7.5 Years of the EOS-M - Post your favorite shots!

Alastair Norcross wrote:

It's really hard to pick favorite shots, because I've taken so many since getting my first M in November 2013. My favorite subjects are people, followed by landscapes/cityscapes and sports. I've only recently started using my M6II for sports, so I expect I'll have a lot of favorite sports shots in another year or so. I'll post people shots in this post, and landscapes/other in another post, so as not to put too many images in one post. These are just some images that I like for various reasons, not my best shots by any means.

First, one of the first shots I took with the M after I got it on fire sale with the 22 and 18-55 for peanuts. This opened my eyes to the tremendous potential of the M as a causal portrait camera. Something about a small camera, not necessarily held at eye level, makes it easier to get relaxed natural looking shots of people. This is the first doctoral student I supervised after I moved to the University of Colorado. I also officiated at his wedding. He's now teaching at the University of Florida, and has a beautiful baby daughter. I'm hoping he will bring the whole family the next time he visits Colorado.

Next, my son in Istanbul, when we visited him in November 2014. He spent a year there after he graduated from college. He's fluent in Turkish, and was a wonderful guide to a beautiful city. The M, with 22, 18-55, 11-22, and 40 F2.8 pancake made a great traveling kit:

My wife, on the same trip. We all visited some friends for Thanksgiving. An American married to a Turk, which is why they were celebrating Thanksgiving in Turkey!

My wife again. I really like the lighting in this shot. The 22 is actually a really nice lens for this kind of portrait:

Onto the M6. This is another of my doctoral students (on the left), obviously rather skeptical of whatever has just been said. He's now in Sweden on a postdoctoral fellowship, but we still get to see him when he visits Boulder (and we saw him in Sweden last summer):

This is my uncle in the UK. He was a TV actor for many years, now retired. He played a long-running character on the soap opera Eastenders. An awful show, but he was a really good actor, so we had to watch it whenever we visited England. This was taken last summer, when we visited for a couple of weeks. The 32 F1.4 is a terrific portrait lens:

My wife, on the same trip, with the same lens. I really like the lighting again. Indoor shots with light from windows are some of my favorites. I would never use flash on shots like this. It removes all the character:

An old college friend I hadn't seen for thirty six years. We got together to do a reunion production of a play we'd been in in 1981! This is another indoor shot with just window light. Again, I love the images from the 22:

Another grad student at Colorado. He is now in China on a postdoctoral fellowship (they do get around). This shot reminds me of something from the Russian revolution. Someone on trial for unSoviet activities, perhaps? The actual situation wasn't anything like that:

And another grad student, looking (and being) very pensive:

And finally, a couple with the M6II, the best M yet. The same grad student, after he became a father and all pensiveness was banished by lack of sleep :):

And one with my latest favorite lens, the Sigma 56 F1.4. I have lots of great head and shoulders portraits with this lens already, but I love this one for the lighting:

As you can see, I'm quite fond of black and white. I grew up learning photography on B&W film, bulk loaded and developed in the darkroom I made in the cellar of the London house where I lived as a child. LR makes B&W conversions really easy, and the Canon Pixma Pro-100 makes fabulous B&W prints, both on Canon paper, and on art rag paper. I'm getting better results from that printer than from my darkroom.

I like these types of people shots, they reveal moods of the moment. Thank you for sharing!

When people share actual photos they've taken, for me they earn a bigger seat at the table in this forum. I've seen so many armchair bashers who have not shared a single image.