June 7th, 2012

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My photo travel kit for 4 weeks in UK and Ireland – Olympus E-M5 and awesome lenses all under 4.5kg including iPad and other goodies

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Have just finished packing my bags for my 4 week trip to UK and Ireland.

I chose Micro Four Thirds when it first came out because I realised it would be THE camera kit for international travel with its limited airline carry-on luggage weight and size limits.

The awesome Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera is small, light, weatherproof and gives high image quality, shallow DOF when I need it with lovely bokeh from the lenses which are image stabilised meaning I really will not need a big tripod even at night without a flash.

So what did I bring to fit into a normal hiker’s backpack and have it all weigh in at only 4.5kg?

and with the E-M5, 12mm f/2.0, 14-42mm kit lens, 45mm f/1.8, clip on flash and spare battery all fitting easily in a LowePro TopLoad Zoom 1 bag for added protection:

The 4.5kg consists of:

cheap hiker’s day backpack
Apple iPad (to back up my photos)
Apple iPhone
Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera
Olympus mZD 12mm f/2.0 lens
Olympus mZD 14-42mm II lens
Olympus mZD 45mm f/1.8 lens
Panasonic Leica-D Four Thirds 25mm f/1.4 lens with MMF-2 adapter
Olympus ZD Four Thirds 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens with weatherproof MMF-3 adapter and lens case
Panasonic Lumix 14-140mm HD lens (old habits die hard – I find this nice for walkaround travel shots during daytime when I can’t be bothered changing prime lenses)
spare SD cards
spare battery
LowePro TopLoader Zoom1 camera bag
travel docs and miscellaneous items

In addition, I put some cheaper items in checked in luggage which with my Aussie winter clothes and boots for the UK summer came to under 16kg:

compact travel tripod (in case I need to do shots longer than half a second)
Olympus FL-36R flash (in case I do indoor portraits and available light is not nice)
Rokinon 85mm f/1.4 manual focus lens with Canon EOS to MFT adapter (well I just couldn’t leave this one at home!)
Sigma 19mm f/2.8 Micro Four Thirds lens
ND gradient filters, other filters, battery chargers, iPad SD card adapter, power board, etc.

The ONLY other lens which I considered bringing is my lovely Olympus ZD Four Thirds 7-14mm ultra wide angle zoom lens but I would be start to push through the 5kg back pack weight, it was too expensive to put in checked in baggage, and thus I decided this time, I would leave it at home.

I thus have 24mm to 400mm focal length range fully covered with high quality image stabilised lenses (thanks to the E-M5), lovely wide aperture low light lenses and some nice bokeh lenses.

That should be plenty enough to give me fun even in dreary, rainy, dark UK weather.

ps.. apologies for the lousy DOF in these photos, I used my Canon 1D Mark III in low light indoors and had to resort for a wide aperture as I didn’t have time to get the flash out.

Note that I may not get to post much in the next 4 weeks as the iPad, and as I understand it, rather shaky mobile ineternet in rural UK and Ireland may make posting blogs difficult, plus I will be having too much fun with my E-M5 to actually bother using the internet.

Posted in backpacks, photography, travel photography | 1 Response »
Tags: Four Thirds Micro, Micro Four Thirds, Olympus, travel, UK

Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera takes a portrait of the lady of the night – the Transit of Venus

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

The transit of venus across the sun is quite a rare astronomical event happening on paired events each century or so.

I captured the 1st of this paired event in June 2004 whilst I was in Cairns in northern Queensland, Australia using the only digital camera I had at that time – a hand held Olympus C8080WZ 8 megapixel prosumer camera with a teleconverter attached and an astronomical solar filter – here is a collage I made at the time:

Today I decided to get a quick shot in before I had to race off to work just minutes before this event finished and none of us will see such an event again.

This time, I had the luxury of using the awesome Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera combined with my Zuiko Digital EC-20 2x teleconverter and ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens, and the same solar filter hanging on the end of the lens (it is way too big for this lens!)

At a 35mm effective focal length of 800mm and resorting to manual focus, a sturdy tripod with self-timer was critical to success.

The exposure I chose hopefully optimised image quality by using ISO 200, f/11 and 1/160th sec through the clouds which dominated today in Melbourne.

The image shown below is a cropped, and resized version for quick web display, you can click on it to view the original, unprocessed (except for default Lightroom export sharpening) image which has been cropped to give a nicer aspect.

The big circle is the sun with clouds in front of it, while the black dot is Venus just about to finish her transit across the face of the sun. You can also see a number of sunspots – better viewed on the large version by clicking on this image.