Olympus E-PL2 Video

Olympus E-PL2 m.Zuiko 14-150mm f/4-5.6 720p edited in iMovie

Easily the best video performance I've yet seen in an Olympus m4/3 camera. This is actually pretty good. The E-P1 and E-P2 were somewhat soft, but this is nice and sharp with good colour. As is usual, nowhere near the flexibility of something like a GH2, but as I've said many times before, is this the point of video enabled stills cameras?

People moan about the lack of full manual control and various broadcast quality features, as if they were using these cameras to shoot some hollywood blockbuster. Some people obviously do use cameras such as this as a budget alternative for some serious filmaking, but the idea of them being a serious alternative to a dedicated video camera has always struck me as like asking for Formula 1 performance in a Nissan Micra!

The great thing is you get seriously good HD quality on many m4/3 cameras, but to expect them to be equipped with the same functionality as a made for the job camera, is asking a lot. Much is made about manual focus and being able to set the aperture manually. This is actually easy to do by buying a manual lens and using an adapter. You can get all sorts of really good manual lenses for m4/3 often at ridiculously cheap prices. I've always found it much easier to use them anyway. I've used MF Nikon lenses on all the Canon and m4/3 cameras I've had, and they work very well.

However this was shot with the 14-150mm zoom, and as you can see its produced some nice crisp footage even at the 150mm end.

Just how good is the Olympus E-PL2 plus Zeiss 18mm?

I really want this combination to be good. It looks simply stunning to me. It also handles and feels great in the hand. Even the fact that its a manual focus lens isn't that much of a problem, with the improved layout of the E-PL and the excellent VF-2 electronic viewfinder. Its one of those combinations I want to pick up and use. But do the results match its looks?



The short answer is yes, just about. The lens is great, there's no question of that. It produced beautifully sharp images on my Leica M9, apart from problems with vignetting and colour casts. Since I'm going to be using one lens only on the Leica this is surplus to requirements. At least it was until I put it on the E-PL2 a few days ago and was immediately seduced by its looks on that camera. I know that shouldn't matter, but it does.

The Olympus sensor, is well, an Olympus sensor! Its got a bit too much luminance noise at ISO 200 for my liking and the colour is somewhat muted compared to a Leica M9 or Fuji X100. The Zeiss produces very nice looking files on it however. Somewhat surprisingly the lens seems to be sharpest wide open at f/4. Not something you encounter every day. f/4 isn't particularly fast but this lens at f/4 on m4/3 produces a similar result to a 35mm lens at f/8 on 35mm. A classic focal lens and aperture setting. So worth pursuing with. Particularly since no one seems to be inclined to buy it at the price I have it on ebay, and I guess if I don't use this combination to take many pictures I can always just look at it!

All following images shot at f/4.

Things to do when I can't take pictures

The weather has been very frustrating lately, dull and wet. There's a promise of something better today and tomorrow and I may finally get out to use the Pentax K-5 for longer than 1/2 an hour.


In the meantime I haven't been idle. But its meant a lot of time in front of a computer screen.


EDITING PICTURES.

I've managed to edit, caption, keyword and upload 1600+ images in the last week. This is probably a record. Some of these go back to May 2010. Apart from anything else I got to look at some pictures taken in better weather. All of these were uploaded to one library website, which provided me recently with a couple of big money sales. I was beginning to think this was a thing of the past, with most of my sales coming from microstock these days. I'm quite happy to either have a few sales at high prices, a lot of sales at low prices or any combination thereof. Its the final total I'm interested in, so I'm not really concerned as to how its made up. 

WEDDING ALBUM LAYOUT.

The couple from the final wedding that I photographed with Ben got in touch about their digital story book album. This has been nearly 4 months since the wedding. They were very complementary about the pictures and said that they were unable to make the decision as to what to choose and left it up to me. This has been fun and I've come up with a layout that uses a large number of images. Doing this almost makes me think I'd like to do it again. Almost!! Looking at the edited images, I sometimes forget the stress and fatigue involved in getting them. This final wedding was a very easy, happy event and the couple were really nice people. However its not always like that, and when they are bad they can be really bad. It is however going to be a good one to end on.

VIDEO EDIT.

Also got round to finishing a large-scale video edit of some of some of the industrial footage we shot last year. I've been using this as a learning experience with Adobe premiere elements. I've been experimenting, so there's lots of split screen and swirling boxes!! The finished file looks great but its 11 minutes long and just under 5GB in its full HD version. I'll reduce it in size and upload it to YouTube in the next few days.

FAR TOO MUCH TIME ON PHOTOGRAPHIC INTERNET SITES.

Sitting in front of the computer all day I often take a break by looking at some of the rumour sites. I'm particularly fond of 43rumors, mostly because its usually pretty accurate and has some great links. Two interesting posts in the last couple of days were firstly Olympus's multi-coloured E-PL2's - http://www.43rumors.com/olympus-e-pl2-in-color-looks-damn-cool/  and the possible imminent release of two new lenses from Panasonic
http://www.43rumors.com/ft4-panasonic-is-preparing-a-12-50mm-f2-5-3-3-zoom/ 
These are reported to be a 12-50mm f2.4-3.5 zoom and the often mentioned 25mm f1.4. 

LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS

I've also had some time to look at photographs. I've decided to do an occasional post featuring images from photographers I like. The first is from Ric Seet, one of my contacts from flickr. Ric is from Singapore and he does some wonderful nature images. I really like his bird and flower shots, and I've put a post featuring some of them here. He also has some great close-up insect shots, but I'm a bit squeamish about them, so if you want to see those, follow the link. The ones I've featured were taken with an Olympus E-5.

I have a couple of other people I'd like to feature, and I'll see if they will agree to let me link to their images. If they do I'll post more like this in the future.

So, I've not been wasting my time, but I'd really rather be out taking photographs. I don't really count testing as the "real thing" and I'm hoping the weather forecast is right. There's some promising patches of blue in the sky, so we'll see.

Words - David

Images- David, Ann, Ben and Ric Seet