Saturday I spent some time with my new lens. Bakersfield has many watershed areas. Some are for flood control, others are reservoirs for farmers who store water to irrigate in dry times. This is a dry time. We haven’t had any significant rain for nearly a year.

This gave me a good chance to take some photographs of some of Kern County’s resident feathered creatures.

This first bird, some type of bird of prey, I’m unable to identify. If you know it, please share in the comments.

American Kestrel looking very colorful on the power lines.

This Turkey Vulture didn’t land close enough for me to get any close ups, but looked majestic in the wind.

There was a very large flock of Egrets clinging to the last remnants of water in the quickly drying marsh.

There are dozens of different gulls in Bakersfield, but I enjoyed the quality of light here.

Surprise, these are not ducks. They are American Coots.

Killdeer

Over the holidays I grew tired of lugging around 10+ pounds of photo equipment on the chance that I might make the chance make some photos. I found myself making excuses why I wouldn’t, rather than making good opportunities to take pictures. I ended up taking more pictures with my less than awe-inspiring camera phone.

Why? Because it was there, easy to carry and was bundled with something I use to keep me connected at all times anyhow.

I had heard a few years ago of systems that were being developed and with my combined birthday and Christmas gifts, and the generous giving of family and friends I picked up an Olympus Micro Four Thirds Camera, the E-PL3.

It reminds me, slightly, of my original Olympus OM-1. That 35mm film camera was given to me by my father when I was 12 or 13. With that camera I made some great memories of high school and college. I learned about depth of field, shutter speed, pushing and pulling black and white film and how that decisive moment when you fire the shutter can help to produce a variety of images.

Now I’m able to take that feeling of the manual focus camera and use it on today’s technology. It isn’t quite the same, and the lenses that are built for the micro four thirds system are infinitely more pocketable.

I’ve picked up a few pancake lenses to take with me. Three lenses, two batteries and the bag weight less than just the body on my Canon 7-D with the lightest lens I have.

I’m hoping to make some great images in 2012.

As I first read here, Exposing to the right is an interesting theory. I had to test it.

I posted this at mu-43.com and decided to make it more publicly available.

Coming from a film training background, and shooting in raw ever since my 20d seven years ago; I first learned of Exposing to the right via mu-43.com and pekkapotka.

No way, I thought. That can’t be true. I liked the grit of my old TMAX3200 at concerts in Los Angeles. I always underexposed. It worked.

I was determined to prove someone wrong about ETTR. It turns out, I only proved myself wrong.

I performed this test on a stairway at home.

I did this test handheld, at night, with one light source at ISO 1600. Given my one week of experience with the PEN system so far, I expect lots of chunky grainy noise as the ISO is pushed higher.

Under these circumstances, ETTR shines as the way to shoot RAW for: low light, handheld, high iso. Feel free to click through and check my EXIF data.

And yes, my focus point changed for the correctly metered image, giving a softness to the detail area, but for the purpose of illustrating ETTR, it wasn’t necessary to shoot again.

All of these images have zero post processing other than adjusting 1 exposure to compensate for the over / underexposure in ACR. No sharpening, nothing.

First, exposed to the left:

Just like I learned on my first Olympus OM-1 in grade school. Sometimes you gotta under expose. And the result:

Ah the noise, so familiar.

Second: Exposed like a meter reader must:

Not bad. Not sharp either. But were looking at detail here.

Third: Exposed to the right like a mad scientist:

What the What? That worked?

What, you say? You want detail? OK.

100 percent crop of all three are here for your review

Exposed to the left:

Exposed center:

Exposed to the right:

Just a reminder, to make it more clear.

These were 3 different raw files. I used the same aperture and adjusted shutter speed to expose to the right and the left of correct exposure — according to meter — by one stop.

Each file was then pushed or pulled one stop in Adobe Camera Raw, depending on which direction it needed to go, to return to what normal would have been. The then correctly exposed image remains unmodified.

Proof enough for me. Won’t use it all the time. But this experiment was well worth it for me. Certainly a test worth trying for yourself if you have an Olympus PEN system.