Saturday, May 30, 2015

Olympus OMD EM10 First Impressions

Ok. As you may or may not have gathered, I've made some changes in my photo equipment recently.

Hopefully, those changes will affect my photography, not in terms of my ability to express my vision, but in my desire to do so on a more regular basis. Not having to lug around a giant camera/lenses/bag should make me more inclined to go out and shoot!

The camera I switched to is the Olympus OM-D EM-10. It's the smallest (and most affordable) of their "pro" line of cameras. Not that it matters to me if the gear I use is "pro" line or not; I'm after the smaller size and smaller dent in my bank account.

I'm about 500 frames in so far, with a goal of shooting another 1000 frames this weekend. The trick to learning how to use it .... (wait for it) is to actually use it.

First impressions:
SPEED: OMG this thing is *FAST*. 8fps, crazy fast autofocus, no shutter lag, turns on instantly. This is easily the equal, and probably the better of my D300s kit. It writes 16 megapixel raw files to my SD card *way* faster than the Nikon D7000 writes to the same card. Haven't tested the high-speed-shooting buffer yet, but I bet it goes plenty fast.



COLOR: Good! Setting the WB is easy, but the camera does a pretty good job in auto. When needed, adjustments in post production are simple, as this camera shoots in RAW. Lightroom takes much longer processing these files than it does with the Nikon files, but what can you do?




ISO: As far as I can tell, the low-light performance of this camera far exceeds that of the D300s. I've included a couple examples to show some higher ISO. Haven't spent any time with it  cranked all the way up yet - but that should come later this weekend.

ISO 6400 around 1/125 sec. Totally usable.

ISO 400, hand held at 1/2 sec. Maybe a bit soft because of camera shake... but still pretty good for hand-held at half a second.

BATTERY: I can tell this is going to be my big gripe with this camera. I'm averaging 400 frames per battery. Charging time is about 4 or 5 hours. Luckily, the camera came with a battery, I bought two more, and the battery I already had for my PEN EL-1 is the same, so I have 4 batteries to swap between the two bodies as needed. I know there are settings I can change to get more out of each battery, but so far I'm just using it and seeing how it goes.

  








selfie






Dat Bokeh Baby! This is off the 17mm 1:1.8 lens.



A series in black and white. The camera will shoot JPGs in cool styles, but I did these conversions in Lightroom.




















In a nutshell, I am loving the camera so far! My goal is 500 frames/day today and tomorrow, so I probably need to get off my arse and get shooting.

See you next week with more photos!
- New Olympus Fanboy