May 07
by Alex Conu in Astrophotography, Review 0 comments tags: astrophotography, light pollution, natural night, nisi filters, review

NiSi Natural Night Filter – Photograph the Night Sky in its True Colours

The sky looked a lot better when I was a kid. It was enough to go behind my house and there were countless stars visible in a beautiful dark aquamarine sky. Well, things changed quite a bit and nowadays, light pollution is more annoying than ever. We don’t have any natural night anymore. We got used to our yellowish urban skies. It’s a huge problem for visual observations of the night sky, but it’s also a problem for astrophotographers. In order to take nice, natural looking, images of the night sky, you need to go in the middle of nowhere far away from city lights and populated places. Just a few weeks ago, NiSi launched a new filter, dubbed “Natural Night”, to help night photographers. The Natural Night filter is a light pollution killer. I received the filter from NiSi before it was launched and I started playing with it. Unfortunately, the famous Lofoten weather was against me and I was barely able to take a few shots around the islands. Then, for the whole month of April, I was in Romania and I had high hopes for better weather there. Guess what! The weather was as bad as in […]
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Jun 09
by Alex Conu in Astrophotography, Review 0 comments tags: 28, astrophotography, galaxy, magellanic cloud, new zealand, otus, review, zeiss

Shooting the Southern Skies with a Zeiss Otus 28/1.4

I took my first astrophoto around twenty years ago. With a Smena 5 camera and a 40mm f/5.6 lens – a camera not very well suited for astrophotography. Then, things got better. I had a Zenit and a Praktica, but I settled for an Olympus OM-1, probably the best 35mm film camera for astrophotography. My parents bought me a 50mm f/1.4 lens; I was hoping for an f/1.2, but it was too expensive for their budget. I used the OM-1 for many years and I fell in love with it and its range of lenses. Some more years passed, and film cameras were surpassed in performance by digital technology. As, outside my astrophotography, I was shooting with a Canon SLR. it made sense for me to choose Canon DSLR as my main camera. Being a professional photographer, I used almost all top lenses out there, no matter the manufacturer. Of course, I was using the same lenses for my astrophotography. And then, I had a problem. My expensive lenses, which allowed enough detail to print wall sized advertising photos, were not exceptional for astrophotography. What was wrong? When I was shooting wide open (and you need that in astrophotography from […]
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Jun 26
by Alex Conu in Behind the Shot, Review 8 comments tags: bouldering, camera, hiking, lofoten, olympus, outdoors, review, rugged, tg-4, tough

Olympus Stylus TG-4 – the small but powerful tough guy

In April 2015, Olympus came with an update to it’s Tough line - the Stylus TG-4. I was really interested in buying the TG-3, so when a follow up was announced I got really excited. Three weeks ago, the guys at Olympus Norge sent me a TG-4 to test for a while around Lofoten.
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TWAN - The World at Night
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