Family Day At Margam Lake And Abbey

Its still the school holidays! It feels like they’ve been going on for ages. Anyway, although it was a bit damp and horrible today, we just had to take the boys out. We decided to go to one of our favourite places and explore, and that’s just what we did! I took the camera as well of course!

Margam is a huge country estate only a couple of miles from our house. There’s a lot to discover, and we’ve been there many times. Today though, we took a slightly different detour from our usual path, and climbed a steep, muddy hill, seen plenty of greenery and generally had a great time. We finished off by visiting the Abbey, a place that the rest of the family had not seen the inside of before. It was such a great day!

Armed with my tiny new Olympus Pen E-PL8 and the 14-42mm pancake lens, I just wanted to put the camera through its paces. I want to use it like I use my phone, to capture moments, and of course, with that bigger sensor than a phone, its more than up to the task. I wanted to try the face and eye detect along with the focusing in general. I set the camera to tracking mode, so I set the focus point (central by default), and then when I move the camera, or the subject moves, the focus point follows. I like this way of shooting, it makes recomposing images much easier without losing focus. I shot in aperture priority mode, mostly wide open, and I used the general matrix metering option.

Here are the jpeg images, resized. A couple have had exposure corrected. With this camera, I have really enjoyed editing the raw files in my tests, but generally I want to use it as a point and shoot kinda camera using jpegs where possible, although, that said, I have just edited some of the raw images from within the Abbey, and they were a joy to edit! So, here is the natural colour profile:

I hope you enjoyed the little write-up and the photos. One thing I’ve learned through the last few years is that a camera, is just a camera. It doesn’t matter what it is, especially if you are just printing for yourself and posting to social media. I have not stopped using the Fujifilm, so don’t worry, I’m just testing this while it’s new, so I know it’s limitations etc and I can choose wisely when I go out with one camera and one lens.

Thanks for reading,

Mark.