Comparing OM-Ds

My much loved OM-D E-M1 is getting tired. The rubber skin is starting to peel. So I've taking my time looking around at further OM-D and comparing features.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W2Tq_-AWRyvPdwCNIoHPDkz5rYOvP_vgXMDisvzoqtI/edit?usp=sharing

Keep it Simple: Fill in Flash in harsh daylight

It's not hard to reduce shadows in harsh daylight, for general circumstances. Here's how.

Equipment used:

• Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark 1
• Nissin i40 (for MFT cameras, able to support TTL and HSS)

Many people who eschew using flash, are used to P A or S (Program vs Aperture Priority vs Shutter Speed priority) for ambient light shooting. P A or S can be so convenient, you feel like using it all the time. When you fit the flash on, you want the flash to somehow work in with the situation. It seems natural to think like that. 

P A or S were designed for when the camera just measures the light in the scene, computes what ISO / Aperture / Shutter Speed is right to use. When you introduce the factor of Flash, the camera now has a conundrum - the flash will only show its hand when it fires, not during liveview before you press the shutter release. So the liveview estimates for ISO / Aperture / Shutter Speed may or may not be able to be fulfilled when you click.  In this case, the camera makers so far, have made assumptions on how to make this mechanism work for P A S. These assumptions may set limits on what you want to do and you may spend more time fighting these assumptions than making forward progress.

Do the Gordian Knot thing - take a deep breath and leave P A S alone. For this situation, use Manual Exposure on the camera body and take control of your destiny.

1. Switch to Manual Exposure on the Camera
2. Ensure Liveview Boost (on Olympus cameras, the jargon is different for other mirrorless cameras) is set to OFF so that Liveview will emulate the exposure if using ambient light alone - this is typically OFF under normal use.
3. Ensure that you are not using Silent Shutter.
4. Set the ISO to fixed ISO 200
5. Set the shutter speed to 1/250th sec
6. Set the f/no to f/5.6
7. Have look at Liveview, take a shot. Make it look reasonable - darken / brighten by changing the f/no but keep the shutter speed at or below 1/250th sec.  This is what I got:

In this photo, without flash, I've adjusted the settings so that the brighter leaves are pleasant but the leaves in shadow are a little dark

8. Now fit the flash, switch it on, ensure the flash is set to TTL Auto (on the Nissin i40, there are two choices on the flash dial - "A" for standard TTL Auto and "TTL" if you want to use an enhanced mode and adjust flash brightness compensation using the dials on the Nissin i40 - choose A)
9.  and ensure that the camera has the flash icon in Super Control Panel enabled. Simply point the camera at anything (not your eyes) and click just to check that the flash will fire when you click.
10. Take a photo with the flash thus ready.

Photo with flash on TTL auto but otherwise same settings as the previous image above.

Notice in this photo, the shadows have been lightened considerably. You can now change the f/no by a little bit if you want to tweak to taste.

If the ambient light changes considerably, you might want to adjust the f/no again but I'm assuming you're using this technique because it is constantly bright and harsh and the lighting is not volatile.

If you are happy with this look, that's it, no need to read anymore. 

For those who are looking for more blur in the background and they have a lens that opens to f/2 (or brighter) which allows a shallower depth of field, this is what you do next.

11. Fit the brighter lens, take off the flash or disable the flash from triggering.
12. Ensure the lens is set to f/2 or the bright aperture that you so desire. Take a shot without the flash.  ISO 200, 1/250th sec, camera on Manual Exposure. This is what you get:

Over bright exposure, with a bright f/2 lens, same ambient lighting as the previous photos

So you see, by ambient light itself without flash, the exposure is too bright. Using Liveview, you will want to adjust the shutter speed so that the photo does not bleach out. This makes a high shutter speed necessary. 

13. Take another shot, adjust the shutter speed faster so that the photo without flash looks nice enough. Let us say, I got a photo that was nice at 1/800th sec.
14. Fit the flash, enable the flash in the camera. You will see the shutter speed drop to 1/250th and no amount of camera dial twirling will make it rise. This is the stage when you want to enable High Speed Sync (HSS).
15. On the Nissin i40 (see pdf manual), you enable HSS by pressing the lighted green button on the flash for a few seconds until a white LED blinks near the right-hand dial on the flash. Once you see that blink, you can use the camera dial to raise the camera's shutter speed past 1/250th sec. So raise the camera's shutter speed to the shutter speed that you arrived at in step 13.
16. Take the shot with the flash firing. You'll get this:

So, a similarly pleasant shot as the one you got at f/5.6 with flash. 

This new shot is similar in exposure brightness to the one you got at f/5.6 with flash. However, this is at f/2 or brighter and you now have a blurred background.

That's it. You've survived Manual Exposure on the camera body with TTL Auto and HSS on the flash and used a bright aperture like f/2 for shallow depth of field bokeliciousness.

Like what you read? Learnt something from it?

I have other flash notes too.
Jargon:

MFT	Micro Four Thirds mirrorless cameras. These cameras have LiveView so that you can see what image will look like in ambient light before you click
TTL Flash	Through The Lens metering so that the camera can measure the light that the flash produces when the flash triggers and regulate it to the image brightness you have nominated HSS
HSS	High Speed Sync - Focal Plane Shutters have a limited maximum speed when used with flash (flash sync speed), typically 1/250th sec and in bright sun outdoors, you need a higher speed than that. So HSS (also called FP mode) was invented to pulse the flash light many many times during the exposure so that the camera body allows you to use a higher shutter speed than the flash sync speed
Focal Plane Shutter	There are several types of shutter used in the variety of cameras. DSLRs and interchangeable lens mirrorless cameras tend to use a Focal Plane Shutter. A Focal Plane Shutter at a shutter speed higher than Flash Sync Speed, produces a travelling slit to expose the sensor that is less than the full area of the sensor.

Walking around Pudu market with Robin (Part 1)

I come to visit my mum and sis in Kuala Lumpur, yearly, it's a pilgrimage to my loved ones and my roots in Malaysia. One highlight over recent years is that +Robin Wong is kind enough to host me around his favourite Photo Therapy spots, often bringing some gear for me to experience.  This time, it was the 25mm f/1.2 M.Zuiko.

A few words about the lens I used most

25mm is a "normal"  field of view in Micro Four Thirds sensor format. There are other lenses in this genre - I have had and continue to have good times with my 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic Lumix pancake (the mark 1 version) that +Luke Ding sold me, second hand when I first started Micro Four Thirds. The two lenses are worlds apart in practical physicality - the 20mm is a pancake design, therefore quite short and light, less expensive, slowish in autofocus because it moves all lens elements to focus. The 25mm f/1.2 is the latest design, heavily corrected for optical performance, sharp, very fast AF, an obviously shallow depth of field at f/1.2, with the focus  clutch system for quick switch to manual focus. It is expensive, chunky and obvious, with length and  weight such that it would tip the OM-D E-M1 body forwards in balance (front heavy).

In this session, I also used my 7.5mm Samyang fisheye for some shots - it is much less bulky and expensive than the 7-14 M.Zuiko zoom but is manual focus and manual aperture.

About the images

I didn't want to carry out a lens review. I just wanted to enjoy my experience with the lens and with Robin. So these images aren't meant to be objectively delineated or critiqued but a momento of my experience and my time.

Robin, in his Shutter Therapy blog is world famous for several things, getting the max out of Olympus images, his excellent series of street portraits. You just have to be with Robin, shooting with him - he has this confidence in his purpose and his skill, his ready rapport with his subjects - one of several, very memorable masters of the craft. So when I was shooting with my Olympus E-M1 Mark 1 and this fab lens, I was feeling the heat - I had not been interacting with people and working the street for months, I had set the lens to a very shallow depth of field, requiring attention to technique, my eyesight for inspection of shots is not at a high, yada, yada, yada.

This shot above, I was very happy with. (Robin had coaxed me to try this position by the way, I had tried a less magnetic position). The subject had paused his coconut dehusking or cracking for me, and his expression, the thoughts in his eyes and his lips just convey his personality to and for me. 

The shot is SOOC JPEG from the camera, with light tonal adjustments and cropping in Snapseed for Android.

Here's the second portrait that I find magical for me. This guy had been working pretty hard, handling the chickens in this stall at the wet market. It was hot in the sun, the working environment is make shift. The workers wear gum boots because as you wash and cut  up produce, it spills on the ground and you wash the floor with running water.

Again, there is a message in his eyes and his expression is his signature. He's grasping a cheap phone, that plastic bag (yes, I know about the anti-plastic bag movement but this also shows why they have become ubiquitous) may be holding his cooked lunch. That white plastic resin chair isn't a #lonelychair by the looks of it, and the blue plastic drum is quite common to hold produce or water for rinse.

A portrait lens would have allowed me to frame his face but would have cropped out details of his environment. Moving closer to him would have exaggerated his limbs and features - I quite like this composition, distance and focal length.

People go rabid about bokeh and love to show bokeh balls. Yes, then talk turns to the size of your sensor and so on. In retail photography (weddings etc) there is a yen for backgrounds and simulated romance / staged nostalgic moments etc.... After a while, it's just a "feature" that you ask for  / buy with the photographer. I'm a bit over that for the scenes I shoot. I just want natural looking focus fall off, that's not over contrived nor ambiguous (like in a kit lens with limited f/nos).

This lens, with the two portraits done this distance, does not make background abstraction by blur, obvious. There is definite differentiation in focus though, between the different areas - a fair number of my shots were out of focus on the desired subject - I don't practise #extremeChimping, I was using Single Point Auto Focus on S-AF. The Focus and Recompose technique might be hampered by the shallow depth of field.

There's also the notorious Olympus implementation of the body framing/live viewing the shot at f/4 instead of the largest aperture of the lens - I routinely have difficulty with that on my 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic where liveview looks sharp but the actual shot has a different depth of field. I was too busy enjoying my walk this time, to notice. 

This photo above has been processed from raw with On1 Raw Photo 2017 - I noticed that her face was subtly in better light than the rest of the scene but I didn't want local adjustments. This cinematic look freshens and lifts the scene.

Robin reminded me that if the f/1.2 was difficult to achieve in broad daylight with 1/8000th sec mechanical shutter, electronic shutter has a higher ceiling.

Being One with the OM-D EM-1

Preamble

Although I'm quite used to the Olympus line of E-series cameras, each time I buy into a new model (usually several years in-between), I'm pleasantly surprised with the modern conveniences and technology improvements give me.

This time, it's the OM-D E-M1 - the top of the line Olympus. I've not ever had a top of the line Olympus - I was too late to appreciate the E-1, the E-3 felt old, the E-5 I dreamed about but could not afford. There was no E-2 or E-4.

Two things I really like - the feature of having a creative Photo Studio within the camera, in the field. I shoot both raw and JPEG - I prefer the immediacy of the JPEG and I like the Olympus JPEG signature - warm, yellow friendly, nice blues in the skies, highish in contrast, fairly reliable automatic White Balance. I like having the raw for tough shots or shots that need creative post processing.

The Photo Studio

Olympus has been evolving their Photo Studio idea with a strength of purpose. 

One feature I like, is the ability to tailor the gamma transformation curve (a.k.a. The Curve) with several degrees of Highlight and Shadow Adjustment.  This feature first saw the light in the OM-D E-M5 and it has been implemented in all subsequent PEN and OM-D models. It's definitely available on the lowest model E-PM2 (although it took a non owner on G+ to tip me off).

The new feature, first implemented on the E-M1 is the Color Creator - it has been subsequently implemented on the E-M10, E-P5). 

Using the features

Note:

These adjustments only affect the standalone JPEG and/or the embedded JPEG in the raw file. The raw file will contain metadata about the adjustments you have chosen so that you can run Olympus Viewer software on the computer to cancel or further adjust.

This is a pink rose on a cold, overcast Melbourne winter's day. Yes, the highlights have a soft pink hue, but that empathic vibe, to me, complements the rose.

My +David Washington moment - the browns are anemic without some Color Creator warming.

You could throw more light on these leaves, to darken the background. Or you could post process a vignette and darken the background. Or just use the Shadows Curve Adjustment in the Camera.

 In closing

My early experiences with the combination of Color Creator and Shadows / Highlights Adjustment are simply that - early experiences. On the E-M1, there buttons and dials to access these two features without making Magnify and Depth of Field Preview difficult.

The amount of adjustment can be more dramatic or more subtle - there is a fair amount of control for most tastes.

Ananda’s Olympus EM-1 button and Dial Preferences

This table has been moved to the E-M1 Site

The Wonder of Pricing

I’m in the midst of engaging with a new camera. It’s the Olympus E- M1. Body only - I can barely afford just that. I’m amazed at the price level though. It was in 2007 when I purchased my first DSLR - the Olympus E-510 kit with two lenses. As I matured my perceptions, I would looked enviously (but could not aspire to attain) the pro level Olympus E-5.  It’s a wonder how much progress has allowed consumers to purchase the pro level EM-1 body at a price level similar to an entry level E-510 two kit lens of 2007 or the latest people’s OM-D, the E- M10.  Psst, if you are in Australia or New Zealand get onto the EOFY 2013-2014(End of Financial Year) Cash Back at Olympus.com.au in combination with major discounts by select volume retailers.)

There are also substantial retailer discounts and cashbacks on the OM-D E-M5 if you prefer that price/features balance.

Your chance to hands on OM-D E-M1 in Melbourne