, big, or small.  I’ve a special fondness for the Mazda MX-5, and am now on my third one.  You can see it in the post Happy Birthday Little MX-5 and more MX-5’s photographed at last years in the post MX-5 Owners Club National Rally.

So when Mazda ran a competition for tickets for the Goodwood Festival of Speed I had to enter… and won!  This was made even better by Mazda being the main event sponsor and launching the new (mk4) MX-5 in the UK.

All of the major car manufacturers were there, as well as areas for racing and F1 cars, old classic cars, and of course the Goodwood hill climb.  On the day I went it was possible to get passenger rides in all sorts of cars up the hill climb.  But not for me.  It seems for most of them you needed to register beforehand.  A lesson for next time!  

It was an expensive day too.  As much as I was tempted, I didn’t buy a new car.  But trying to get photos correctly framed in between the crowds of people with a high quality prime lens made me realise I needed a better quality short range zoom lens.  So as a result of the day I ended up buying a new Olympus 12-40mm lens.  Future blogs will feature photos taken with that lens.