Author: DMcA

A while back I watched a YouTube video about a Czech photographer, Marek Ondracek. He takes remarkable landscape photos using the Olympus OM-1 in high-resolution mode. I was so taken with his compositions and technique that I got in touch with him and arranged to spend 3 days in Czechia in April 2025 on a private workshop.



The area we went to is called Moravian Tuscany, and is to the east of Brno, which itself is in the south-east of the country. This area exhibits a unique folded landscape, seen only in Moravia, the original Tuscany region of Italy, and in the Palouse in northwestern USA. Apart from being a very attractive wine-growing region, this area is famous for some classic landscape views, usually involving a small element of the folded landscape in dappled sunlight.



Photographs of this kind are taken at very long focal lengths, often up to 400mm, which is unusual for landscape work, but which compresses the geographic folds to produce a very pleasing image. This was my first time taking this kind of landscape photo, and the weather wasn’t ideal, but I got some reasonable images, and learned a huge amount. I hope you like them





Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon

In July 2017 my daughter, granddaughter and I went on a longish trip to the Adriatic coast of Italy. Seascape images from that trip are shown in a separate album. Most of our time was spent in the province of Apulia, or Puglia, which has the longest coastline of any in Italy. It runs from the spectacular Gargano peninsula down to the boot heel of Italy, and has many opportunities for eating and sightseeing.



This album is a selection of street and beach photographs from the trip. In addition to my Olympus E-M1 Mk II, I also took the Panasonic Lumix GM5 specifically for street photos. Both of these cameras use the same interchangeable lenses, but the GM5 is one of the smallest cameras of it’s type ever made, so it was perfect as a permanent carry for when the opportunity arose. Being Italy, many such opportunities occurred, from a sinister looking group of post-prandial priests in Trani , to a fabulous wedding in Lecce, shot from above.





Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon

In July 2017 my daughter, granddaughter and I went on a longish trip to the Adriatic coast of Italy. We started in the foothills of the Abruzzi mountains, and pottered down to Otranto on the boot heel of the country. My granddaughter was just over 6 months old at the time, and was already an enthusiastic traveller (and eater).



I took thousands of photos on that trip with my (then) brand new Olympus E-M1 Mk II camera. On returning to the UK I never considered the images for showing to anybody but family, partly because of time constraints, and partly because I didn’t think I had taken many memorable shots.



One reason for this, was the extreme contrast between light and shadow in Italy in the summer. I allowed for this by bracketing the exposure on the photos at the time, but the software technology then available made post-processing very difficult (and beyond my skill level). But recently, I came across the photos again, and using my improved skills and the vastly improved software, had another go.



The images are taken in two locations, almost all at sunrise. The first set are of the delightful Trabucci of Chieti province. Trabucci are spindly fishing jetties built out into the sea, and are very similar to the Carralet of the Gironde estuary in France (which have their own album on this site, accessible from the top menu). Some of the Trabucci have been turned into restaurants, and some are falling apart, but a surprising number are still operational.



The second set of images are of the lovely sea stack, inlets and cliffs of Puglia, just up the coast from Otranto. Unlike the British coast where there are also many sea stacks, these are a honey gold colour in the morning, and the sea is warm, so you can (and I did) swim out to them as well as take photographs.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon

A while back, I acquired the amazing OM systems pro 90mm f3.5 macro lens. This is a unique piece of optics, rather expensive, but one of the best macro lenses ever made. It sat for a while unused, as I didn’t have any particular subjects in mind. But a month ago, I was out walking in the local (Royal) park in the early morning with a friend, and we noticed the frozen tips of the ferns glinting in the low morning sun. It occurred to me that frozen tips of plants and buds might make an interesting set of images to christen the 90mm lens with. I spent a fascinating hour or so in the freezing morning light in our Japanese gardens a day later and took around 1600 images (for various reasons it’s about 50x images per view). Here are the 12 best, and I hope you like them.