The past three evenings I photographed an annual event, which
I've done for seven years now. In less than 10 total hours I
shot slightly over 1,000 pictures. All digital. There is some
Olympus content here, but also some operational notes, so hang
in here.
The Olympus E-1 performed flawlessly. About 800 of those
pictures were taken with the E-1 and other than human error, it
was perfect. I think I've identified the "killer feature" of
the E-1. It's the quietness of the shutter. To be able to keep
firing away (no flash) during quiet moments without disturbing
anybody is worth the price of admission. I needed to get
photographs of the keynote speaker (a rather important dude),
but his facial quirks and other habits made getting the shot
extremely difficult. Over two evenings I shot over 200 pictures
of him to get a handful of acceptable shots. The shutter never
bothered anybody. Yes, my Minolta A1 is quieter, but it comes
with other baggage--namely imaging noise and shuter delay.
High-ISO noise. No, the E-1 isn't noiseless at higher ISO
settings. In a few instances I did have to utilize ISO 1600,
but ended up with 800 for non-flash and 400 for flash pictures.
Stage lighting was setup for video, so it was right on the edge.
Working distances ranged from 20 feet to 200 feet.
Weight. Make no mistake about it. The E-1 isn't light. With
the 14-54, Stroboframe and flash, it starts to get a bit tiring.
I'm glad I don't have to haul a 1Dx with L glass around. My
hands didn't go numb right away, but I noticed last night that
numbness finally kicked in. It was a gradual thing and even
this morning I'm running maybe 10% feeling in my fingers.
Monopod. See previous note. This is a required piece of
equipment. I told my wife last night that the monopod has
become one of my most critical pieces of gear. I have a Bogan
QR plate (with recessed screw) mounted on my Stroboframe so I
popped the heavy-duty ballhead from by Bogan 3001 on the top so
I could quickly engage and disengage from the monopod. Great
idea, but I'll need to go to a smaller/lighter head as it
doubles the weight of the monopod making it quite top-heavy.
White Balance. I'm less than pleased with the WB in the E-1. I
couldn't get it to match to lighting. Most non-flash picture
will require color fixing. In comparison, the A1 nailed the WB
perfectly. The E-1's WB bias is Blue-Red, whereas the A1's is
more Blue-Orange. This is an area of concern with me and I'll
continue to devote time and effort to plugging this hole.
Thanks for the Memories. The E-1 allows you to save four
different settings or presets. Unfortunately, this requires a
total of three fingers to accomplish. I had two setups--one for
flash, the other for ambient light. I programmed ISOs, WB, and
manual exposures for each setup. I did have a third for the
studio portrait shots, but that's another story. With the
Minolta, I can switch setups with a turn of the mode dial. One
finger--very convenient and most usable. The E-1 is much more
bothersome to change in a high-speed working environment. I'm
glad Olympus allows me to save these settings, but I'd love to
see them implement it in the same fashion that Minolta has done.
Tilted top-panel display. You ever wonder why they tilted it?
Ever try to read the top display when the camera is at eye-level
on a tripod or monopod? Nice job, Olympus. Now I understand.
It has a good beat and you can dance to it. The A1 has a
built-in feature that I used to great success. The question is
how do you get a back-facing shot without actually being up on
stage? Either remote control the camera (wasn't an option for
me) or put the camera on Intervalmeter. This I did. I had it
fire off a shot every minute for three hours. I started the
sequence about 15 minutes before the start of the event and came
back afterwards. The backdrop was black fabric, the small
tripod was setting on a ledge with a 2-inch lip. All of the
reflective aluminum I had either behind/below the lip or I had
covered up with the nifty little lens-bag Olympus gives you with
the 14-54. As the camera is black it disappeared into the
backdrop. Unless you knew exactly where to look, you couldn't
see the camera and even that was marginal. But the camera could
see you.
Portraiture. I had to do portraits of about 75 people. Hung the
backdrop in the green room, stuck up a single studio flash in a
softbox and placed and fired. My wife helped get them situated.
We were under time pressure and I did all 75 in about 20
minutes. Talk about hoofing it! With digital I had instant
feedback to verify the smiles/eyes. Second and third shots were
necessary on a few people, but we were able to do it without
hesitation. Having the 4/3 crop meant that I could shoot for
printing and not worry about cropping. I did shoot these in
RAW. Ate up half my storage doing so, though.
Speaking of RAW, I shot nearly the entire project in JPEG SHQ.
Where necessary I'll use Noiseware to clean a few shots up, but
nearly everything is as-is. Will do a batch process to convert
the colorcast in the blown WB shots.
Analog Zuikos. I used the 100/2.8 and 200/4 for a number of
shots. The 100/2.8 turned out to be about the perfect lens when
I shot from the back of the room or balcony. The distance to the
stage gave me a full-length shot (person occupies 75% of frame
height) in portrait orientation. The extra F-stop was also handy
to keep shutter speeds or flash power requirement in check. I
either shot the 100/2.8 at F2.8 or F4. Results are excellent.
Flash notes. I used 2200 mah rechargable AA's in the Vivitar
flash. A full-power flash to full-power flash cycle was about
five seconds for fresh batteries, but got down to eight seconds
by the end of the evening. I had to go to half-power (and opened
up a stop) as one particular sequence was extremely tight
timing-wise. I left the flash on or in standby mode (standby
preserves all of my ISO/Fstop settings) for over three hours and
fired around 200 pictures on a single set of rechargables! 2/3
of those pictures were full-power. I had two spare sets of
rechargable batteries, but never touched them any of the three
nights. Last year I went through three sets in just one
evening!
Gripes. The 14-54 is too big to stuff in a pocket. I'm used to
carrying a handful of lenses in jacket pockets. White Balance
oddities as mentioned above. Inability to change batteries in
the E-1 without removing it from the stroboframe. Although i
did eventually figure out a way to rotate it a little to get
access to the battery. Autofocus is very good, but could always
be better. Slow review. I'm used to instant review with the
A1, but with the E-1 you've got to wait until the buffer is
written to the storage. It was an issue when shooting those
portraits! Unfortunate position of the WB instant-set button.
On at least a half-dozen occasions I accidently pressed that
button. 1-minute sleep time caught me napping. I learned to
wake up the camera before I actually need it.
I did a lot of in-camera editing. Whenever I had a spare minute
I zapped the obvious outtakes. One thing I absolutely hate
about the E-1 is the gut-wrenching fuzzyness of the review
images. You have no clue whether or not the picure is sharp
enough or has to be redone. The quick zoom in/out function is
great, but the image quality is baaaaad. Take a lesson from
Konica-Minolta, folks.
The E-1 performed better than I expected. All of those horror
stories about imaging noise is just that--noise. Let's put it
in perspective here. Two years ago I shot this with the OM
equipment and Portra 400 VC. Those pictures were just as "noisy"
as the worst of my E-1 pictures at 800. 1600 is obviously
noisy, but consider the shots. I can see where a Canon with
ultra-clean high ISO performance would be nice, but the trade
off with shutter noise offsets the whole equation. Using the
monopod allowed me to use ISO 800 with no problems.
I've already got an order for a half-dozen 13-19's of pictures
shot at ISO 1600. Guess they aren't too bad.
AG
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|