Quick WIsh List - mFT

Here is an impromptu wish list for something all Olympus

EM1 ergonomics and features
zoom f2.8 over range 12-40 and 25-150 - save me doing so many lens swaps in the mid range 30-60
an f2 or better portrait short zoom 30-80mm
a macro convertor ring which maybe crops the frame for best results
Depth of Field / Focus auto bracketing for macro
Focus Lock / Focus range lock combined with focus peaking
Blue tooth speaking settings
Auto file back up and "keeper" double back up. Auto delete all non keepers from earlier shoots when docked. USB memory stick dump possible.

In reality though today, what is there as a system for me? 

Firstly there really is no fall back short of the 16mpx sony chip ,and then with viewfinder built in. Hence OMD.

I see very little point now in the em1 because the swd lenses are expensive second hand, so expensive in europe that hand baggage imports of new lenses from the states or far east are cheaper.  People think they can hold their value and now there is a new body to take them-  if not excell with them screwed on- the prices for the two swd zooms which do it all are way too high. The 12-60 used on ebay and amazon and our local finn.no are around 800 euros, which is more than the new mFT 12-40. When a new oly fast zoom comes out in the range say 40 to even 120, then the golden ed pro zooms of old will be foot notes in the book of Olympus's digital adventure.

A better bet is now loosing value and being sold on some nice E3s and E30s, the venerable 14-54 mrk II. The mark one is also being punted on E1's and hundred series cameras. These packages are around 400 to 600 euros, and you could pretty much dump the body in the bin as far as i am concerned. If you are getting the mark II plus some other lenses of note such as the wide zoom or 75-300, then that is a bargain. People are a bit prone to want to sell their whole system if it is pre E5 E620. For latter day cameras with quality lenses the lenses are usually quoted seperately after a bait price on the body with the kit lenses.

Even the mark I seems to work on some mft bodies, but it is thed mark II 14-54 which was contrast detect optimised and has a second to none manual focus.  This works across all the ep compacts from 3 vintage,  and the omd range of course. It is a more compact lens than the 12-60 and is actually faster in the mid to longer range on f stops. 

But then it lacks that nice eq 24mm for lakeland shores with mountain panoramas, city scapes and weird candids. Well on mft there are good wide primes and you now get amazing iso performance compared to four thirds E series cameras so you dont need a soft wide open 22-28mm range. Also people are far more consumerist about the fashion of system compacts, and dump kit cheap to make the down payment on their next bling thing. Often that means an earlier PEN body with one kit lens or two, but with one quality wide prime or the 45mm prime in the package or highly negotiable.

That is the good thing about PEN, panny g series and now OMD: lots of consumer fashion idiots buy them, learn they need a good prime, and then realise they are using their iPhone /Galaxy for actually taking piccies, thus selling off as above.

Kodak by name only,  have amazingly enough gone 16mpx mft and have their own interesting zoom lens which is not super fast but nor is it a slow dog kit lens. Also they are using IBIS , so the lens can be cheaper than a panny and you can retro on anything. The "kit" zoom has a good range and if i remember it was f three and a half to the arbitary five point six, not that shabby if ISO is up to the job and ibis works as well as oly. Also they launch with an at first comical Hubble competiting 400mm (=800 in old money!) Which could be to mft was the "Bigma" was to FT. If under 300€ it could have the last laugh not just for those awful twitching "birders" who clutter many a photoforum with this week's brown bird sitting in a tree , or eagle half hidden by pine tops, or vulture silohoute against blue sky. Bravo "kodak". Eastman may guffaw from above.

Samsung- Dark Horse ? Olympus still Shine

Samsung maybe just doesn't sound authentic enough for 'real photographers' in their NX mount range of compact and 'bridge' EVF cameras. True, they have no legacy. Disappointingly you don't get them as a bargain either.

And there is the rub for me: pre sony 16mpx mFT sensor I could see that the NX with the APS-C sensor was a way of getting an ergonomic camera with better colour and light dynamics than the best mFT at the time. Now however, I just don't see the point in NX unless you are already an owner, or you are Korean.

Samsung could have done a flyer in the market by having a best value for money body and a small range of fast zooms, and also some degree of convertability to legacy MF lenses. Instead they have a hotch-potch range og lenses in terms of aperture and focal length.

My ideal street and general use camera needs only two lenses: a fast 24-90 / mm carry and portrait lens and a longer lens without the need for very fast , just 4.0 to 5.6 up to 300/400 mm eq from FF.  A macro would be nice, but a macro convertor onto the former of the two may suffice for my rare excursions into food and flowers. Here a legacy lens may do the job with focus peaking and bracketed shots.

Now I could do this handsomely in fact with an E520 with just two lenses : the 12-60 and the 50-200 , which would be a second hand purchase likely to also have the excellent macro 50mm f2. However the 520 is quite dated in terms of the poor dynamic range on the chip and also availability of them. Price for this set up is about the same often on Ebay as for the cheaper OMD's with the 12-40 plus say the 45mm prime, so that is an alternative or the 60mm macro ontop of the kit 14-42/40-150 combo. Olympus really have got a sorted out lens range!

EM1 back compatibility is not shining and people want their cash out of the 12-60 or are willing to persevere so far onto the new body with an adapter as very few are available used. I suspect the 12-40 would remain resolutely stuck on any of the OMD houses that I chose.

All in all it is a bit of an investment, best done where VAT is lowest in the world and I guess I am in for $1400 - $2200 dollars so I had better find someone looking to buy some photos!

Olympus Blues ....Are the Greens and the Shakes

After a bit of a break from taking photography seriously - a bit unfocused if not diffuse - I have been using the E450 for more or less snapshots and I have been with the family all the time this summer so the "better " more thought out shots have been actually compromised into being ever so slighty better but often lacking.

So this summer for the first in four years of E450 joy, I produced no signature portaits of the kids and no perfect landscapes.  In fact: Quite a lot of mediocre results due to various factors, mainy of course concentration, but also some limitations of the camera: My main bug bears are then:

1) camera shake / movement blur
2) using too wide an angle
3) composition needing cropped which could have been in camera zoom or "shanks pony" zoom/ shifting my backside
20m
3)b) titled images needing rotating and cropping out good composition
4) Olympus Greens

On the latter, the green,  green grass of home is ever so slightly too green. I guess this is because olympus have chosen to optimise their system into producing stunning sky and sea blues and flattering skin tones (in contrast to panasonics crappy jpeg engine). I shoot only jpeg Large Fine now because without a full photoshop investment and a lot of time on my hands, olympus have hard coded the best jpeg conversion chip in the business and i cannot do better.......except for those garish lawns and hillsides.

I was a bit taken a-back by olympus having a vivid setting as factory default but more disappointed that "natural" still produced garish greens and rather flattering skin tones are more apparent. Reds and blues become more realistic thought.

The fix for images with a lot of green, such as lawns or grassy summer mountains is to set the camera to "muted" which suddenly makes the greens very natural and even adds depth and texture to grass details.

Just remember muted will give rather dowdy blues, yellows and reds while also losing some flattery in skin tone.

On the green issue i coud advise someone who is clued up and who has lightroom, corel 64bit or photoshop to then shoot raw and adjust per "keeper" shot first, then running a batch conversion on the series from the shoot. I would rather be behind the camera on location than in Post personally.

On being behind the camera, this brings me to point 3.

The main draw back with the earlier olympuw E series cameras through to the latter day last of the 10mpx my dear old 450 , pre E3 /30 ,was the small view finder. The OVF gives less than full view of the actual chip frame size and is small and difficult to use with glasses. I often find I am trying to catch my kids in full flight and at the right moment, head out of camera ,and i more or less end up shooting with a "blind" eye to the actual composition TTL.

This leads to most often shots which are too wide, shots which are tilted badly off plumb or zoom shots which are cropping off limbs.

For kids-in-action shots there is just going to have to be more praqctice in setting up and knowing what focal length will work best. CAF focusing in ljive view is too slow, but can be useful for candid shots of people at ease. Also a better eyecup is probably available for spectacle wearing clots like me. This then covers two.

I think i need to go back to looking at some posed, stock library family shots etc and get a feel for composition and then fire off lots of frames when i feel the golden moment is in there.

So no quick fix there, only a back to the basics, experiment and experience. At least i stand inspired as i have hardly lifted my olympus to eye this year!

Finallly the real bug bear for E450/420 and I suspect many other non image-stabilised E series cameras: low shutter speed .

Programme/ Auto mode in Olympus favouritises aperture wide for faster shutter for the same exposure. This is okay if you own the faster, over price f2.8 glass wear, but for the vast majority of we "hundred" series owners we dont own, and we cannot just go over to standard shutter priority and dial in because we have poor non base ISO. We shoot ISO200. Or can we?

Well we have had the sun here and i have bet on 1/320th on S mode as often as i remember to set the camera up. I then shoot even -0.3 a lot of the time to get nice saturation and further more I have been using a polarising filter all summer, whipping it twixt the two kit zooms it fits. The thing with the E series is that you can pull detail and colour out of the three quarter tones into the shadows, but the quarter tones are often poor and the highlights clip in.

So here I have dozens of S images and a good few high light range images which can be lifted, but you know what? ? I like underexposed landscapes and people shots and town or boat shots because it kills off blocky highlights and adds depth with heavy shadows which have good gradation into them.

My investment then for the end of the summer with no work contract for August yet, was a half price monopod which is a full 1669 mm extended ,almost eye height, which i will experiment with to see how much this improves my camera shake issue to free me up for A priority and low light shots.

I am inspired to do a blog based on the very theme post shooting. Watch this space.

Bemoaning low house prices? Eikas cheif economist in lala land

http://mobil.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/Taler_-eller-tall-om-boligmarkedene-7384960.html

Roughly translated; house prices in Oslo are too low and on a national basis it is not economic with any new building.

Ja vel, as they say here . He is gryning really about the biggest correction to the markets for consumer finance and mortgages in the north western hemisphere since who knows when...it almost has no comparison as a half decade of insiduous decline to what i mean is infact a greater reality now ahead of us:; rather several major changes:

1) we are facing a shift of wealth creation, distribution and retention away from the western middle class engine to asia and to the super rich.
2) we in the west are going to have to get used to paying a much higher proportion of income on food and energy
3) we are in a new epoch where  nervousness is a powerful brake on the previous lunacy of loose flowing credit- uncertainty in the finance system based around intervention regulation versus abject failure if the mistakes were repeated and a western world liquidity crisis rose again.

Although maybe not inevitable, it is a forseeable scenario that house prices to income ratios outside the major western metropolises will continue to be a gearing with a declining profile towards three times average household income per average city or regional house price.

Norway is not exempt from the demands on banks to have higher equity to debt ratios. This has had the immediate effect at the highest percieved risk end where now first time buyers have no access to one hundred percent mortgages. They are faced with 5 - 10 years of saving for the minimum deposit; that may even need to rise if house prices show stagnation or a falling trend for the flats they would be buying.

This is the base of the whole pyramid of consumer property, but it is in fact just a drip of petrol which used to get the nitrous effect when boy meets girl, and two starter flats are sold at a major joint capital gain. That is what had been stoking the fires of the Norwegian house market prices, and many regional markets.

With the 1970 and 80s babies themselves dragging their feet terribly in starting families, this meant that the single white female had made a very tidy profit on her appartment because she had been in that rabbit hutch for 5 to 10 years. She and himbo had probably not paid a bean in capital repayments either but came out with maybe a million krone as the downpayment on their big step up the ladder.

Now they cant sell or make less or find they are even in negative equity and losses on selling costs. So the bottom rung on the ladder has actually affected profoundly the town house appartment, semi in the commuter belt or out of town villa two steps up the ladder or more.

Eventually you reach a level where ordinary employees are not the fuel in the market. Here the rich in Norway have been really stung due to a hang over of super high glamerous prices which the glitteratii thought nothing of paying to secure a bit of coastal paradise or luxurious cabin at altitude.

Lower down from the impulse purchases of the well heeled, capital investing in property means getting ROI,  in turn that necessitates selling at some point. That also relates to green field and brown field redevelopment plots.

It is therefore pretty obvious that two main scenarios pan out: house prices fall,  land prices follow , developers and builders decide to get a little less rich or lower margin operators come into the market. The next scenario is that a bubble is suddenly created with masses of first time buyers getting access suddenly to the market: this would happen because the blue-blue government get their puppet strings pulled and create a system for 100% mortgages or subsidise first time buyers, , , which was called sub prime in the USA and was probably the the grain of sand in the evil oyster which precipitated the whole crisis......

Olympus and Focusing Improvements

A missed opportunity from fourthirds days has been to install a focal range lock on olympus system cameras.

Olympus had a pretty poor in prism pdaf and it sounds like the on chip pdaf is less than ideal. Prior to the quad core processors, the contrast detect functioned inadequately in low light; but that was par for the course in all cameras without an EDM built in or with flash attached.

What olympus could do is a retro software update to include a focal range lock and a focus-auto-bracketing functionality for the FT and the first editions of the mFT bodies.

In the first instance you would include hyperfocal as one setting with a display of what that is in meters for the lens settings. Then you have arbitary or user definable ranges down to minimum resolving distance for the lens. One setting further to this would be a toggle to a shorter range, another to take at midpoint if no target is found upon full release of the button.  Yet another variation would be to lock a point on prefocus half depression, then to hunt only so many meters -cm-mm around this calptured point.

Further to all that we have then the possibility for functionality to both focus auto bracket x amount of frames to y range of the varied focal points, and to execute depth of field auto bracketing.

All the above could be retro programmed in a software update to nearly all four thirds format cameras!

We then open up much enhanced use in sports and nature photography for the entire range of lenses; and in both ontrast detect and pdaf. We also improve possibilities for better results in continuous tracking mode too.

Finally focus bracketing and dof bracketing are both especially useful in macro photography and landscape; on the one side you fire off several shots and find a best frame while on the other you automate a series of shots for merging in post processing.

Olympus- A Compact Integral Zoom mFT ?

Picking up from the last blog, Olympus will continue to showboat the best sensors and in camera elec-trickery in the OMD range and hand-me-Down to the EP compacts. They have a few more lenses in them I reckon, especially fast zooms and macro and long end telephoto "big white". However I would not be suprised to see the mFT format going into non interchangeable lenses.

Oly come very near to fighting for their own customers With the XZ2 versus the EPMs and last season sales of EPs and so on, because the XZ is just so very good for general snap shot hobby and travel use. I bet you there are a few pros use one on their day off!

The one big difference now will be the sensor quality -

They handed Down the spec to the smaller XZ10 and also to the New Stylus super zoom which uses some Technology from the OMD's allegedly - EVF probably anyhows.

Now I reckon they will hand me Down mFT chip or a slight Crop of the existing sensors into an integral lens camera.

Why? Well the sensors on the stylus range are just too small - they will always be better quality than Your average mobile Device but they will not get near the performance for sports, low light and Professional Publishing.

The point here being that you do not need to be on price With the low end PEN cameras here. If you offer an f2.8 or faster zoom lens, constant aperture or sub f2 to f2.8 then you hit into People who aren't interested in system cameras, or those who would like to avoid lens Choice paralysis!

The benefit is of course, as you see in the stylus Product range, that the lenses can collapse further than a flange mounted system can allow: the lens housing flange can receed into the house and the lens follow inwards to create a really small carrying package.

What we are though talking about is a trade off: you would get say 12-45 in a camera With f2.8 which would be more compact that the EP range With the kit 14-42. If you are looking to sell to enthusiasts then they have the EXIF data and would know that a wide-street-portrait camera focal range is for them.

Now what you do NeXT is you then sell a New camera which does a longer telefoto range With maybe a high qaulity digital zoom using the best IBIS can do and improved in camera Processing or perhaps a Nikon style "best shot" : so you here start at say in old Money, a 45mm ( 23mm FT) and go up to 180 (90 on ft) and then do a Nice Reach on stabalised digital Crop, perhaps re-pixelating upto full image size. Oh yes, the Technology exists to add more pixels to an image while retaining a high degree of Fidelity, and this could work in camera.

Olympus then sell the enthusiast or photojournalist two cameras at the price of the highest end small sensor camera - maybe upto 700 dollar mark. The houses are pretty much standard.

An alternative would be to do something a little Ricoh like and have a two lens system, where the Mount is not traditional bayonet type flange, but a boxy, mechanical locking unit which self calibrates to the actual required flange position. You sell that then initially as a two lens system, covering 24mm to 250 mm as FF focal lengths and perhaps develop a wider or a Fish eye adaptor, or a super long one.

Olympus and Panasonic really stole a march on Canikon who were happy for them to play there, and have had some degree of Catch up to do and not got there yet. Samsung are the dark horse, but not regarded as highly as they should be by pure camera-fan-boy brand snobs. Sony really blaze a trail With their slightly bigger APS-C mirrorless into New photographers.  Now Olympus can do this again and cover the mid ground between Leica and the higher end Fuji compact offerings and the G12 and Nikon top enders, and their own and Panasonics own- coming out Ahead With something unique.

But wow, you say, the mFT is a system set up and you either get the Whole idea of IQ With buying lots of glass, or you are better off With Your mobile or a 1970s polaroid? Hell no, if mobiles took as good images as top end compacts at the 500 dollar mark or thereabouts, there would be no market for 500 dollar small chipped compacts. Many enthusiast and pro' FF and APSC owners have a smaller non system "quality end" compact.

Here Oly can make cash on the Whole body-lens combi at first purchase point and capture a creaming niche based on the far superior images mFT sensor or even a 75% Crop can take over the current "mid" sensore enthusiast compacts, while also eating into Leica and Fuji and whatever luxury prosumer compact is launched NeXT.

The philosophy is that the best camera is that which you have With you the most and which best covers Your style and tastes in focal legnth and aperture. The more compact, to a jacket Pocket single lens beauty, the better.

Olympus - A Full Frame on the Wish List

Olympus of course in reality decided that digital cameras would one day be far smaller than 35mm cameras. Ironic then that the OMD EM5 is not that much smaller than an OM10 35mm film camera. However, Olympus and originally the others in the FourThirds Group were right that one day that there would be enough megapixels and improved signal to noise in theory, that would allow us to come to where we are today With the mFT format- and this is likely to be pushed to 20mpx at some point.

The limiting factor was optics, but in reality many full frame lenses are best stopped Down to mid f2 to f3.5 so at that the Depth of Field is about the same as the sub f.1.9 prime lenses.

However throwing reality aside in the Wake of Nikon's wonderful Df-g full frame, why don't Olympus look at going a step further at a lower price tag: putting a 36x14mm sensor in an old OM body- no autofocus, full compatibility to OM lenses and Conversion rings to other FF Legacy gear.

Autofocus is what takes up so much of the processor Power and necessitates more room for Electronics. However you could have some low intensity CF or on chip based PDAF focus assistance such as live view focus "peaking" and Depth of Field preview. You could add an in-body infrared IDM laser shooting from the prism. Or sod it and just rely on ground glass and the split objective Mirror Method ( which some Companies will etch retrospectively to reflex Mirrors on DSLRs by the way. )

Even a last generation Sony 36mm sensor at under 16 mpx would Catch the imagination and bring many an OM hoarder of lenses out the closet.

The OM series With the OM10 became the market leading pro-sumer camera range for a while in the 80s before the evil empire of plastic and EOS came to the world. In effect Olympus built very good 1970s cameras until the late 80s and could not make the transfer to autofocus, which always seemed to me to be a bit of a removal of the Whole feel of photography.   Back then I reckon they should have kept top end of manual focus, With better in camera exposure Programming,  and not tried the OEM camera system they did. They could have developed AF in their own time, awaiting patents to run out and so on, or pioneered full frame, manual focus cameras.

Olympus has made a great direction and now has Three legs to stand on: mid to high end consumer compacts, the mFT compacts and the prosumer OMD EM series. They showed that they could flog an old horse With the 12mpx sensor for Three crucial years, re-establishing the brand on an sensor made for the last white hope of FT DSLR. So they will no doubt have a good run With minor tweaks to the OMD system line up, and hand me Downs to mFT compacts and maybe lower Down as I expect into single lens non system mFT.

But if only, if only they would dare to do an D-OM full frame!