Olympus in-Camera magic: the OM-D series,

(Warning! Contentious content)

Some people are used to give female names to their camera. I don't but if I had  to, i would give it Mélusine, the name of the Queen of Fairies, with the tail of a Siren, so well she supplements the needs of Imagination.

When the E-M5 appeared almost 3 yrs. ago, the mirrorless m4/3 format was still immature: slow AF, mediocre sensor, low sensitivity to light, restricted Dynamic Range. All it had was small size and better image quality than the so called Point & Shoot cameras.

Then suddenly all problems were solved, everything fell into place, and we had a jewel of a camera whose whole was more than the sum of its parts. When Steve Huff made one of his Strange comparisons against the Leica M9 he defied his audience to tell which shot was which.

The E-M3, a black beauty.

To me its is still a recent buy, but from the beginning it has somehow changed the way I shoot. By offering a tolerable EVF of some 1.4 Mpx and a small dSLR form factor it brought me back to my film times. But by giving me separate wheels for aperture and EV controls, plus a manifold of buttons to change the settings it has made for me even more useless Photoshop and PP. DPReview however was the first to notice that Olympus had made the miracle of making a Jpeg processor which had as good Dynamic Range as the best result you could get from RAW processing.

I know that many will cry foul. This is a contentious issue for people who consider Lightroom their holy grail. Much good might it do to them, I consider the time saved in avoiding PP precious for further shooting.

By seeing what the sensor sees I make corrections on the spot, and I am ready to shoot in a few seconds, even with the right Art Filter if I need a special atmosphere, for tone gradation there is even a separate button.

The OM-Ds have also a nice feature called Live Time. When shooting at extra low shutter times, the camera shows you an image emerging from the screen, so that you can stop the exposure any time, when you are satisfied with its brightness. Live Time makes it easy tomake such effects, like light-painting:

courtesy Steve Huff.

On the side of reactiveness,  not only the AF is lightning bast. The back screen, a great bright OLED  is touch sensitive, and has touch shutter: you select the area AF by touch, the camera does it and shoots instantly.

Priceless: when using it from the navel, people never notice you, especially if you have a wide angle pointed in a different direction, but they are still within the frame. OTH you can completely shut down the back screen, and use the EVF instead, as if it were an ordinary dSLR: great in bright Summer days, and great on batteries.

Now about the debate Jpeg vs. RAW. The difference is not in the recording format, but if and when you do a photographer's work. You are not collecting Kellog's Mickey Mouse piccies like kids after all, are you? One must be ready to catch reality, and if that reality is dead, because it is PAST, no exotic processing is going to save your skin.

Reality must be caught while it develops. That is the meaning of HCB apocryphal: 'I am a  hunter, not  a cook'.  We are not Digital cooks. If need be, one can convert an uncompressed  Jpeg into a Tiff, and work losslessly for minor corrections. Don't invent a fake world at the expense of a snap!

With the OM-D Olympus gave the possibility of preparing a perfect image BEFORE the shot, which a photographer should always attempt. Thinking that one will save the image later and correct it is just an illusion - treating photography as if it were  a painting, adding layer upon layer, an additive art, which it isn't. Better choose the right light on the scene, instead of brightening later on the computer. At the worst learn to use a speedlight - you are still using real light! Photography is about Light, not about layers of painting.

A proof? If you have a high number of keepers from the start you won't be interested in spending hours in the digital lab. You'll be more interested in spending that same time on the field in catching the visual opportunities. And this will result in a higher number of keepers.

Now what is a keeper and what is not a keeper? If you are on flickr, you know that others will rate your pics, and  that they almost never rate the camera, or the processing, but content, the decisive instant.

They will be indifferent if it is a Jpeg or a Tiff, and they will certainly not rate a RAW. They will rate if the picture is timely or not. The same will happen in contests.

All this wouldn't have happened if Olympus and Panasonic hadn't introduced the view from the sensor instead of the traditional dSLR view from the lens. EVF allows WYSIWYG and it is the whole difference: like going from a geocentric astronomy to heliocentric. You compose everything  on the LCD. Bye bye, Photoshop!

The E-M1 was the first to sport duplication of functions by WiFi on a  smartphone.

Now back to the Olympus cameras. Later models have refined the concept and added innovative features.

The expensive E-M1 introduced PDAF in addition to CDAF (Phase AF + Contrast AF). This allowed to use over 30 High Quality lenses of the earlier 4/3 system and use them at their native speed, which had been impossible with the E-M5. 

  It added also HDR in camera and Time Lapse Movies. A Color Director - I could also see its uses, next to Tone Control. Again something you don't need Lightroom for anymore

Introduced later this year, like in the E-M1, the economy E-M10 added Wi-Fi, which allows to download, or better upload piccies to your favorite social sites on the fly.

The E-M10 sports a new pancake zoom kit lens

Thus you can see a new concept emerging in photography: not  a work of art or better an overprocessed monster, slowly cooked in PS, but image as instant communication, to be corrected later in Instagram or Snapseed if need be, if you want to add to the fun. Otherwise just plain, stark photography, directly uploaded on line. Communication first, musings later.

Besides WiFi also allows to literally to drive the OM-D on a tripod from the phone: again WYS in the phone is IWYG from the camera. Isn't it neat? You can 'touch' the camera from the phone!

Another feature all those fairy cameras have is strong IBIS, meaning that you have rock steady AF, a thing that only steadycams could provide in the past, with a heavy expense and with a cumbersome equipment. Now it works with a slight buzz, as if by magic. Or the whirr of invisible gyroscopes. In fact Olympus made the sensor levitate!

 That means shooting with a 3-4 stop advantage in low light. You can also shoot movies, which are absolutely steady, including the image of the viewfinder.

This combination of features has resulted in an industry standard that other brands have trouble to follow.  This disruptive  technology has created a cognitive gap with other users, that is why I have trouble explaining why I am not interested in Photoshopping anymore and I have switched instead to  the 'Slow Photography' paradigm.

When I tell DPR forum users the above they can get very angry, but that's the mere truth: disruptive technology can change radically one's habits, and sometimes for the best.

I have been accused of using Olympus' Art filters in place of PS, in a crude way. But the truth is that I like them crude, exactly like B&W is a strong transformation of colour. I like them not for realism, but from distancing from the real in a critical way. For instance to show how hard underprivileged environments can be. I am not into the beautification of marriage photogs. or other commercial shooters.

A tip about the lenses

Strong IBIS and good sensors have much reduced the need of fast lenses - this is another contentious argument. Be against or for, my pleasure. But I will give my opinion:

People have forgotten than in film times there were plenty of 2.8 and even 3.5 great primes optimised for resolution and small size. Last century. Leica 3.5 lenses were not rare, and so Zeisses and other wonders: the best pancakes ever made for rangefinders.

Lenses below 2.0 were rare, big and mostly used for Portrait or Fashion. Now in the consumerist age everybody seems to have learned the worst from Marriage photogs. , but the truth is that fast and sharp exclude often each other. 

Example: the PanaLeica 25mm has half the resolution at 1.4 it has at 2.8, Lensrentals discovered.

So people get lenses that are fast and sharp, but only at smaller apertures, and pay big bucks for the privilege, LOL.

Zeiss knows since it just provided the Sony A7 with a 35/2.8 for small  size and sharpness.

But what do people know? In fact with short distance to flange it is v. risky to make fast lenses, especially in wides, for resolution drops at the edges since they are not telecentric.

Better have a moderate aperture and exploit the sensitivity of the sensor, exactly like Sigma is doing with its Art DN Series, if one wants sharp across the frame. These lenses are resolution champions  for Micro 4/3 and they cost 1/3 than those of other makers. Just check them at Lensrentals.

The Sigma Art Series for m4/3 system, all f/2.8

BTW sharp and high resolution are not the same. Sharp is subjective while resolution is measurable.

Most of my lenses are 2.8, and believe me I don't feel limited at all. In low light Auto ISO can to to 3.200 or even 6400 and IBIS allows me to shoot at 1/10 s perfectly stable at 2.8. What else do I need? That is candlelight.

People object: but you don't get nice bokeh. I reply get close to your subject and you'll have all the bokeh you need at 2.8. 

Besides I, consider bokeh  a dirty trick issued from the beautification drive of Marriage photogs.  - a drive towards fake photography as fake as it might be. Women without pimples or freckles.

Again this has nothing to do with Slow Photography, which is rather on the side of f/64 and the Stieglitz camp. Again YMMV, as they say. But a Camera is first and foremost a perspective machine. Why waste your DOF by blurring everything?

Feel that I have been unfair or unjust towards PP? Feel free to comment. If we are many we might even try to make a poll.

My Black Queen, with gaffer's tape over the Logos.

A Petite for a Camera

Users of mirrorless format Micro 4/3 will be already familiar with very small cameras, and despite this with their high Image Quality.

It is the main feature of the format that for the first time did away with the use of the mirror in digital, therefore shrinking all that was stuck around it. Never such an extreme in miniaturization was reached however. Compare the differences:

A GM1 compared to a Canon 6d  (Courtesy Joachim)

The Panasonic GM1 is smaller than my palm and fingers, and yet has the same quality of its bigger brethrens, adding a very respectable MPEG-4 video format. It has a 16 Mpx sensor that can go to up to 25600 ISO sensitivity (candlelight!) and a12-32mm F3.5-5.6 pancake zoom, with great resolution, covering from wide - typically a living room, to short portrait.

Panasonic succeeded to make it collapsible to pancake size, so that you can put it easily in your pocket.

Check the Specs here

This petite in fact is probably smaller than your smartphone, and it can  interact with it by Wi-FI.

And here we come to a user's dilemma. Should you buy this beauty, which will set you back by 600 $, or should you do away with it, by simply using a smartphone?

The difference with the latter is of course that the GM1 has interchangeable lenses, which allow better IQ.  Features and performances are like  a full camera of course, not like a phone. You don't use Apps, but the controls are already coded in the camera itself.

In other words do you want to play photographer, or geek? The difference between the two is a nightmare for camera companies. The entry-level cameras, the so called Point & Shoot, were the first to be wiped out by the extreme casualness and portability of the smartphone.

This year it was worse: system cameras, the top of the bunch, lost as much as 20% worldwide - and it is not the end yet.

While the smartphone triumphs, the camera industry goes down in flames with the last contenders at each other's throats.  Can mirrorless be an answer?

Reflex camera owners hate mirrorless  since they have no optical viewfinder.

The GM1 in fact has not even an electronic one, but does it need one? It can connect to your smartphone after all.

In a mirrorless everything is sacrificed to size. Indeed  short distance to flange allows lenses to be designed much smaller.

The crop factor also allows much smaller telephotos, so on the whole, everything gets smaller.
As a result, many leave at home  the camera bag, and instead use simply their pockets, when they need additional lenses.

In a mirrorless  even an LCD back screen allows WYSIWYG, to see what you get, i.e. what the sensor records, so you can  correct the result of the shot in advance.
Similarly one can change colour casts, tones, brightness - do essential photography, *before* getting  back at home, and  lose time with Photoshop.

In fact you can directly beam by WiFi  to your social sites. End of PhotoShop!

Last but not least, Mirrorless has also no lens calibration issues, and some of the fastest AF in the industry.

M4/3 which brings so many advantages, includes a neologism: Scalability, meaning you can choose different camera sizes for the same sensor.

Nobody forces you to have a petite like the GM1 alone,  if you want to use a bigger camera with the  same lenses.  Just get two m4/3 cameras,  say a big one for Studio and Portraits, and E-M1 - and a midget, if you want to steal pictures in the street. You stll be using the same set of lenses. Great savings!

In my case I have a  dSR- like,  the Olympus EM-5, and another Olympus, the E-PM1, a midget. The first I use for dedicated work like Landscape and Architecture - the second  as an 'always with you camera',  for Street Shooting, with a diminutive pancake, a Panny 14/2.5.
By using every day the same 14/2.5,  I can tell the Field of View by heart without even needing a framing device.

Now  let's go back to this little queen of mirrorless, the  GM1.

Because of its small button estate, it has only one Function button, and a few others, including a MF/AF one. 

Its main interface is a touch screen, and that can be a blessing or an affliction. Being so small it's very easy to bring to life the screen with the thumb holding the camera. Then the wheel around the diamond keys can easily move away the focus point from the center:

 Trying to find the GM1 problems.

Now let's have a look at the customization. DPReview says: "The GM1 has one physical customizable button (Fn1, encircled by the focus mode dial on the top panel) and five more touch controls that can be assigned custom functions. These are accessed through a 'Fn' tab on the screen. Any of those buttons may be assigned the following controls:

• Wi-Fi

• One-push AE

• Touch AE

• DOF preview

• Level gauge

• Zoom Control

• Photo Style

• Aspect Ratio

• Picture size

• Quality

• Sensitivity

• Metering mode

• i.Dynamic

• i.Resolution

• HDR

• Shutter type • Flash mode

• Flash adjust

• Ex. Tele Conv.

• Digital zoom

• Stabilizer

• Motion Pic. settings

• Picture mode

• Silent mode

• AFS/AFF mode

• Peaking

• Histogram

• Guide line

• Rec area

• Step zoom

• Zoom speed

• Restore to default

That is an enormous choice.  Probably half of the functions are wasted on you, and so on me. But how to agree about what should be kept? Do they help us make better pictures? I doubt. We play, get distracted, and forget to take pictures.

But you can also see it in another way. Once those functions are set, you forget about them, and you have a camera set to your very specific needs.

OTH it's clear that such a small camera will never have the real estate needed for all the buttons its deserves, so it has to rely on the touch screen, just like a smartphone.

That is the first reason why I hesitate to  let myself seduced by the petite. Would I ever become a touch screen addict?
The second limit is that  it has no IBIS (in body stabilization) and that the battery life is only 230 shots.

On the bright side this camera has HDR, and an i-dynamic setting which can smooth the tone curve - the difference between shadows and highlights -  in heavy contrast days.

On the fun side the GM1 has Stop Motion / Time Lapse, which allows you Koyanystquatsy effects.

DPR says: "It will capture a series of images and automatically generate a movie file of a Nightmare Before Christmas-type style. With the camera on a tripod, the GM1 will take as many pictures as you'd like, and the camera will put them together into a video for you. The original stills are saved, as well. The camera can 'auto shoot' at set intervals (you'd better be quick) or you can take them at your own pace. An overlay of the previous shot helps you see exactly what's moved." This is great fun!

If there must be a conclusion for me, is that petite cameras are  becoming more important than their dSLR alternatives, because we use them more, as everyday devices. 

I have an additional reason to be involved in dwarf camera. For short range work I use  a 28mm eq., and therefore  I must  get v. close to my subject. Such a small camera as the GM1 makes me the invisible man, like Tichy:

One last thing that puzzles me considerably. The GM1 has an electronic shutter, which is true Space Age: 1/16,000 of a second. What will it be for? Electronic shutters allow a Lartigue Effect , and that is certainly a draw for me, although it might be a con for others.

On the flip side  it has only a 1/50 synchro speed for flash, which is next to useless. At the most  you can use it to trigger faster, more powerful slave speedlights.

In any case this petite, and its successors are on my radar. They simply offer too much for the size.

You can buy it at Amazon.

Rétro: the way we shoot, or the way we shot?

A couple of years ago, beginning with the Olympus E-M5, a new kind of cameras appeared out of nothing,  looking like the old reflex cameras of the film era, with a central hump and a wheel, as if camera makers had a nostalgia of when cameras made of metal, and everything was done by hand.

With the exception of the Nikon Df  35mm  however the new cameras are all mirrorless. They don't even have a pentaprism inside the hump, but an  Electronic ViewFinder. So why go back to the controls of a bygone era?

Now I will briefly introduce one of the latest models, the Fuji X-T1, allegedly one of the most desirable of the season. 

All made in metal (Magnesium body, Aluminum wheels) with a 16 Mpx sensor of the Xtrans CMOS kind with primary color filter, it has a different array of photosites than other APS-C sensors, supposedly giving  a better tonal control and sensitivity.

Specs

Typical of the Fuji X cameras is to have traditional controls, with a Film simulation processor that gives you the old Velvia and Provia Film kind of signature. The images look very film like, with deep shadows and sumptuous colours.

The X-T1 the camera goes to even greater lengths to simulate a reflex camera, with a surfeit of *three* controls wheels on top of the camera. 

 Olympus, Panasonic and Sony  instead have one P-A-S-M wheel and two unlabeled wheels to control Aperture and EV correction.  Instead the Fuji has a dedicated wheel for shutter speed, another wheel for  EV correction one with +/-  marks and a third ISO wheel, with a scale for sensitivity. The Fuji lenses also have an Aperture scale.

Exactly like the manual cameras of 50 yrs. ago, where you set the Triangle of Exposure  by hand, and could tell how the camera was set just by looking at the controls.The Triangle of Exposure however has changed:

The New Triangle of Exposure

Now the question: is it better to shoot the retro way, or  the Auto way? With a Fuji  you can prepare the camera *before* the shot  and remember how it is set, even when shut down.

In my Olympus I have no way to remember how it is set. Instead I must  put it on and watch inside the EVF the exposure values; or leave Auto-everything do its thing.

The final result is the same, but clearly there is a 'haptic' pleasure in using the Fuji wheels with all the old marks of a long time ago. One feels a bit like a goldsmith.

Here is a Hands On review:

The Phoblographer

There are counters too, though. The ISO wheel has a lock button, which is is quite hard to budge.The EV correction wheel is rigid, so you lose precious time to set it, with a loss of precious instants. 

My main objection is that when I don't shoot in A, like Aperture priority, I use P like Program and Auto ISO.

This way I have maximum shooting speed for my street scenes that require 'the decisive instant'. To me manual controls  are wasted. I prefer to leave the camera 'gain'  by itself according to its own  tone curve, with minimal corrections of the EV wheel, in case the shadows are to deep.
This way I have maximum operational speed, and usually a good interpretation of the scene.

 Setting the camera rigidly for a set scene won't do. It might even prevent a timely shot.

50 years ago when the Fuji type of controls saw the light all the cameras were Manual. By the beginning of the Vietnam war, Nikon  launched the first lightmeter coupled to Aperture,  and war reporters readily adopted it.

It  was cumbersome: in the VF you had to collimate a needle on a mark, the needle position varying according to the shutter speed chosen on a wheel, or the aperture mark on the lens. 

Additionally there was no AutoFocus, you had to manually set the focus, and choose the right  Depth Of Field, according to scales on the lens.

In fact if one thinks of what cameras can do today automatically, you'd think that one had to be a magician in those days to operate a camera quick enough to get a keeper.

There was a price to pay. When a few years ago I decided to scan and digitize my old slides, some of which I had sold to newspapers, what a shame it was to notice that most of them were slightly out of focus. My sight and handshake had limits that the electronic pixel-peeping  had revealed.

This would never do today. With my Olympus I have one of the fastest AF of the industry, and the best electronic stabilizer, a 5 axis one, which ensures perfect crispness.

The lightmeter works almost by magic, I have tons of sensitivity for low light, and even the most tricky of measures, White Balance, works remarkably well in artificial light, giving pleasing skin tones.

I take therefore full advantage of the operational speed of the camera, and often shoot from the hip unnoticed, trusting all the auto controls and especially the blazing AF. People simply don't have the time to notice me. 

In fact, I wonder, would I ever  benefit from the scales of the Fuji when shooting from the hip? Usually I have no time at all to check the controls. Everything happens so fast with chance meetings, that I must rely on intuition and automation.

Here is an interesting comparison between a Sony A7, a GH3, and a Fuji X-T1:

soundimageplus

As you see they are basically even. I am not really losing anything.

To me Rétro is just a figure of speech nowadays, mere designer rhetoric to bait the noobs.

I don't doubt that Fuji will meet the  shooting way of a lot of trendy customers, but for me I prefer the faster approach of m4/3 cameras. 

m4/3 are not Art or Landscape Cameras like the Fuji , they are Reportage tools, allowing blazing reactions and basically that's how I work. When catching the decisive moment, one cannot think twice. Machine speed is a godsend.

You can see some of my Street work here:

People and Street

You can buy the X-T1 at Amazon