January 2004 Archives

...well it may just be me, but this is far from easy. Olympus supply a really bizarre tweezer tool which seems to be mainly designed to make life difficult.

First of all, if you're going to try this, read the instructions. But not too carefully, because they're not very helpful. The trick is that everything is actually far less tactile than you'd expect. To start with, there is talk of a tab that needs to be pulled down using the tweezers. Well, first the aperture that gives access to this tab is too small to get the tweezers into. What actually seems to happen is that somehow you sort of brush the tweezers against the tab (certainly you do not "pull it down" as the instructions say) and then the screen swings down. Although "swings" is again too strong a word. Collapses is better. Then you've got to remove the screen by grabbing a protruding tab with the bloody tweezers. The thing is, this would be much easier if this tab was the same size as is illustrated on the instructions. It isn't, it's tiny, and again the tweezers seem to be designed to thwart you.

By this point one starts to wonder if all this poking around in $1700's worth of camera is such a good idea.

Anyway, once you've grabbed it the old screen doesn't so much slide out as (you've guessed it) fall out, although by some miracle it didn't (a) jam itself behind the mirror or (b) fall on the carpet.

So, next step, grab the new screen and insert it. Well getting it out its bag is challenge #1. It obviously liked it in there. Then, using aforementioned tweezers, one simply places it on the holder. Now this is really where I lost the plot for a while. I expected to slide into some locating grooves or something, and much head scratching ensued. In fact, as it turns out you sort of balance it on the holder and push the holder back up. Somehow everything stays where you put it. It all feels a bit flimsy but it seems to work.

Next, remove the grid screen, very carefully blow air on it to remove the dust that somehow went along for the ride, and put it back in again - at least you'll know how to do it by now!

Is it all worth it ? I think so. I found with the standard screen, in what is after all a very small (albeit very nice) viewfinder, you need all the help you can get to keep horizons horizontal and so forth. But the instructions on such a delicate operation could be a bit clearer. And those tweezers should go back to the medical lab they came from...

The annual PMA show is due, where the photographic industry will display its latest offerings. The net is going crazy with speculation on what will Canon do, what will Nikon bring, etc etc, and it is verging on hysteria. What are people getting excited about ? Well, we have the new Nikon D70, which is Nikon's answer to Canon's mass-market (sort of) 300D DSLR. It actually looks like a fairly bland box, if you peel away the hype. A 6Mpix DSLR in a so-so housing, with, admittedly, some nice features which to a neutral observer gives it a slight edge over the 300D - which of course has been on the market for 6 months, a lifetime in the new world of digital photography. But, finally, the D70 is a capable and relatively economic tool for taking photos. Yep, that's it. And yet some people seem to be investing all their waking hours in furious debate over this thing that so far nobody has even seen. And the Canon-Nikon thing is really bizarre - far worse than the old Mac-PC wars. WHY ? Any Canon, and Nikon is probably capable of better results than 99% of photographers are ever going to achieve. They do more or less exactly the same things, and yet people are prepared to scream at each other endlessly about trivial technical details rather working out how to get out of that 99%.

But it gets worse, because at least up until recently these religious wars have been fought over existing devices. Now they're fought over marketing and press releases.

As a recent DSLR purchaser, delighted by the radical new workflow, I can understand that people get emotionally attached to their new toys - but I can't understand this urge to rubbish everything else. Clearly it is in the interest of all the manufacturers to collude in stirring this up. And to feed the frenzy by releasing new models every 6 months, hyped up with elaborate "leaks" and other guerilla marketing tactics. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

And meanwhile, how long will it take for people to remember that a camera - any camera - is just a box designed to capture light, and to get back to the basics of better photography. I suspect never in fact - the digital revolution has spawned a new type of customer, a mutation of the computer nerd, who's idea of photography is midday shots of Disneyworld taken with a $3000 camera and has no idea what those A, S & M settings are for.

Just worked out how you post images in Movable Type blogs.

This was taken this morning just after I got out of bed.... sunrise over Monte Generoso. Taken with the E-1 at 400ASA, 14-54mm lens, ESP metering, only 1 coffee.

Every morning I think if I was a real photographer I'd be out there at 6am.

I've just done a test of RAW conversion using the High Function and High Speed options. I applied zero sharpening in Olympus Studio, and then used PhotoKit to apply capture sharpening.

I read RémiG's article on sharpening. I can't reproduce his results: In my case (a winter landscape, similar in type to his test image), there is a slight difference in the results. The HF version seems to have a little extra edge contrast, but it is marginal and only really discernable at 200%. What is slightly more worrying to me is that the two versions have slightly different colour casts. Possibly this has something to do with the (reported) poor color management implementation. But certainly I don't see this "painterly" effect he reports.

On this evidence, I don't see much point in HF. However, it will be interesting to look at the results of upsizing. It is possible that HF has slightly more detail.

Either way, I'd say that Olympus Viewer and Olympus Studio are two good reasons not to buy an E-1. They're not totally unusable - and maybe are better than Canon's efforts - but they're really not very impressive. If my software team produced this sort of stuff their next career move would be selling burgers...

Just for fun I thought I'd register my E-1 with Olympus. Seems like a good idea, doesn't it ? Of course you'll only know you can do if you've managed to find a link in the twisted maze of web sites that Olympus has managed to publish so far.

Starting from what appears to be supposed to be the main site now, you can follow a registration link (at the top right), which brings up a form which some genius has decided should be implemented in Flash (and is served from a Japanese domain). This has 9 steps (screens). When you get to screen 2, if you're in Europe or the US, you'll find that you can't select your country. You click on "other countries", and, hey presto, you're dumped here. You select your country, and depending on the selection, fun things happen. If you select Switzerland, you end up in the olympus-pro.com world, rather than e-system.com, but you can't actually register your product. You can however sign up for a newsletter, which apparently is in German. Olympus realise that Belgium, for example, is multilingual, but in Switzerland they haven't noticed yet. Never mind. If you choose "United Kingdom" instead (going back first, not from the drop-down, that takes you somewhere else..) then hey presto you can register your equipment, using an HTML form, and choose any damn country you want. Progress! And it tells you "because we know what you have, we can inform you about the new firmware updates you require". Well I'll believe that when I see it. However you do get an email response thanking you for your application to the Olympus E-membership programmes, which you may well not be aware you'd submitted.

Has anybody got bored enough to work out if there is any logic behind all this ? I assume that http://www.olympus-esystem.com/dea/ is the main site, but really I'm far from sure - http://www.olympus-esystem.com has a different design and doesn't appear to link to /dea, whatever "dea" stands for, and Europe links all end up at http://www.olympus-pro.com.

I'm baffled.

With the first photos comes the first photo-processing. I've installed both the Olympus Viewer and the Olympus Studio Trial software on my desktop machine, which is an Apple Macintosh G4 867Mhz "Quicksilver", with 1.5Gb of RAM and as much disk space as my whole University had back in 1983 :-)

As I said before, applying the 1.0.1 updater to Olympus Viewer stops it working. A pity because it claims to solve 1 annoying bug, which is that converted RAW files are saved without colour profiles. I haven't tried it on my Powerbook yet. The announced 1.1 updater does not yet appear to have arrived.

Apart from a mysterious "High Speed / High Function" RAW development engine tradeoff in Studio (the manual has little to say about it, despite being 292 pages long), it seems that unless you want edit tools and camera control, and find RAW batch processing useful, Studio has little to offer over Viewer. In any case, they're both quite clearly version 1.0. Whilst they offer a lot of interesting functionality, they're both clunky and slow, especially in RAW conversion. Roll on the E-1 updated to Photoshop CS.

The RAW developer is especially annoying. Whilst files can be saved using the same file name as the RAW (with the appropriate filetype, so it doesn't overwrite anything), or saved using a rule-based formula, you can't, believe it or not, enter your own filename. Secondly, the type always defaults to Exif-JPEG. Finally (so far), if you ask it to open the converted file in Photoshop, if Photoshop is already open, Viewer crashes - after saving the file, fortunately.

But... the results are pretty good. At 240dpi I get more less full A4 (using no margins on Epson 2100). Images straight "out of the box", capture and output sharpened using Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener and printed using ColorByte ImagePrint are pretty impressive. No tweaking, no optimising. Next step is to go to A3.

I think that Josh Anon's Lightbox software is worth investigating too, certainly for organising all the various derivatives of the RAW files. I daresay that will be the topic of a future post.

For anybody wanting to experiment, a RAW file and associated JPEG of a Swiss mountain peak can be found online here.

The blue sky was very transitory...

The photo was taken handheld, at 100ASA, 54mm, 1/250th, F9, using ESP metering. The metering coped pretty well.

So, no post yesterday. Circumstances, for example shovelling snow, kept me away. Today, however, the E-1 has leapt into action. Taking advantage of a business trip over the Alps, I stopped off at a few places to try it out. The weather was still both foul and boring, but there were a few better moments. I just used the 14-54mm lens for these first trials.

I'll post some photos soon, when I decide how I'm going to organise it. But my first impressions are very good. First of all, I'm relieved to report that I like the 4/3 framing. I expected to, having taken to 6x7 very quickly, but you never no. Next point, this camera just works. The learning curve, even when coming from manual focus Canon SLRs, is practically non-existent. Most controls work on the "press a button and rotate a dial basis", with the added feature that you have two dials to choose from. So far I've only discovered one mode where the two dials do different things, which is setting aperture and speed in M mode. The comment that the buttons seem to be randomly spread all over the camera has some justification, but you soon get used to it. I found that the DOF preview button didn't immediately fall to hand, but again, after a few minutes it became second nature.

The viewfinder is superb. It does not feel at all restrictive. I don't know quite why, because it clearly is much smaller than the one on my T90 for example, but it isn't noticeable. However, I think investing in the eye cup might improve things even more.

On the menu front, well again it is easy to use, but I should say that I have been using an Olympus C4040Z for the past two years, and the logic is similar. One thing which I haven't seen reported anywhere is that the Info mode "remembers" its last setting. So, if you choose histogram view (requiring click Play, press and hold Info, rotate dial) the exit, the next time you click Play then Info, you get the histogram. Not quite such a pain in the neck as some have suggested. I guess a single button press, like on other DSLRs, would be nice, but this is hardly awkward.

One thing I haven't taken much notice of yet is changing the default settings. Apart from changing the colour space to Adobe RGB I've left it all as it is. I may well be wrong but so far I assume that all of this stuff is relevant only to processed images, not RAW. Still, as I've using RAW + JPEG, I will probably tweak the settings so that it produces JPEGs as I want them.

For some shots I used my tripod, with the Acratech ball head. I used a Really Right Stuff plate - model ..., which I bought for the T90. It isn't ideal as the curved base of the E-1 body doesn't fit very well. Really Right Stuff claim to have released an E-1 specific plate, but when you try to order it, a different, generic (and cheaper) plate ends up in the shopping basket. I'll call them tonight to clarify this.

Well I promised to post everyday, so here it is... but, due to horrible weather and saturday domesticity contraints, the E-1 has been untroubled... One thing that might be interesting - it would have been for me - is what is actually in the box. Well the Europoean E-1 kit includes:
- E-1 body with body cap
- 14-54mm lens with lens shade and soft case, front & back caps
- Li-ion battery and charger
- Getting started manual (full manual is PDF only, on CD-ROM, and can be found also at the E1 website. The quick reference guide can also be found there but strangely is not in the box or on the CD. The manual is some 170 pages long.
- Software CD with Olympus Viewer 1.0 and Olympus Studio Trial 1.0. As far as I can tell Viewer is quite adequate if you already have Photoshop.
- Firewire, USB and Video cables
- body strap with "I'm an expensive OLYMPUS camera, please steal me" written on it.

The 50-200mm lens ships with lens shade and a very nice case.

The booster/grip does not include the hand strap, which seems a bit cheap...

So, all pretty much what one would expect.

FIRST GLITCH: I'm using Mac OS X 10.3.2. I installed Olympus Viewer, and immediately applied the patch to version 1.0.1, which seems to be recommended. However, Viewer 1.0.1 crashes on launch, whatever I do. Luckily there's an uninstaller, and it works. Unistalling 1.0.1 and re-installing 1.0 gave me a working program. Of course this may be a local problem.

Well, I'm at home surrounded by boxes. I haven't charged the battery yet, so all I can do is read the manual. But I have had a peek through the viewfinder, and, well, I'm amazed. It just feels right. It doesn't have the tunnel vision feel of the Canon 10D or 300D (note, please, this is not Canon knocking. If I could afford Canon lenses I'd have chosen it, probably). It is almost as good as the Minolta Dynax 5. My idea that I'd be using this 50% of the time, and my film cameras the rest of the time starts to seem archaic. This thing just feels great.

Let's hope the image quality is up to the standard of the handling!

Ah, if only people knew the hardships of living the other side of the Alps to everybody else in Switzerland. Everybody else including Olympus Switzerland, for example. Doubtless somewhere near Zurich, over the 3000m high Gotthard Pass. Just think... some poor courier guy has got to struggle through howling winds and biting cold to transfer the boxes that were in stock on Monday in Zurich to our isolated outpost of civilisation. Well it is only 4 days since the order, can't complain. After all, it's not as if we have DHL, a tunnel through the Alps (road and rail), a 7 flights a day air link, is it ? Oh. We do ? Hmm.

At this rate I'm going to have to order something else to keep interested. At least it looks like the weather will be abysmal this weekend.

I wonder if Hannibal operated a parcel post service ?

Not much to say today as (a) I'm still waiting and (b) I've got a lot of work to do. However I did see a new review posted today at dcresource, which seems to be pretty positive.

It certainly looks promising...

Regular visitors to this website (me, that is) will notice a burst of activity recently. I've finally worked out where I was going wrong with blog archives (MovableType is very nice, but before they launch their pro version they should hire a technical writer or two :-) ). I've also added a second blog dedicated to my soon-to-arrive new toy, the Olympus E-1 digital. I have a feeling that the way I've set both up to use the same templates is not quite the way it should be ...

I've re-arranged my photo archive. Following 99.99% of common practice I've renamed "collections" as "galleries", and at the same time I've realised that I need to give people a chance to get a quick overview of what I'd like them to see, so up front will be the new "best of" Portfolio section. This requires (a) some jiggery-pokery with MySQL, (b) me to see if I can somehow use MovableType to power a comments / feedback feature, and (c) the hardest part, making a selection.

After that, I hope to start presenting some "exhibits", presentations of organised, thematic work. Am I taking this too seriously ? Time will tell...

So why choose the E-1 ? Well first of all, I defy any photographer to pick one up and not instantly recognise that it just feels right, in a way that no other DSLR - and very few film SLRs - does. I don't believe this is an accident. It has clearly been very well designed by people who understand what a camera is for. I'm not saying that Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax or other engineers have no idea, but the Olympus team is clearly top quality, and of course they had the considerable advantage of not being tied into a legacy 35mm system.

But that isn't enough. There are some serious factors weighing against the E-1, and they are mainly to do with the sensor. Really, 5 megapixels is right on the resolution limit. And the noise issue, which seems to affect all sensors produced by Kodak, whilst over stated is should still be considered. The 4/3 side doesn't bother me at all. I like working with squarer formats, alongside my Xpan work, and replacing most 35mm work with 4/3 is going to give my creativity a boost.

So what are the other good things ? Three points: lenses, lenses and lenses. The quality / price ratio of the E-system lenses is second to none, and I don't know how often I've read that you should choose your system on the basis of the lenses you want. Again, nothing wrong with the competition on that front - so long as you accept, largely, that you'll have to compromise because the designs on offer were conceived for 35mm, and also that you're going to pay a very high price for a lens which is capable of extracting the full potential of the sensor. People who should know agree that the Olympus Zuiko lenses are on a par with Canon L glass - that's good enough for me.

On the quality / resolution side, finally I made up my mind by downloading some RAW files from a few web sites who's owners were good enough to post them. I processed them using Photoshop CS, which does not yet fully support the E-1. The real clincher was when I printed out an image at A3, compared it favourably with a good 35mm print, and then discovered after the event that it was taken at 800 ASA - which, as web lore has it is noisy as hell. Well it isn't. Probably a pixel pusher would take issue with this, but a photographer would soon work out what is relevant and what isn't.

Of course I went over endless reviews on the web. The two that convinced are well known, but worth mentioning: the first by Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape - as well as his review in his Video Journal DVD, Issue 9 - and the diary by Uwe Steinmueller at Digital Outback Photo. Both are intelligent reviews, both list pros and cons. After reading these, and of course others (apart from the specification sheet regurgitators), and based on my own first hand experience, I decided the E-1 was for me.

The Canon 10D was a very close second. It lost out on ergonomics (minor issues) and, mainly, cost and weight of appropriate lenses. Obviously if I already had an EOS system it would have won. And had I had a Nikon system, probably I'd be writing about the Fuji S-2 now.

Well I've done it. Today I placed my order for an Olympus E-1 and various accessories. It should arrive in a few days. Since the E-1 is quite new, and it's all new to me, it seemed like a good idea to maintain a diary of my progress. At the same time it forced me to work out how to run two weblogs at the same time from MovableType (yes I know it's basic but I do have other things to do...)
So, what did I order ?

• The E-1 Body and 14-54mm lens kit


• the 50-200mm lens


• the extra battery & grip (yes I know it is really an alternative, not an extra)


• the 1.4x converter


• the grid line focussing screen

To be honest I wasn't totally sure about the battery grip, but what the hell. I ordered from my local shop (Il Fotoamatore in Lugano) - I got a pretty good price. Sure I could have shopped around on the internet, but that's a mug's game. Everybody - the shop included - is aware that this is an option, but with this kind of thing I prefer to pay the small premium and get personal service, confidence that any problems will be resolved, and the simple pleasure of being able to discuss things with professionals beforehand (and they initially tried very hard to convince me that the E-1 was a risky choice!)

So, here we go.

Recent news articles have been highlighting the dramatic environmental and ecological disaster we are facing if governments - and George W Bush's in particular - stay in their greed-fuelled state of denial. The Independent recently published an article reporting Tony Blair's chief scientist's attack on US policies. It states, amongst other things, that "results of a major study showed yesterday that more than a million species will become extinct as a result of global warming over the next 50 years".

So what has this got to do about photography ? Well in fact it need not have to have anything to do with it, but it has. The work of talented and high profile wildlife photographers help to keep issues in the public eye. Seeing a great picture of a wild animal in its natural habitat is always nice - seeing it in the context that your children will probably only ever see it as a historical curiosity is another matter altogether. The photo that sparked off this train of thought - although the environmental issues were already well to the fore in my thoughts - was of a group of lions, published today by Michael Reichman on his Luminous Landscape website.

It illustrates that beyond all the talk of megapixels, L lenses, Canon, Nikon, Leica, etc ad nauseum, that there is, sometimes, some tangible social benefit to this photography stuff. If just a few visitors to his very popular site stop and think, hey, a minute, maybe that goddam pinko liberal limey scientist guy has got a point...then maybe the lions, and the other 999,999 species will have a better chance.