The vastly underrated Panasonic G5

For the last two-and-a-half years, I've been very happily shooting with the Micro 4/3rds system, a first step up from the compact sensor cameras I'd outgrown. I bought a GF1 which became a fantastic travel, street or documentary camera - retro styling chops, light with full manual controls and the best selection of lenses in the CSC space: fast sharp primes for churches and museums, useful all-day zooms, stabilized reach at the long end for kiteboarding and wildlife and a gorgeous ultrawide for hiking.

But the GF1 was really the first serious enthusiast M43rds camera, and as such its shortcomings niggled: I had to add the electronic viewfinder which was essential but barely usable, the metering regularly assumed I could handhold at 1/5, ISO from 800 onwards was pretty dire and 12 MP didn't give me much room to frame in post. (Yes, yes I know - go full manual and frame before you take the photo. But this was for travel, remember, and I travel with an impatient, non-photographing fast walker - sometimes there just isn't time to do it all).

So to upgrade the  body. In 2012 the obvious choice was the Olympus OM-D of course, it's won camera of the year everywhere. It promised vastly better dynamic range and cleaner ISO in the best M43rds sensor to date, sensible metering, an inbuilt usable viewfinder and those retro looks... Tempting... 

However, as you'll have guessed while I meander, I didn't buy it. 

Firstly the price - the OM-D costs twice as much as the G5! Twice!  I regularly (and riskily) left the GF1 and 100-300mm in the car at the beach when kiteboarding and such a high price would stop me from doing that.

The G5 is stocky and very much mini DSLR-like - it's not covetable in quite the same way as the OM-D, granted. But it's also incredibly comfy in the hands.There are front and rear control dials, customizable function buttons and a fantastic custom menu system: really well thought out. (According to dpreview, there are whole threads dedicated to the obscure OM-D menu system, while us G5 owners are apparently just happily getting on with things). 

 The G5 is not weather sealed, unlike the OM-D - but neither are any of my current lenses: the ziplock bag is always going to come out when it rains. The built in viewfinder is, by all accounts, identical to the OM-D's and is really quite bright and a vast improvement over the GF1. The sensor is not quite as good as the OM-D's, but there's such a dearth of G5 reviews that the pixel peepers don't have much to go on. I can say it's a quantum leap forward from the GF1, and for my purposes ISO up to 3200 is fine - that makes me very happy. 16MP is much more flexible too. 

The screen is fab with Panasonic's intelligent touchscreen interface. And it tilts and rotates fully closed, unlike the OM-D - that's important for me as when hiking it will be attached to my rucksack straps and so scraping against my jacket zip for hours. I also don't find the sensor that detects when you have the camera to your eye too jumpy at all. For silent street photos or churches, the electronic shutter will be so handy - I've programmed it on the custom button under my left thumb.

What more can I say? The G5 seems like a terrific little beast - its layout makes it easy to pick up after using a second camera, it's responsive and it's predictable. Perfect for hectic travel situations. Plus it was free! After selling my GF1 and 20mm lens (too slow and noisy when focussing, I prefer the Leica 25mm) I bought a practically box fresh one for the same cash on eBay. Result.

Prepping for Miami Art Basel

The annual scrum that is Miami Art Basel is about to begin - here's just a few of the artists we're keeping an eye on... 

ABC Berlin

Spent the weekend dipping in and out of the ABC Berlin art fair – such a nice vibe here and much more relaxed than Miami Art Basel. There are some top galleries with pieces and prices to match (if you can get them to accept your money that is, most of their works are earmarked for museums already). But also a really nice selection of medium level artists. And, this being Europe after all, there are fewer of the big spenders to swoop in and snap things up before you've even had a moment to find the bogs. Less of a feeding frenzy, more of a convivial huddle.

Ooh and I got a t-shirt with a big Z on (in case him indoors forgets my name) and a mug which I obtained by swapping the Ritter at the bottom of my handbag. That was part of a project (Give it away now by Timo Gaessner & Project Projects) about art works as currency, hence the swap. Each mug has a small portion of a text (get the free font here) describing how Americans bought thousands of artworks from the strapped-for-cash Soviet government during the early 1930's. Andrew Mellon's purchases while he was Secretary of the Treasury, alone accounted for a third of Soviet exports in one year. 

café: * * * * *

Pastrami sandwiches, beetroot/goats cheese salad, toasted brioche with truffled mushrooms, flourless chocolate torte and a really excellent cappuccino. What more could you ask?

Exporting tagged bookmarks from Evernote to Pinboard

I adore Evernote – I've got about five thousand tagged recipe notes in there, a whole lot of stuff on renaissance art as well as all the contemporary artists and galleries we keep up with. 

But I've been using it wrong for a while, to store all the random bookmarks that I used to put in Delicious. These are notes that I use mostly to plan travel (restaurants, museums to visit, audioguides etc.) and as such consist of a source URL and, crucially, the tags that identify city, type of attraction, cuisine and that sort of thing. Evernote is just overkill for that kind of use in my opinion – I rarely need to save actual content in the note whether the original HTML or my additions, it's very clunky to open the original URL, slow to save while browsing on the Mac and really slow to email in additions from the iPad. 

Since belatedly learning about Pinboard, I've been wanting an easy way to extract those urls out of Evernote while preserving the metadata. Evernote isn't very export friendly though, unless you know XML rather well. But @paulkruczynski connected the dots for me that Pinboard accepts emailed tagged bookmarks in a certain format and Evernote is Applescriptable! So here's the script I wrote to extract my tagged bookmarks and mail them to Pinboard. 

evernoteToPinboard v1.4

The script takes the notes you've selected in Evernote, creates a mail message for each one preserving the note's title, source URL and tags and sends them to a specified Pinboard email address. (Note that white space in Evernote tags is replaced by hyphens). Successfully mailed in notes can be optionally tagged in Evernote and in Pinboard to identify them. Notes without a source URL are skipped and can also be optionally tagged in Evernote. 

Bug reports, comments and suggestions are of course more than welcome – I am by no means a codemonkey (code caterpillar perhaps?) so please let me know if your computer spontaneously combusts and you would like to squash me underfoot.  

Schloss Charlottenburg

From what I understood from the audioguide, King Friedrich I waited until his wife Sophia Charlotte died to move into this, her summer palace and finish decorating the whole shebang. Apparently it was in a style inspired by her. Really, Friedrich? I think there was just a whole lotta kitsch in him waiting to come gushing out. The porcelain gallery alone is a delirium of ceramic everything, dragons, parrots, pots, a stuffed deer exiting the of the ceiling and, no kidding, a cherub lighting a fart (see gallery). There's an exuberant collection of dinner sets and silverware - who doesn't need a silver camel and an elephant with an obelisk on its back to hold down the tablecloth? Other cool Prussian gadgetery included a wind clock, attached by gears to a weathervane on the roof. There's a real impression of these overrich, overstuffed families trying desperately to outdo Heinrich down the road, even if there must have been something going on upstairs: Leibniz was Sophia's personal teacher, and Alexander Humbolt was also around a lot.

The paintings weren't my style at all (e.g. German vedute), but there was one worthwhile find in the original Watteau that inspired our Lluis Barba photo. Barba's thing is to take black and white reproductions of well known paintings and then add photo collages on top, of celebrities, tourists, random girls with nice bums. (It's a bit like the E! Entertainment version of what Thomas Struth does with his careful photos of people looking at art in galleries.) Anyway, our Lluis Barba is based on exactly this Watteau, L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1720), and shows his art dealer's shop. There are people looking at paintings in various ways (technical examination vs perviness) and a possible political commentary with Louis XIV's portrait being packed away. 

The whole palace was heavily bombed in WWII and now very much reconstructed. I wasn't so keen on the way it was run – you have to pay for a photo permit and to use their loos (on depositing 30 cents in a bowl, there's a man employed solely to open the automatic doors. There's a cost saving to be made somewhere, if only I could think of it...) But, all in, definitely worth a day out – the gardens are lovely too. 

audioguide: * * 

Informative, especially the main section, but dry. I wanted more scandalous anecdotes.

sausage: * * * * *

There's a great restaurant just inside the main gate – stonking sausages with sauerkraut and homemade mustard. The cakes also looked amazing. We will return, the Picasso museum across the road as our coverstory. 

More Charlottenburg palace photos

Neue Nationalgalerie

This is the last building Mies van der Rohe designed before his death and is definitely recognizable as one of his – a lofty, open, platformy space, all rectangular lines and glass with the bulk of the rooms on the lower level, a bit cavernous and dark. But upstairs, that gorgeous space full of natural light was empty when we went. (Well, there was a giant wooden box. Didn't go inside. Sorry, but when it says  "radical performance art" and "installation" in the same bumpf for an exhibit, my eyes start rolling towards the back of my head, and my feet start rolling in the opposite direction.) 

Anyway, the meat and potatoes here is downstairs. For the moment, they're showing the second half of their collection of 20th century art, from between 1940 and 1970. So tons of good stuff arranged really sensibly by style, letting you get a handle on a German-tinged cohort of artists (COBRA, Spur, Zero...), their interlocking influences on each other and the social context in which they were working. Loved pieces by Antoni Tàpies, HP Zimmer and Karl Otto Götz and there's more on flickr...

café: closed

Dis-aaaaas-ter, although the basement location wasn't too appealing in any case. Why, Mies, why? So much space and natural light upstairs. Here's a thought: swap the giant wooden box for the radical installation of a coffee bar with fresh Apfelstrüdel. Luckily the Gemäldegalerie is close enough to avoid hypoglycaemia.  

audioguide: * * *

Good coverage and occasionally good historical context, but slips far too often into arty waffle.  More info than that printed on the wall for individual works though, so probably worth gritting your teeth for. 

More photos from the Neue Nationalgalerie

Brandenburg gate

Short walk around the Brandenburg Gate a couple of days ago – popped in to see the audacious Frank Gehry atrium at DZ Bank, the Akademie der Künst next door and the Reichstag. Also the Holocaust memorial – those heavy, sombre stones could be quite crushing with reverence, but in the sunshine it became clear how it works as a public space. OK, it's a space with a serious purpose but the giggling teenagers playing hide and seek didn't seem out of key. Using the memorial for meetings, dates, fun and living – it feels like the right way to enjoy and appreciate the lives we have now, while still acknowledging those past horrors that will always, should always, be with us. 

More architecture photos

Hamburger Bahnhof

Eh. I would have thought that the more art I see, the less my bullshit-o-meter would ping. With all the fairs and museums we go to, I should be, at this point, able to see the artistic merit in even a Klara Liden rubbish bin. But no - I'm apparently the arty equivalent of a Daily Mail reader, opinions becoming ever more entrenched no matter the evidence put in front of me... 

But anyway – what a great space for art this is: huuuge rooms, massive halls. A tad wasted though. Starting with the obvious good bit: the Cy Twombly / Warhol / Anselm Kiefer / Rauschenberg rooms are brilliant - immense canvases and works that remind you that there's more to Andy than student posters and photo app filters. 

The rest... well, there's a fine line between artistic endeavour and "should this guy be on meds?", isn't there?

One frankly worrying exhibit is on Morton Bartlett, an artist who spent most of his professional life making, dressing and photographing naturalistic dolls. He then "got bored" (which I read as "got completely freaked out by them") and put them in the attic, where they remained until after his death. They were properly spooky, so much so that I didn't hang around to take any pics, nor did I look them in the eyes. Brrrrr. 

The whole huge architektonika 2 exhibit was... not great. There were some small architectural prints by Thomas Struth who I've got a lot of time for, but the rest was jumbled and odd. Especially the 40ft long sculpture which had taken decades to create and was basically the contents of an exploded shed, complete with preserved "stuff" in jars, old tvs, junk, paint... I just thought, my mum and dad's garage could give this guy a run for his money. The most photo-worthy bit here is the mile long, straight corridor filled with EXIT sign balloons, which I realised after walking all the way up it, but which at that point I was too hungry to go back and shoot...

cake: * * * * *

AWESOME restaurant/cafe, with tables out by the canal and nice service from waiters in aprons. We had swiss almond cake (squishy nutty filling sandwiched between pastry layers) and chocolate cream raspberry tart (pastry + ganache + raspberry mousse). Good coffee. Basically we're hoping they pull out some big guns (get the Gursky out of storage?) so we have an excuse to go back.  

audioguide: none

A shame because some of the more esoteric bits needed explaining. Or justifying. 

Hamburger Bahnhof

Pergamon Museum

I'll let you into a little secret: going to the Pergamon on a Monday (when all other museums are closed) and it's 35˚C (so every survival-minded tourist is in there) is not a stupendously intelligent plan. 

Luckily, the collection is so mammoth both in physical and cultural scale that it dwarfs all other concerns, even the 734 separate foreign teenagers I spotted, all saying "Can we go now?" in various euro languages, and futilely swiping at their data-hobbled smartphones.

The Pergamon friezes, the Ishtar gate, the Market gate, bits and pieces of Assyrian splendour... wow. Wow also to the archaeologists who thought "We'll just nip this gigantic Roman gate back a few thousand miles to Berlin, shall we? That'll be jolly!". I thought the British were bad with nicking stuff off the natives but apparently, here too, we fall rather short. 

Oooh and if you buy one of those 40EUR annual museum passes (great value), you can totally bypass the enormous, sun-baked queue and just walk straight in. There is nothing I love better than being a cultural VIP. (Well, actually, there's nothing I like better than bypassing a queue with a look of righteous entitlement on my face and a middle finger held up behind my back, but anyway. Don't judge - I'm English and it's in the genes.) If you're like us and didn't go for the super pass that includes special exhibitions, there's an  "upgrade" desk inside, so again, you don't queue. Yay. 

audioguide: * * * *

ask for headphones as they seem to ration them on busy days

café: *

Truly atrocious! One star for its very existence, but grudgingly and only because I was about to perspire from dehydration. It's a kiosk-style, "bottle of Fanta with straw"-type with only a few seats. What you would expect on a ferry connecting two remote Scottish islets, not one of the most important museums in Europe. Had run out of both still water (!) and ice-cream (!!) on hottest day of year. I mean, go to the Pergamon if you must, for the culturally unique treasures and all, but... gosh. Would it kill them to provide cake? 

Pergamon Museum

Edward Burtynsky

I love big-format, geometric, texture-based photos and if my husband loses me at an art show, it's normally because I've stopped stock still, mesmerised in front of a giant Gursky. He has to drag me away, a bit perplexed, until we reach a photo of a derelict building at which point I'm lost again... 

Anyway, those sort of "pattern" based photos are normally stunning as individual works, but can lose some of their power when you see too many of them together: "Ah, another clever composite image of Chinese fast food signs / stock market traders / whatevers". But Burtynsky's works really do make sense and enhance each other when seen as a body of work, as in this exhibition.

Oil is about the manmade effects of our use of petroleum, and the industrial, ecological and societal changes that have gone along with it. So there's giant truck racing in the USA, obligatory flag waving from the cab. Mountains of beautifully textured abandoned tyres, crushed cars, deserts full of aeroplanes and helicopters, spaghetti junctions (yes, these have been done, but he does them very well indeed). Landscapes of oil wells and the Gulf oil spill. A subtle aerial shot of islands in the Gulf of Mexico, with naturally occurring canals and rivulets, almost taking your eye away from the one completely straight channel extending to the horizon, concealing a submerged pipeline. And some truly extraordinary images of oil tankers being dismantled in Bangladesh.

the art: * * * * *  amazing, and a really interesting fashion photography exhibit too, covering the greats from early 20th century to present day

the location: * * * * *  a formerly derelict building! bring camera!

C/O Berlin

Helmut!

Helmut Newton's grave

That characteristic "Helmut Newton" style is easy to recognize, but I haven't seen so many at the same time before - two big floors at Berlin's Museum of Photography.

Seeing them one after another is a bit like binging on internet porn, following a law of diminishing erotic returns. But I loved them anyway - strong, sexy women who look like they know what they want, in bed and out.  His self-portraits show a man enjoying life, with one of those rosé-crumpled, Keith Floyd-ish, faces - a sense of humour along with a sense of his own talent. One anecdote told of him booking into a hotel when revisiting his childhood vacation spots in Germany - the receptionist couldn't get a handle on his Anglicised surname until she realised it was spelt like Isaac Newton. Slightly irritated, Helmut replied "Yes, of course he was also famous". 

But what really made me warm to Helmut was his wife, June, shown in an extended video interview. She completely shot down a question about whether her presence at the shoots had reassured the models about stripping off as they could see Helmut was a "nice married man" - no, she said, chuckling, women don't care about wives - they get what they want. And why shouldn't the girls be nude, she added, while they're still young and gorgeous? 

I knew nothing about June Newton before the show, but after some reading around she sounds like a properly fantastic woman, and their marriage and work together so interesting. I might have to go back and  watch the interview and her film of Helmut at work.

Upstairs, there's a temporary exhibition of photos from the British colonial era in India, all impressive moustaches and patronising paternalism. Apparently the habit of inflicting a family photo on bored kids dressed in their most uncomfortable Sunday best is a depressingly long-lived phenomenon. 

the art: * * *   you've really got to like HN and the Indian photos are interesting but not super-involving

Museum für Fotografie