Seattle Times Pictures of the Year 2014

Seattle Times Pictures of the Year 2014

We enjoyed last year's Seattle Times Pictures of the Year presentation so much, we made sure to go again this year. Not only are we glad we did, but we remembered to get there early enough to grab good seats. In fact, we sat very close to where we did last year. The highlighted photographers this year were Steve Ringman and Erika Schultz.

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Ultra-wide adapter

Ultra-wide adapter

A few months ago I rented a Panasonic 7-14mm ultra-wide zoom, and had a great time using it. Since I'm using a micro 4/3 camera, it's the equivalent of 14-28mm on a full-frame camera. Unfortunately, it's very pricey and holds its value well, so the number of times I would use it doesn't justify the expense. However, I noticed that there are some very inexpensive ultra-wide adapters, and thought it would be worth the $10 to experiment with one.

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Legacy glass

One of the reasons I ended up with my Panasonic G2 is the ability to buy adapters for almost any other lens available. Because the camera has no mirror, there's plenty of room for the adapter to place the adapted lens at the correct distance from the sensor (the Nikon F adapter is a hair over an inch long). I don't have a lot of legacy glass, but have had a good time trying them out. It's also a relatively inexpensive way to play with different kinds of lenses, narrowing down where to invest in the future.

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Which lenses? So many choices!

While it can be argued that the most important aspect of photography is everything that happens up to the point the shutter button is released, in many ways equipment influences the photographer's creativity. While my equipment has changed over the years, at first I thought it was the vision and thought which happened before the shot which had the most impact. To be fair, I still feel that way, but I didn't realize (or more correctly, didn't really internalize) how much equipment enables that creativity.

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