John Michael Swartz

Here are some interesting odds and ends from the end of August and September. They're a bit stylistically haphazard, but it's good to till the soil and plant a cover-crop every now and then.

As with wildlife photography, I don't really do street photography. So there's one shameful grab-shot from the hip. Although tilted like a Winogrand and containing a few Winogrand-y elements, it lacks a heroic subject element (human or otherwise) that is exemplary of his work. Getting that kind of thing in an urban street photo requires way more chutzpah than I have.

There is one accidental BIF picture. One necessarily reads about bird photography when reading around the internet about using Olympus cameras, because they are very popular for that use-case. This is how I learned about the acronym "BIF". It means Birds In Flight. I didn't even register the pigeons flying through the "very busy composition" photo when I was taking it.

One thing I haven't done a lot of with the OM-D are longer exposure urban nightscapes or available-light stuff. I did a lot of that in college and my 20s, often with a tripod and film. The in-body stabilization of the OM-D is so good that I was able to get very sharp 4-10 second handheld exposures. At the longer end of that range, bracing against a tree was sufficient. The issue with longer handheld exposures isn't usually hand-shake per-se, but foward-backward movement, especially if you're squatting.

The lake photos are with the waterproof camera, just from above rather than below (see the previous post). I was able to identify the plant in the last photo by uploading it to Pl@ntNet, which was impressive. I wonder if they are using AI or what kind of AI is being used on their back end. I would like to see this plant flowering some day.