About

Who?

My name is Mihai Balan and after some effort I finished 😀 a management master   I’m in my second year in a a  student at the Computer Science faculty of the University ”Politehnica” of Bucharest. From time to time I take my camera and try to show things the way I see them. Sometimes I get nice shots, sometimes I get personal shots and many other times… boring shots 😀 .

What?

That’s my photoblog. I’ll do my best to collect here pictures that I consider personal bests. Most often they’re quite random and not chronologically ordered in any way (although a partial order relationship may exist 😛 ). They may be heavily processed or not processed at all, just as I felt they would look best.

Why?

I started this photoblog for at least two reasons. One of them was to separate the pictures from the words, thus taking the ”photoblog entries” out of my blog and creating this place where most (if not the totality) of the posts are pictures I take. The other reason was more of a ”Can I do this?” challenge for me. Though I admit I often take advantage of the «post to the future» feature of wordpress, it still ”forces” me to think and decide what to post next, so it’s a nice way of analyzing and digging a little more into my pictures on a quasi-regular basis.

Gear

I currently own an Olympus E-30 (Oliver) with a Digital Zuiko 14-54mm/2.8-3.5 plus the lenses in the Update section and a Fujifilm X10 (Em) that’s usually with me no matter where I go. Older gear, no longer by my side, include an Olympus E-510 with a Digital Zuiko 14-42mm/3.5-5.6 and a Digital Zuiko 40-150mm/4-5.6 and an Olympus PEN (Tess) with the Zuiko 17mm/f2.8 lens. Some of the older pictures where taken with my old faithful Fujifilm Finepix S5200.

Update: I managed to adapt an old 50mm/f1.8 Helios 77M taken off a Zenit ET camera so that it works with my Oly. Besides being a full manual lens, it’s a wonderful one 🙂 .

Update 2: Thanks to Ștefan I’m now the happy owner of a Zuiko Digital 70-300mm/4-5.6. Yay! I can’t wait to see if it lives to my expectations 😀

• It was nice, but thing is, I’ve never been an extreme telephoto kind of guy. Might have something to do with myopia 🙂

Update 3: After graduation I indulged myself with a little photographic gift – the Zuiko Digital 25mm/2.8. Good things come in small packages and this pancake is one of the most nice lenses I played with 🙂 .

• Lovely as it was, I decided to let it find a better home somewhere else, as Tess joined the family (yes, I know I’m… special for giving names to my gear 😛 ).

Update 4: After an impulse buy of a Revuenon 55mm/1.4 I still try to find my way around it. A very nice piece of glass, provided you can nail the focus 😀

Update 5: Following a visit to the US and a *very good* deal on refurbished lenses over at B&H a Digital Zuiko 40-150mm/4-5.6 rejoined the gang 🙂

Software

Post-processing is done mainly in Adobe Lightroom, with other touch-ups in Gimp for Windows (and sometimes, on Linux, especially the older pictures).

Photos are stored online on Flickr and some of them made it to Zooomr (which is still in beta and has some short-comings). Thus, clicking on the picture will get you to the picture page on Flickr (Zooomr) where you can see more data about it (EXIF metadata, and for some of them, even geo-location) and larger versions (for the moment, for the photos stored on Zooomr only the Medium size is available. That should be fixed soon – I hope 🙂 ).

Wishlist [new]

Here I’ll list the items – related to photography, and this blog – that I intend to buy myself soon(ish) 🙂

• Zuiko Digital 70-300mm/4-5.6 – because sometimes, 150mm just isn’t long enough 😛 (you interested in buying a ZD 40-150/4-5.6 in top shape?). Could also prove useful for portraits.
  • I keep considering selling the ZD 70-300mm/4-5.6 and buying instead the Sigma 70-200mm/2.8 HSM. Anyone has any pertinent comparison between the two? The macro end of the Zuiko is what keeps me (at the moment) from selling it.
    • Got it, never quite used it, sold it – the cycle of photo gear 🙂
• Lensbaby Composer – the newer and better incarnation of the Lensbaby v2 (it’s more of a v2.5 though). Actually, even The Muse would do 😛 .
  • Best birthday present ever 😀
• Zuiko Digital 9-18mm/4-5.6 – because wide is always fun.
• Olympus FL-50 (or maybe even the wireless version) – could you believe I made it through a whole year with the built-in flash? Actually got myself an make that two FL-36R‘s. Now I’ve got to get hold of a diffuser for it 😛
  • And a shoot-through umbrella, and a stand, and some clamps, maybe even a Honl kit 🙂
• a FlickrPro account – having only 200 pics visible at a time can be frustrating.

Contact

If you wish to contact me, just leave a comment below: