Head Game

With an extremely bright background, he appears almost monochromatic; the little bit of background detail came from a little post-production adjusting. I was very happy with the sharpness and the eye glint seems to impart some character. I guess the moral here is don’t discount any opportunity for a shot, even with a familiar subject.

Venus at Twilight

I took this picture of the celestial queen  on the grounds of Keystone College’s Cupillari Observatory as the twilight began fading. Overall, the balance of the lighting and the framing are acceptable, but next time I will be trying to make improvements. This was a 25-second exposure at f4.5, ISO 200. Venus is blazing at -4.46 magnitude, overwhelming the nearby star Elnath in the constellation Taurus, which is shining at a rather pedestrian +1.62 magnitude.

A second picture I took of Venus and Elnath from approximately the same vantage point as the sky darkened was disappointing, but instructive. Again it was a 25-second exposure, this time at f5.3, ISO 800. It didn’t have quite the impact I thought it originally had in the image review screen, but I think I understood where to go from here.

Venus at Night

One of the problems, of course, is that with Venus as bright as it is, exposing for the foreground tree will tend to blow out the disk of the planet. I need to experiment further to find a more appropriate exposure value.

Oh Venus…I’ll get you next time.

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The image above sums up the lens best – and it’s linked to a full-res copy, so click it to get the big view. This is the 25mm (a 50mm equivilent view) at f/1.8. The focus point is on the boat itself, which is tack sharp. The grass in the foreground is falling out of focus nicely, and the background has gone pleasantly soft. If I change up the physics and move the subject nearer to the camera, a distant background really goes out of focus.

Image Credit: B&H Photo

Let me say it again, in case you missed it: this lens is sharp. Freakishly sharp. Possibly the sharpest of any lens I’ve ever owned. It’s sharp wide-open. It’s sharp stopped down a couple of stops. Should I say it again? It’s sharp.

As m4:3 primes go, it’s a little hefty. It’s bigger than my Canon 50mm f/1.8. It feels good on the camera. The build is great and the focus ring is excellent. Moreover, I like the view through it. It’s a great walk-around lens. Shoot some portraits, some details, some scenics. Or shot a 21 frame panorama and stitch it together:

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Just a pair of HDR landscapes shot at sunset/early twilight with the kit lens. Both images are composed of a three-stop series, merged and processed in Photoshop. I was – again – very pleased with how well they came out, and especially how well the detail and subtlety was maintained in them.

Shooting info: E-M5 + 14-42mm, tripod mounted, ISO 200, f/8

This last one is a single exposure, taken almost an hour earlier with the same setup. I just can’t resist good evening light!

Brent edged the car close enough for him to start shooting, but there I was trapped in the passenger seat trying to shoot around him and through the open window with the engine running (thanks, Brent).

Not being the steadiest shooter afoot — or should I say “aseat,” I pulled myself up as far as I could go and aimed, hoping for the best.

Here's Looking At You

The lighting that day was dreadfully flat, but in this image and the two that follow I felt the existing (lack of ) contrast was best left alone. This shot is from the first group of images, where he stood in a small puddle at a slight angle.

Struggling to remain elevated in my seat (bad back and all), I got this shot when my quarry turned to face the camera after retreating a bit from the water. I’d like to think he did it on cue, but I was just lucky. I was pleased with the eye detail without enhancement; I think he looks worried.

Getting Closer

And finally, as my back continued to protest, he thought better of getting any closer and turned away, climbing onto the pebbles nearby. If anything I think he looks more worried.

Turning Away

I was pleased with the output, particularly the sharpness, in spite of having to twist myself into position and shoot around my friend. But the next time, I’m asking for the window seat!

[Editor's Note: Paul exaggerates - the whole time I was asking if he was okay, and he kept telling me not to worry about him and just focus on shooting.  :)]

This wasn’t one of the planned reviews, but after spending several hours shooting the night sky on Friday, I knew that I had to change the plan a little and say something about the E-M5’s capabilities in this arena. I realize that astrophotography is a pretty niche application and I don’t know how many of you really play around with it on a regular basis. But for those of you who, like me, enjoy spending a warm night outside with the camera, watching the universe turn, you’re in luck.

The image above is the pinnacle of my Friday night. It’s a composite image, built from three separate one minute exposures, imported into Photoshop as layers and stacked together using the Screen blend mode. (Using three shorter exposures instead of one long exposure keeps the noise down.) This was shot from a tripod, obviously, and only shows a short amount of trailing in the stars. But apply the same method forward, with 15-20 shots in sequence, and you’ll have a pretty awesome image.

So what makes the E-M5 shine in this realm? It probably won’t capture any more stars than any other camera, but it will do a heck of a nice job at it (with the right lens) and it will make the whole process a lot easier. For starters, the whole mirrorless concept makes a lot of sense for long-exposure shooting – no more vibration worries, no more mirror-lockup.

So here’s what I was working with:

• E-M5 + Panasonic Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens
• ISO 200, f/2(ish)
• Manual focus, 2-second self-timer, shutter speeds from .6” down to 60”

When I started shooting, it was still late twilight, and only the brightest stars were showing. Under these conditions, the AF wasn’t able to get a lock, so I switched to manual focus and used the rear screen to zoom in on Venus – the brightest object in the night sky at the time – to get my focus. (If you’ve ever tried to manually focus a star, you know that they never really look sharp – it’s more a matter of getting as little halo-effect as possible, which lets you know that you’ve got it right.)

For me, the worst part of astrophotography has always been how uncomfortable it is. The camera is on the tripod, the lens pointed skyward, which means that the viewfiner and rear screen are aimed at the ground. The only way to see them was to sit/squat/kneel under the camera, in a position that started to hurt after a while. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be done with all that! With the OM-D, I just flipped down the rear screen and was able to shoot happily away.

This has the added benefit of making it much (much, much) easier to compose your scene. Optical viewfinders are always darker than the actual scene, and at night it can be almost impossible to find the stars and/or landscape elements that you want to frame. The EVF is much brighter and makes it much easier to find and frame composition elements, even in relative darkness (it’s not night-vision, but there is a marked difference).

Unlike all the other cameras I’ve owned, which have shutter speeds ending at 30”, the E-M5’s stretches out to a full minutes. A click beyond that is Bulb mode (which is only useful if you have a remote, since it records for whatever length of time the shutter button is depressed) and finally Live Time. Live Time is where you want to be for this kind of work; the exposure starts when you trip the shutter and ends when you push it a second time (a remote would still be best for this, to eliminate any chance of camera shake).

Best of all, during a Live Time exposure, the display shows a running timer, broken down to the half-second, of elapsed exposure time. The image on the rear screen also gives a rough view of the exposure, with a refresh interval that updates it (and is apparently adjustable somewhere in the depths of the menu system).

Personally, I found Live Time to be the best feature for astrophotography, as it completely eliminates the challenge of timing bulb exposures. In the past, I was either squinting to see the 7D’s timer on the top display (difficult at best in the dark, when you can’t use a light during the active exposure) or using my cell phone as a stopwatch. There’s no more guesswork – the timer is built right in, as it should be.

I used manual focus the whole time, but as I was packing up, I pulled the camera off the tripod and tried the AF again, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked – and worked well. When I had first tried it, during twilight, there just wasn’t enough contrast between the dimming sky and the stars – but in full-darkness, it was able to lock focus on Venus, as well as a few of the brighter stars. Knowing this now, it should be even easier next time, as I’ll be able to compose, AF, and shoot all with the rear touch screen.

The resulting image files look awesome – I’m very happy with them. I was able to shoot at or below ISO 400 the whole time, in part because I was using a fast prime lens and in part because I was shooting long-exposures with the intention of capturing stellar motion (star trails).

I really have to give mad props to the lens – the Panasonic Leica Summalux 25mm f/1.4. It is an incredible lens, fast and very sharp, even when wide-open. With a 50mm equivalency, it isn’t quite as wide as I’d usually like, but it was simply so easy, and so much fun, to work with that I never even thought about switching back to the kit lens.

So there you have it – a somewhat unexpected review, but further solid proof that the E-M5 is a seriously capable little camera.

[These may look a little dark/muddy on uncalibrated monitors ]

As I wrap up the outdoor and wildlife segments of my E-M5 review, I have a few photos left that didn’t make it onto the blog yet, but are still worth sharing.  For starters, here’s a Killdeer, one of a series shot out the car window.  Killdeer are skittish and I could never get this close on foot, but in the parking lot they are strangely unafraid of cars, and allow a close approach.  A head-on shot is a little unusual for birds, but it’s that very fact that makes me like this one.

And how about this Solitary Sandpiper at Archbald Regional Park?  It’s not quite the usual quality image I like to share – there’s some brush partially covering his head and he’s rather small in the frame overall.  But this is one of those shots that took multiple visits to capture – each previous time I’d flush 4-5 sandpipers before I even knew they were there.  And once spooked, they stayed well out of range.  This was the only shot I’ve gotten where I was actually able to see, and finally identify, this otherwise tricky little bird.

Just some geese.  Dad (I’m guessing at the genders here) is standing guard and Mom is on the nest, with a half-dozen goslings under her.  Moments later they headed for the water (that photo is at the top of my E-M5 Wildlife Review post.)

Finally, a pair of landscapes up at Fords Pond.  I must have a hundred photos of this tree, and yet I’m still drawn to shoot again on nearly every visit.  There’s just something photogenic about it, and it’s interaction with the surrounding fields and hills.  The horizontal frame was shot with the 14-42mm kit lens, and I punched it up quite a bit in post.  The other is a vertical panorama, composed of three shots taken with the 100-300mm (click it for a larger view).

While portrait and commercial shooting is my professional niche, wildlife photography is my personal addiction. The challenge of finding critters, of learning their habits and behaviors, and then pulling it all together to make portraits of them in their wild environments is a rush. On a good day, at least. (On a bad day, when the light stinks and the critters are hunkered down somewhere else, it can be frustrating as hell.)

I got into wildlife photography about three years ago and as my interest in it increased, so did my investment in longer, faster telephoto lenses, finally culminating in the Canon 300L f/4 IS, which wasn’t the ideal solution, but the best compromise in terms of usage and affordability.

Enter the m4:3 system. One of its initial appeals for me was its potential as a wildlife photography rig. The biggest benefit? The smaller sensor and it’s 2x effective crop, which while damaging on the wide end of the spectrum, is a huge bonus on the long end, making my Panasonic 100-300mm lens an effective 200-600mm.

I know that the whole effective-focal-length thing irritates some people out there, but it’s a fact of the system and I don’t see any reason to take issue with it, especially when we can turn it to our advantage. Want proof? Here you go:

Despite the utterly abysmal aesthetic properties of these two images, the comparison in lens capability is pretty clear. The image on the left is from the Canon 7D + 300L, at an effective 480mm; the image on the right is from the E-M5 and 100-300mm, at an effective 600mm. When you’re shooting wildlife, and especially birds, that additional 120mm of effective reach is crucial and can spell the difference between getting a shot, and missing it. When it comes to wildlife, you can essentially never have a long enough lens.

So how does the E-M5 perform with a long telephoto? In a word, well. But here’s the caveat: well, so long as you are aware of its limitations and requirements and are able to work within both. The good news is that they are mostly the same limitations as any other telephoto system.

Let’s start with the biggie – focus. The AF performance of the E-M5 has impressed me every step of the way and while it is certainly capable when it comes to wildlife, it isn’t without its frustrations. So long as there’s good subject isolation, the AF acquires and holds a target without any difficulty. However, in the case of small animals, such as songbirds, amid cluttered backgrounds, the AF has a tendency to get lost.

The problem, I believe, lies in the size of the AF point itself, which is really quite large. Even at full-zoom, a songbird rarely fills the frame, and because of this the AF can have difficulty locking onto the bird itself, as opposed to the background. (For whatever reason, if the AF starts to get confused, it seems to lock onto the background by default.)

There are, however, a couple of ways to deal with this. The simplest is probably just manual focus – the AF system has a setting for Single-Shot + MF, which works the same as having a Canon USM lens; half-press the shutter, then manually focus with the lens dial. When you begin to MF, you activate a magnified image section in the EFV to help you. The catch here is that, even with the IS system, at 300mm + the MF zoom, it is very hard to hand-hold the camera and keep it steady enough to be useful. For MF focus with a telephoto, I strongly suggest a tripod.

The second option is something I’ve read about, but haven’t tried myself yet. But apparently if you zoom into the image preview, the focus point remains the same size while the target critter gets “bigger,” resulting in a relatively smaller AF point. The camera uses the zoomed view to lock AF, in essence creating a virtually smaller AF point that is able to focus on a smaller section of your target critter. (But again, I strongly suspect that doing this hand-held would be almost impossible.)

I work primarily in the S-AF mode, as I find it the most dependable and responsive. I’ve played with C-AF, but just like AI Servo in the Canons, I don’t have much use for it, or at least can’t get a good feel for using it. I’ve also played with the C-AF+TR (tracking) mode, which I think has some good potential, especially when used against relatively simple backgrounds, where keeping a lock on the subject is easy. I’m thinking birds in flight against a blue sky, or shorebirds at the beach; busier scenes, like songbirds against brush, may prove too much for it, but that’s mostly just a gut feeling.

Lens aperture may be the one weakness in this system. The telephoto options currently available, the Olympus 75-300 and the Panasonic 100-300, are f/6.7 and f/5.6 respectively. The reciprocal rule for shutter speeds is stretched in this case, since you have to take the 2x sensor factor into consideration. So steady shooting at 300mm (effective 600mm) really requires about 1/600. If you’re like me, and spent a lot of time shooting in morning – or mixed – lighting, then you know this is nearly impossible, especially at the base ISO.

The built-in IS system does do some heavy lifting when it comes to stabilizing the telephotos, but even it has its limits. I haven’t done any “IS-gets-you-3-stops” type tests, but I can say that, from shooting in the field, once I start to get down to the 1/160 range, my shots usually show camera shake. (But I also have unsteady hands.) In order to keep the shutter speeds as high as possible, I’ve accepted that shooting at ISO 200 just won’t happen. ISO 400 seems to be the best starting point, and up to 800 is common.

Side note: Speed is largely why I chose the Panasonic 100-300mm over the Olympus 75-300; the Olympus’ aperture is a half-stop slower at 300mm. Since most of my shooting will be at 300mm, every extra bit of light I can get is important.

The good news here is that ISO performance on the E-M5 is fantastic. I’ve yet to push it past 1600 (because I rarely ever shoot higher than that) but I’ve been very please with everything I’ve see up to that point.

What I do have to stress, however, is that there is a learning curve for shooting wildlife with the E-M5. It handles and responds differently from the Canons I’m used to and, because of that, my keeper rate is lower than usual. I’ve found more shots that are just slightly out of focus, or blurred, than I’d like. But I’m convinced this is part of the learning curve and not a flaw in the camera.

The same things that draw me to the camera – it’s small size and light weight – also work against me, or at least against my instincts, when shooting wildlife. I used to brace my heavy gear against my body, and was pretty good at using its heft as a sort of counter-weight. When I try that now, I nearly stumble backwards, because the E-M5 doesn’t have any heft to balance. It takes some getting used to. (I plan on getting a battery grip in the near future and think that will help. It should add just enough mass, or at least enough additional gripping area, to make the camera a little more hand-holdable.)

A few final comments:

• using the E-M5 with a Panasonic lens, I’m unclear on how the IS actually works. Since both the camera and the lens have independent IS systems, both obviously shouldn’t be engaged at the same time. I’ve tried just the lens, and just the camera, and seem to get roughly equivalent results with each, but really don’t know which is the “best” way to go, although for now I’m using the IBIS. The camera doesn’t indicate that it doesn’t know what lens is on it, so I can only assume that it does. I haven’t been able to find any information about this online, so I’m just speculating. But since Oly and Pana seem to share a lot of info (and each system can update the firmware on the others lenses), I can only assume that the body and lens are communicating focal length, etc, for effective IS.
• those of you who use a hotshoe flash and Better Beamer style flash extender may be disappointed, as none of the Olympus speedlight options appear to be as powerful as Canon’s 580EX. I also tend to think that putting a traditional speedlight-type flash atop the E-M5 would unbalance it, especially if you’re using it without the battery grip. Since I waffle back and forth about using a flash+extender for wildlife, I’ve set this issue on the back burner for now, but it’s something we’ll have to consider at some point.

So far I’m loving the E-M5 and find it a perfectly capable wildlife rig. Naturally, I’d love to see some faster – or even longer – lens options come along. And I think that the AF system could use some firmware upgrades, especially for the tracking mode. But I also think it’s likely that we’ll see these kind of improvements shortly. In the meantime, I have no reservations about grabbing the E-M5 and Panasonic 100-300mm combo and heading out into the field.

And I’m thrilled that, once out there, I’m comfortable carrying it around for hours. The difference in weight and size is incredible. It’s liberating, actually. And as I see it, if I’m spending less energy hauling gear around, that’s more energy I have to trek farther and stay longer.

Making good use of the EM-5′s tilt screen on my last outing.  I’ll admit, I was not a fan of tilt screens when they first appeared, especially ones like are on the Canon 60D.  To me, they seem like one more component that’s not only likely to break, but is all too easy to snap off entirely.  But I’m coming around.  The EM-5′s screen is only a tilt – no swivel or fold-out capability.  And it seems solid and well-engineered.

But most of all, it makes life easier.  Which I guess is the hope behind most new features on anything.  Call me lazy, but instances where I’d previously have to lay down in the creek/sand/mud/rocks/etc, I can now tilt the screen down and hold the camera at ground level and shoot away.  Using the touch screen’s touch-to-shoot feature makes this even easier.

Ground-level shots give a whole new perspective to a scene.  It’s a way of seeing the world that most of us don’t usually see, so in photographs it makes things more dramatic and engaging.  Different is good.

Just a few clicks from Sunday afternoon’s hike at Lackawanna State Park.  It was one of those perfect afternoons – warm, slight breeze, not too many people.  I’ve always found retreating into the woods therapeutic, a good way to clear my head and find some balance when it’s lacking.  Making images works into that easily, especially when there are no goals and no expectations.  Just me, the camera, and whatever comes along.