Yesterday I participated in Scott Kelby’s sponsored Worldwide Photo Walk.  I took part in the Jersey City edition of the walk, which had many, many such local walks literally around the globe.  I chose Jersey City because it is an area I do not know yet is still close and accessible.  I chose to bring my Olympus Pen E-PL1 instead of my Nikon gear.  I wanted to travel light and I wanted to see how much the E-PL1 is capable of.  It turns out to be quite versatile.  Let’s start by talking a bit about the camera, and then the photowalk, OK? This will effectively act as an E-PL1 camera review.

The E-PL1 has a lot of built-in presets.  The Macro setting appears capable of creating very nice bokeh, beyond what you would expect to see from the lens itself.  These 2 images were taken with a lens whose fastest aperture setting ranges from f 3.5-5.6 depending on focal length.

The presets come in 2 groups.  Filters and scenes.  The Macro is a Scene.  An example of a filter is Pop Art, which pumps up saturation and vibrance.

Another Filter is called grainy film.

I had fun playing yesterday with a filter called Diorama, which creates a tilt-shift, scale model illusion in the camera:

When you shoot with either a filter or scene applied, the E-PL1 creates a JPEG file with the filter applied.  Some take a few seconds to process in the camera before it is ready for the next shot.  This is more true of the filters than the scenes.  Most of the scenes simply apply a preset combination of standard camera settings such as aperture, brightness, white balance, etc, based on the scene you tell the camera it is shooting, such as night portrait, landscape, etc.  For the filters that do create a special JPEG, the RAw file will be unaltered.  To get both, simpy tell the camera to shoot both RAW and JPEG together.  Every image posted so far has been from the JPEG, straight from the camera without ant post-processing added.

As for the photowalk, I highly recommend it.  It is clear that photography is, for me and many others, a solitary pursuit even when done in a group.  Most of us spent much of the walk on our own, clustering together occasionally to collect a group that would soon disperse for the next leg, and to share some shade on a hot day with temps in the high 90s.It seems easier to interact with phoographers when not actually taking pictures, which is one reason social media such as twitter, flickr, and crisscrossing blog links work so well for photographers.

Afterwards, we gathered at a beer garden for lunch and drinks.  There I discovered that one lady actually briefly passed out in the heat but fortunately recovered and looked completely unscathed.  She indicated she probably hadn’t properly hydrated – make sure to do so in any hot photowalk days yourself.

The group page for the walk is quickly adding up to a lot of images.  I’m really enjoying the different visions that people brought to the walk.  People not only shot the same things in different ways, but many people shot things that I didn’t even notice.  I’d love to include a few examples, but I’m disappointed to notice that nobody else in the group appears to use a Creative Commons license, so I cannot.  Folks, unless you are in a special place professionally, the failure to use a Creative Commons license, or something like it, simply means fewer opportunities for your work to be seem.  Please consider it.   All I can do is invite readers to visit the Group Page here.

My full gallery is best viewed here at Phanfare.  It is also on Flickr, but not as pretty as the Phanfare version.  Both include a number of black and white images from the post-walk gathering.  these were among the few images from the walk where I needed to work wih the RAW file to get the full measure of highlights and shadow adjustments, due to the extreme range of light in the indoor setting with large windows.

I’d like to thank our walk leader Wade for planning such a great route, and my fellow walkers for their company.  I hope to continue seeing you all on Flickr or anywhere else you publish.