May, 2012

...now browsing by month

Updating to Lightroom 4.1 to gain RAW support for Olympus OM-D E-M5 – converting all your old presets

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

One of the never ending issues with buying a new camera is that you need the latest photo editing software to be able to deal with the new RAW file structures of the camera.

This applies to all of the latest cameras although arguably there is less of an issue with those cameras which use the Adobe DNG RAW format.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 is no exception to this, to process the RAW files in Adobe Lightroom, you need Lightroom v4.1 or later – at present there is only a release candidate available but it seems to work well.

Adobe Lightroom v4.x adds a few nice new features to Lightroom v3.x but it also means that by default your old presets no longer give the same results if they alter the following parameters

Exposure
Brightness
Contrast
Fill Light
Highlight Recovery
Black Clipping
Clarity
Tone Curve

That’s the BAD news, now the good news – you can have the presets working in Lightroom v4.x if in the Developer mode you scroll down to the Camera Calibration section and set Process to 2010.

Unfortunately, you will need to do that every time you want these old presets to work.

You have 2 options to manage this annoying problem:

create a new preset with the process 2010 saved into the preset so Lightroom always reverts to 2010 format when using the preset
try to re-create the appearance of the old preset in process 2012 then save as a new 2012 preset (this will of course no longer work in earlier versions of Lightroom)

The 1st option is simplest by far:

open any image in Developer mode
apply the preset
set process to 2010
press the + icon at the top of the list of presets to save your new preset – ensure all parameters used by the preset are ticked in the dialog box
you can now delete the old preset

The downside to using process 2010 is that you will not be able to add further adjustments using process 2012 parameters, but you can still use new features such as the gradient tool.

The downside to converting them to process 2012 is that it will take a lot of trial and error to find new settings to match the old ones.

If you don’t upgrade, you can still use older versions to process your jpegs, but note, that by default, Lightroom will not import jpegs if it finds a similarly named RAW file, to enable this, you need to go to Edit:Preferences then under General there is a section “Import Options” – just tick the “Treat jpeg files next to RAW files as separate photos”

Posted in photography, post-processing | Comments Off
Tags: Adobe, E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, Lightroom, Micro Four Thirds, Olympus, post-processing, raw

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 with 12mm lens makes hand held urban street shots at night easier and more enjoyable with more security

Sunday, May 27th, 2012

Last week I went on a road trip to outback Australia to play with my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera and primarily used it with the lovely but moderately expensive Olympus m.Zuiko Digital 12mm f/2.0 lens.

I love walking the streets at night to take urban street scenes at night when they have a totally different character, but carrying a tripod and a big camera when you are by yourself is just asking for trouble!

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera with the Olympus 12mm lens is small enough to easily fit in a jacket pocket so you can be discrete and hide it when there is potential for trouble, furthermore it means you can still go into a pub for a drink and not draw attention to yourself.

This combination allows you to easily do fun night shots as the image stabilisation combined with the 12mm f/2.0 lens, EVF so you can still see your subject in the dark, fast AF in the dark, adequate DOF for street landscapes even at wide apertures, and high image quality at ISO 1600 breaks barriers that no other system can match for hand held shots at night of static subjects, easily beating my Canon 1D Mark III pro dSLR for this purpose.

You can hand hold this lens down to shutter speeds of even a half a second if you are very careful, although I would recommend you try to limit yourself to 1/4 or 1/6th second to get more reliably sharp photos.

At f/2.0 or f/2.8 and ISO 1600 at 1/4 sec you can get into some quite dark environments and take successful shots, plus the slow shutter speed allows you to add some motion blurring effects if need be.

Here is a typical hand held shot walking around the remote outback mining town that is Broken Hill – which I think is actually quite a lot safer than Melbourne at night but still, I wouldn’t want to push my luck!

This is essentially straight from the camera (although converted to B&W, cropped and resized for the web in Lightroom).

Shot details: Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens at f/2.0 with ISO 800 and shutter 1/20th sec hand held.

I have also posted these earlier related blog posts:

This combination makes an awesome, compact, high image quality, versatile travel photography kit, just add in a walkabout zoom lens and a 45mm f/1.8 portrait lens, and you are set!

Posted in cameras, night, photography, travel photography | Comments Off
Tags: 12mm, E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, Micro Four Thirds, night, night photography, Olympus, travel

False color infrared photography with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

In my last post, I showed how the E-M5 makes B&W infrared photography easy.

This post is to demonstrate a limited false color tehnique if all you have is Lightroom.

Normally to get a false colour infrared image from infrared RAW file, one would swap the red and blue channels, but unfortunately, Adobe Lightroom does not have this functionality.

In this image I have used Lightroom to adjust White Balance to the far left (blue) and then adjust the tint then correct the exposure as we are no longer relying only on the red channel as I did in the B&W IR shots.

Silverton, near Broken Hill in outback NSW, Australia:

ISO 200, 12mm lens at f/2.0, 1/13th sec hand held.

Posted in cameras, infrared photography, photography | Comments Off
Tags: E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, infrared, infrared photography, Micro Four Thirds, Olympus

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 makes hand held infrared photography easier

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

I love infrared photography and use a Hoya R72 infrared filter as my main IR filter.

This article is NOT about using a modified camera with IR blocking filter removed but an E-M5 straight from the retailer.

Unfortunately, using an optical viewfinder as on dSLRs makes hand held use almost impossible as the filter is so dark there is little that can be seen through it unless pointed at the brightest of scenes.

Furthermore, the reduction in light requires either long exposures or high ISO, even with wide aperture f/2.0 lenses.

I was just able to achieve reasonable hand held IR shots with my Panasonic GH-1 combined with the Panasonic Leica-D 25mm f/1.4 lens at f/1.4 in bright sunlight, but the amazing E-M5 takes IR even further thanks to its built-in image stabilisation system, and much better image quality at high ISO.

Hand held infrared with the E-M5 becomes a fun enjoyable experience as long as you have a relatively bright scene, a Hoya R72 filter and a f/2.8 or wider aperture lens.

So let’s see what can be done in the bright sun in outback Australia with its blue skies (although unfortunately, few trees to show off the Wood’s effects):

This is essentially straight from the camera (although cropped in Lightroom a touch).

Shot details: Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens at f/2.8 with ISO 400 and shutter 1/8th sec hand held.

Broken Hill sculptures at sunset:

The above shot was with Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens at f/2.8 with ISO 400 and shutter 1/6th sec hand held and was processed in Lightoom with split toning to provide the sunset tones instead of B&W.

Shearing shed on shores of the fossilised 18,000 year dry Lake Mungo:

The above shot is my favorite, and one of the few times during the week that there was actually some clouds in the sky.

It was shot with Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens at f/4 with ISO 400 and shutter 1/5th sec hand held and was processed in Lightoom with split toning to provide the sepia-like toning instead of B&W.

Setting up the Olympus E-M5 for B&W IR shots straight from the camera:

set Picture Mode to Monotone with Contrast +2 (I like contrasty IR shots), and B&W filter to Red. Of course you can play with these further and add Pict. Tone of Sepia instead of Neutral.
set ISO to 200-400 for sunny scenes
set exposure mode to aperture priority and choose a wide aperture to give a fast enough shutter speed (remember the 12mm lens on the E-M5 you could use even down to half a second with care hand held!) but sufficient depth of field (eg. f/2.8)
ensure IS is set to IS1
adjust exposure compensation so that you minimise blown out highlights as these tend to create hot spots from IR flare within the lens (I often use minus 0.5 to minus 0.7)
place the IR filter on the lens
you can easily compose and autofocus even with the IR filter in place – just awesome!

Posted in cameras, infrared photography, photography, travel photography | Comments Off
Tags: 12mm, E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, infrared, infrared photography, Olympus

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 makes astrophotography easier

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Part of camping out in the beautiful night skies of the remote regions of Australia well away from light pollution of the cities is to just lie back and observe the myriad stars while waiting for meteors – fantastic in the desert regions in May where there are no mosquitoes to annoy you and the night is not yet too cold as to be uncomfortable.

What better time to see how this amazing camera can make astrophotography easier.

Unfortunately, I did not bring my telescope mount to provide guided long exposures and so had to limit myself to tripod mounted long exposures.

How does the E-M5 make life easier for astrophotography?

no mirror, so no need to remember to set mirror lockup to prevent camera shake
no mirror, so live view is easy to use
flip out LCD avoids having to strain looking at awkward angles, particularly when shooting straight upwards
AF is good enough to AF on bright stars as long as the sky is dark and offering good contrast and you have a wide aperture lens such as f/2.0
touch LCD can be set to AF only thus makes it easier to AF on a bright star instead of having to manually move the AF region onto the star
magnified manual focus is easy to use if AF does not work
can set Live Boost ON to make it easier to see the fainter stars on the LCD
can use Live BULB so that they can see the image forming during long exposures – very handy to check that you have the composition correct and abort the exposure if it isn’t instead of waiting a full 1-2 minutes to find out
NR ON automatically performs a dark frame subtraction for long exposures
ISO 1600 is VERY usable
timed shutter speeds extend to 60secs in manual mode (most cameras only go to 30secs which is inadequate for most astrophotography)
can set a timed limit to BULB and Live TIME of 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 20, 25, or 30 minutes – very few cameras have this feature
camera is light so that mounting it on telescopes causes less issues with weight balancing compared to a full frame dSLR
can use a remote cable and set drive mode to continuous and AntiShock to the interval between exposures to work as an intervalometer
can attach a TriggerTrap cable and use your iPod or iPhone to control intervalometer aspects
can use almost any lens ever made (via adapters) as well as direct attachment to eyepiece of telescopes (via M43-T2 adapters)

One of the holy grails of astrophotographers is to find a wide angle lens that captures stars as points instead of with the usual spherocoma and astigmatism aberrations which are a characteristic of nearly all wide angle lenses.

My main aspiration of this test was to see how the AF and MF worked as well as to determine if the Olympus 12mm f/2.0 would perform in this very demanding domain.

During my trip I found the Olympus 12mm to be superb for most of my needs such as hand held infrared photography, hand held urban night street scenes, and general travel photography but like nearly every other wide angle lens ever made, it too was not optimised for astrophotography and the over-exposed brighter stars had the very annoying coma and astigmatism with purple CA in the coma aberration:

Milky Way with Southern Cross and Centaurus on top right and Scorpius bottom left: Olympus 12mm at f/2.0 ISO 1600 20 secs (click for larger view):

Note that I did play with contrast a bit on this image but I did not do any CA correction.

So as lovely as this lens is, and with the very nice switchable manual focus controls, it is a useful but not brilliant, astrophotography lens.

Full frame astrophotographers generally resort to expensive wide angle lenses such as the Zeiss 21mm f/2.8, although I have heard the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 does an admirable job and is very cheap in comparison, so this lens may be the answer for Micro Four Thirds users needing a wider angle than a Panasonic Leica-D 25mm f/1.4.

I also briefly tested the Olympus m.ZD 45mm f/1.8 lens and this performed better but still had CA around the bright stars and there was some coma and astigmatism in the corners. Unfortunately, the focal length of this lens means tripod mounted images are restricted to about 8-10secs to avoid obvious star trailing.

For those who are interested, THIS LINK will open a full jpeg straight from camera of a dark frame at room temperature (~16degC) from the E-M5 taken at ISO 1600 and 60secs exposure with no dark frame subtratction (NR = OFF) and Noise Filter = LOW.

Now I will be even better prepared for the next bright comet that comes our way, here is a manually guided image of Comet McNaught I took with an Olympus E330 and an Olympus OM 50mm lens in January 2007:

Posted in astrophotography, photography | Comments Off
Tags: 12mm, astrophotography, E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, Micro Four Thirds, Olympus

A very quick night street shot as I walked across the road and an ambulance started bearing down on me

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

Just to show how responsive and fantastic this Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera is with the Olympus m.ZD 12mm f/2.0 lens on, here is a shot as I was crossing a busy Melbourne intersection with camera in hand.

I had a split second to compose, AF, get the shot and get out of the way as the ambulance with lights and sirens on started to head my way.

The ONLY processing this image has had is in Lightroom 4.1 on the RAW file which was rotated a touch, cropped and then exported as web size with compression and default Lightroom sharpneing for the web.

It was taken at ISO 320, 1/60th second at f/2.0 with autoWB, noise level at low, Picture Style = Natural with default settings.

Obviously no tripod, but I was walking and had an umbrella in my left hand so I was not holding it carefully – indeed not carefully enough that I had to rotate the image!

But still it is very sharp indeed given the situation!

Click on it for larger view.

Posted in Melbourne, night, photography, travel photography | Comments Off
Tags: E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, night photography, Olympus

Pushing the flash sync of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera

Friday, May 4th, 2012

The new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera is great for lots of reasons, but one of them is that it has easily the BEST flash capabilities of ANY Micro Four Thirds camera, or for that matter, ANY mirrorless camera currently available.

Unlike the Panasonic cameras, it has remote TTL flash capability, much better control over manual flash output, the TTL flash metering appears to work perfectly with legacy lenses, you can over-ride the flash sync speed* and the flash sync with new flashes is a lovely 1/250th second.

The Fuji X-Pro1 with its lovely sensor only has flash sync of 1/180th sec, no remote TTL flash system as I understand it, and has major trouble with autofocus or manual focus in low light conditions where you would be most needing flash, and of course, no image stabilisation on any of the only 3 lenses available.

The Sony NEX cameras persist with Sony/Minolta proprietary hot shoe which is not compatible with every other manual hotshoe ever made, and flash sync only 1/160th sec.

The Samsung NX cameras have flash sync of 1/180th second, but no remote TTL flash that I am aware of.

Most of the EM-5 features also exist on the current Olympus PEN cameras except the nice fast flash sync of 1/250th second.

Another benefit of the identical Micro Four Thirds and Four Thirds hotshoe pin layout is that they can both use the Canon off-camera TTL cord as this is TTL pin compatible for use as a off-camera TTL cord to an OLympus flash unit – fantastic if you also happen to use Canon gear as I do!

But being who I am, I like to see what happens when I push the system, because sometimes you want full output flash at faster shutter speeds (not just Super FP or HSS flash which saps your flash output dramatically as you increase shutter speed!).

On the Panasonic GH-1 there was no way I could push it like I have always been able to do on my Olympus dSLRs, and now with the E-M5 – by using a manual flash only adapter in the hotshoe which then connects to your flash in non-TTL mode, you can trick the camera software to allow any shutter speed not just a shutter speed up to the “flash sync”.

The downside, is that as you increase the shutter speed, you get increasing vignetting along the top of the frame from the flash exposure due to the mechanical focal plane shutter obscuring the sensor during the flash exposure.

However, if you are shooting a portrait outdoors in the sun with camera rotated into vertical portrait mode, and you position your subject to the opposite side of where the vignetting is occuring (and preferably have no close objects which will only be partly lit by the flash, as this would betray our little trick and spoil the photo), you can succesfully use this technique very nicely indeed to get results that are otherwise not possible.

So here are the test shots of a wall to demonstrate the increasing vignetting when using an Olympus FL-36R flash:

1/250th sec (above)

1/320th sec

1/400th sec

1/500th sec

The hotshoe adapter could also be a non-TTL radio trigger device, or a MiniTTL PocketWizard set to non-propietary mode which ignores the TTL pins.

The main reason for doing this is to effectively make your flash more powerful when trying to use it in bright sunlight as a fill in flash, and at the same time, the faster shutter speed allows wider apertures for your portraits, although you will almost certainly still need to use a ND or at least a polarising filter to further assist in getting a wide aperture in bright sunlight at ISO 200.

Food for thought.

Posted in cameras, flash, photography | Comments Off
Tags: E-M5, flash, Four Thirds Micro, Olympus

The incredible Olympus OM-D E-M5′s hand held low light performance plus a high image quality wearable camera system! No more back pack, good bye tripod!

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Today was the 1st day I had the opportunity to take my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera for a walk in the city.

It was a heavily overcast, wet day, and I decided I would catch the train in, leave my backpack at home, and carry my camera kit in my jacket pockets as well as carry a full size umbrella, just to see how it would go.

I took the E-M5, Olympus 12mm f/2.0, 17mm f/2.8 pancake, and 45mm f/1.8 lenses (I can’t wait until the 75mm f/1.8 comes out in about July!).

I could easily have also taken the Olympus 14-42mm collapsible kit lens in another pocket, they are all so light and compact.

I must say, this was the 1st time, I have been able to carry 3 lenses and such a high quality camera with me in my jacket pockets and would-be assailants would be none the wiser!

I have just downloaded Lightroom 4.1 RC so I could play with the Olympus RAW files, and being late at night now, I decided just to upload one untouched file other than being opened in Lightroom and resized and compressed for the web, and this is the one below top demonstrate how fantastic the hand holdable low light capabilities of this camera.

For this shot it was about 3 hours AFTER sunset, in the middle of a very dark alley, looking through my 12mm f/2.0 lens in the EVF the image was dark as the light levels were BELOW what the EVF is designed for (I didn’t put the Live Boost on, nor resort to iAUTO, both of which would have made the EVF brighter). The wall was lit by a distant lamp.

I was hand holding the camera at the end of a cold walk in the night air (~10degC), and the camera had no problems rapidly autofocusing on the graffiti on the wall even though it was so dark (I have the AF illuminator OFF as well !!).

So here is the untouched shot to give an idea of how sharp it is at f/2.0, ISO 800 and exposure 1/2 a second hand held – yes you read correctly half a sec hand held!!

Of course, I could have bumped ISO to 1600 and allowed a more reliable 1/4 sec exposure, but here is my one and only attempt at half a second on this shot before I caught the train home:

WARNING: this photo is NOT meant to have any artistic or photographic merit other than to show half-second hand held photos ARE possible!

When you can hand hold shots at 1/3rd a second reasonably reliably, it means you can get reasonable night street shots with moving headlights, as well as being able to do moving water shots such as waterfalls in case you forget your tripod.

For hand holdable low light wide angle at 24mm focal length in 35mm terms with AF, you just can’t do this with a Nikon or Canon cropped sensor dSLR to this degree and for this price.

For a start neither Canon nor Nikon make a 24mm equivalent prime lens for their cropped sensor dSLRs so you have to go for a zoom lens at f/4 (f/2.8 if you go Sigma), or the super expensive 14mm f/2.8 pro lens would be the closest prime, and in neither situation do you have image stabilisation.

And don’t even think about even putting the lens in your jacket pocket let alone a camera and 3 lenses.

When I was walking around and it was lightly raining, I just turned the camera with the lens downwards as these lenses are not weatherproof like the E-M5.

I just wish Olympus did not follow Canon’s lead and put a stupid ON/OFF switch at bottom rear of the camera, as I had to use 2 hands to turn it on, while for the most part I could just walk around and control everything with my right hand while my left hand held the umbrella up.

The other tricky time is trying to change lenses in the wet, it would be nice to have a 3rd hand as I was always worried I might drop one of the 3 items I was juggling.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Olympus made all these components TOUGH like their compact camera series!!

Very happy indeed so far with this camera.

It has its foibles but it is such an amazing camera for its size and the lenses are just so lovely, and the AF so fast, the foibles are insignificant in comparison.

Posted in cameras, night, photography | Comments Off
Tags: 12mm, E-M5, Four Thirds Micro, night photography, Olympus