After 4 days back in the UK following on from my visit to Amsterdam, I was back at an airport. This time, I decided that being as I was on a work trip, alone, I could carry a bag of camera gear and it wouldn't get in the way of a holiday vibe. With my A7R and an assortment of focal lengths, I was ready to go.
Flight time to Vienna was around 2 hours, which is less than the time it takes to fly from Tokyo to Okinawa. Barely enough time to tuck in to the feast of a sandwich I was given, and make my way through some gin & tonic.
I am often asked questions about my post processing. I use Lightroom (LR5.6 at the time of writing) only; I used to use Aperture many years ago (stopped when LR3 was released), knowing that Apple would simply can it and go mainstream. They have. Apple tend to do that, at least in recent years. It's one of the reasons I dumped the iPhone at the gorgeous iPhone 4. Endless iPhone X then XS variant a year later became increasingly boring, and popular. I currently use a Lumia 930; the only one I have ever seen in the wild.
Anyway, I am often asked about processing, but that's something of a difficult question to answer. I have a preset or two of my own in Lightroom, which I have made after many years of raw-file conversion, which I feel suit my style and provide me with images I wish to share. In a nutshell, I spend only 1-2 minutes per file, usually giving contrast a punch via curves, and then work on white balance and toning.
Why did I go to Vienna? For EGU 2015 of course! What do you mean, you've never heard of the EGU?! It's the European Geophysical Union annual meeting at the Austria Center (above), in Vienna. I gave a very interesting talk (ho ho), attended even more interesting talks, and manned an exhibition booth for the week.
The above photo is taken with the lovely little Voigtländer Super-Wide 15mm F4.5, a variant of which I first tested on my NEX-7 almost exactly a year ago. On a full-frame camera, this lens is wide. Due to the sensor glass of the A7R, and the short distance between the rear glass element and sensor glass, there are some issues with using this lens on this camera, but as you can see above, it's brilliant for black and white, and pretty nice with colour images, if you take some care composing (see below).
As I said, I had a bag of lenses with me. One of these was the very nice Contax Yashica mount Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm f2.8. This lens has very nice contrast, almost no distortion, and makes a nice change from 35mm.
There's no exif recorded to the camera, so I have appended focal length and lens information myself. It was bright and sunny (as you can see), so I guess I was stopped down somewhere between f/8 and f/11 for most of these. I enjoy shooting stopped-down just as much, if not more, than wide open.
I purchased this lens for a very good price (much better than the average on the electronic 'bay), well before Sony announced their own 28mm lens (which is native, and f/2). I was thinking that the Sony lens might be a nice companion for the A7R, and then Zeiss just announced their Batis 25mm f2. And I am a sucker for Zeiss. Uh oh.
And, being as some people seem to like this shot on Flickr, I will include a bonus A380 shot taken with this lens on the A7R, to conclude the first post on my trip to Vienna.