Flight From Callahan County

 Here's a black and white image of the legacy Olympus OM-System 50mm f2 Auto-Macro on a modern micro four thirds camera -- the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III. Because this prime lens was designed for SLR cameras, it's big and heavy, although the Olympus OM-System was smaller than other SLRs. The grip and the size of the E-M1 III make it work well on this camera. I would not want to use it on my smaller PEN-F without a grip attached. This copy of the lens, which I acquired used on eBay, is in good shape, and looks great on the camera. The wide rubberized focus ring operates smoothly with its wide throw. For manual focus work, I prefer this approach to the focus-range switches used on later model macro and telephoto lenses. The aperture ring with click stops is located at the front of the lens. A focus-distance scale is found at the back of the lens behind the focus ring. A Fotodiox Pro OM-MFT adapter attaches the lens to the micro four thirds camera. This lens and virtually all of t...

Skylum's Luminar 4 is scheduled for public release next week and has already been made available to those of us who took advantage of a pre-release discount back in July. Opening to mostly rave reviews, this photo editor for Windows and Mac platforms has some great new tools using AI technology, including sky replacement and quick enhancement of faces in portraits. For us black and white enthusiasts, there are also dozens of black and white presets that can be downloaded for use in Luminar. But the latest version continues the company's failure to attend to weaknesses in the emulation of the look of black and white films. This is particularly disappointing since Macphun's Tonality CK plugin for the Mac platform had the best monochrome film presets of any software I have used. I ran a test of several photo editors that reproduce the look of black and white films, comparing their "out-of-the-box" presets for Ilford SFX 200, a black and white film in 120 or ...