Here is the following equipment I use...
- Olympus E-500 digital DSLR 4/3rds camera
- Olympus lens adapter
- Olympus Zuiko 50mm Æ’1.4 lens (not mine, but the combo of these looks like this)
- Printed poster hung on foam board
- Kitchen Island
- Carrera track pieces
- Porsche race cars
- Regular halogen kitchen island lighing
When using a vintage Zuiko lens on a newer digital DLSR, you need to set the camera to "M" manual exposure and adjust the shutter speed manually based on lighting and ƒ stop. With the lens wide open at ƒ1.4 your depth of field is super, super short—which means your area to what is in focus is small. Most of these shots I used ƒ5.6 which is halfway open and focal depth was ok, just enough to fuzz (bokah) out the background image and Carrera track as it fades into it.
With the 50mm lens
I purchased a used beautiful unit I hand picked from the used lot at B&H Photo in NYC, mounted on a 4/3rds camera it doubles the lens size, so in essense the 50mm becomes 100mm. There is no zoom, only manual focus and Æ’ stop adjustments.
For color temperature I can manually adjust the white balance on the Oly E-500 and with my yellow halogen lights, set this to 4000K. I did some slight post camera adjusting of color in photoshot, but not much. They still have a warm feel to them.
Film speed on a DSLR is measured with ISO rating, this was set to 400. If I had more time and set up my tripod I would have set this to 100 as the originals get a little grainy on higher ISO. I shot these hand held with the camera resting on island. Hold your breath, click.
So, to try and make these look like "real" racing shots (at least without the wheels turning) I tried to place them in the camera composing to simulate shooting in real life. This means get the lens down at a scale position to the height of a scale photographer would be.
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2014 7:34 am
