Early morning onwards

in Olympus E-System , Saturday, February 14, 2004

Well I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning at 6am to catch the sunrise. I managed to fill up a 512Mb CF card remarkably quickly, and cursed myself for leaving the new 1Gb card I'd bought at home. So out of 47 or so photos, one of which you can see here, 6 or so are now fully processed and printed. I'm quite pleased with the results - these are not easy lighting conditions for a camera to cope with. Having said that, I spent most of the time in manual mode, using the histogram to check exposures. Unfortunately, when I first set up, I tried to get a light meter reading at 400ASA. I realised it wasn't going to work, so switched to manual... but forgot to change ISO. So I ended up with everything at 400. I have to say there is a lot of noise in deep shadow at 400 - a very unpleasant mottling. Of course, I also completely forgot noise reduction mode. I've now programmed in a Reset with mirror lock up and noise reduction for twilight conditions. Also, I processed everything using Adobe Camera Raw 2.1 - possibly I would get better results with Olympus Studio, but this is a test still to be done. In parallel to all this I'm working on a comprehensive web site update, reprocessing some 200 photos, scanning new ones, and updating scripts - and I managed to fit in a second, late afternoon photo session. Maybe I'll have another go at sunrises tomorrow...

Late post ...

in Olympus E-System , Thursday, February 12, 2004

I'm being very slow at adding updates here - partly because I'm spending a lot of time totally rebuilding my web site. I have started using the E-1 quite extensively, although not routinely yet. However, I have not shot a single frame of film since I bought it! Fuji stock price must be going through the floor.

Just to illustrate the point that the camera has little to do with the result, Ian Kingsnorth recently advertised some E-1 photos he's published, on the DP Review Olympus SLR forum. Nice to see that the E-1 can actually be used for other things than cat photos and back gardens

I've grown to quick like Olympus Studio, enough even to put up with it's slug-like response. The various tools provided to compare and sort images are very nice, such as the Lightbox, the labels, the A / B lists (these are all in Viewer too). The Batch mode helps get over the speed issues, although the way you set it up is a bit strange...feels a bit like a "non-linear Action Editor" for Photoshop. I would probably stick with the Studio RAW convertor even after Photoshop CS is updated, as the controls map more specifically to the camera.

Of course the huge fuss at the moment remains the PMA (unless you speak French in which case its the DXO Lab tests in Chasseur d'Images). There doesn't seem to be anything terribly exciting at PMA for E-1 users, but I have to say I think they hype around this year's show is at an incredible level. Digital photography progress just keeps accelerating, and more and more people are getting sucked into the "gear watch" addiction...me too.

If I was a swan, I’d be gone…

in Olympus E-System , Saturday, February 07, 2004

The wonders of digital. On film I'd never have bothered scanning this obvious mistake. But in digital... ...I started playing around in Olympus Studio, added a medium red filter, cropped a bit, and, presto -- quite an atmospheric result!

40 x 30 printing

Just a quick note today. I've just printed my first full A3 borderless print from an E-1 photo. This was the big test... ...well it is certainly up to 35mm 4800dpi scan standards. I simply enlarged to 30 x 40cm at 200dpi in Photoshop CS, using one step with Bicubic Smoother. The photo itself was probably not the best example. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll try something more challenging. But so far everything looks good!

At Last!

in Olympus E-System , Friday, February 06, 2004

Finally I managed to get out to take a few photos. I hoped that the weather would work for me, but finally it was a bit bland. Anyway, I got a bit of real-world experience using the E-1 in evening light. This photo was taken using the 14-54mm lens with 1.4 teleconvertor, at ASA 200. I'm impressed with the colour rendition, although I quickly discovered two things: in this sort of light, it pays to underexpose by about 2/3 when using ESP. Second, the LCD screen is of very limited use in judging colour. One annoyance: it is a great pity that when the screen displays a shot after it is taken, that you can't press INFO to bring up the histogram. This is weird. If I start pressing appropriate buttons at this point the camera should realise I want to go into review mode and just let me. One bit of user stupidity: I had real trouble with the AF, and was constantly correcting it. Im some cases I found it impossible to focus even in manual mode. Later, when showing the camera to a guy in the shop I bought it from, who hadn't seen an E-1 yet, he pointed out that the diopter was way off. I must have moved it when changing the eyecup.... oops.