Gosh. It’s been a while. Apologies, I’m afraid that life has been getting in the way of the blog; sad, but true.
In any case, my liking for this little camera is in no way diminishing (I have since had a little go on the first m4/3 camera, the Panasonic G1. More on this in another post.). I thought someone out there might be interested in how it works as a landscape camera. And the answer is, erm, quite well, actually.
One thing that I did not (for some reason) expect it to do well was a long exposure. So I thought I’d test it out. I got hold of a cheap IR filter, which, along with the fact that the e-p1 has a pretty effective IR filter (God, I haven’t explained that well. Perhaps I shall someday) means that exposures with it are quite long. The photograph above was shot with the kit lens at its widest setting (14mm) at f6.7, with the shutter open for 20 seconds. The camera locked up for about another 20 seconds, for noise reduction voodoo. The results, as far as I’m concerned, are absolutely great. I’m not going to go into 100% crops and the like, but I can tell you that it is sharp, noise free, and generally beautiful. I’m pretty gobsmacked, actually. Now, I’m not by any means a big landscapist, but if I were, I suspect I’d be ecstatic with this result. Certainly, the tonality in the above image is, to my eye, lovely. You may well not like the image itself; I do, in fact, and I normally hate my landscapes. But I think it’d be quite hard to fault the tonality of the thing.
The upside of this is that I am finding more and more applications in which the e-p1 is far more than adequate, and I am picking up and carrying around my dirty great D700 less and less. It’s not something that I was expecting, to be frank, and it’s very pleasing indeed. A little less philosophy in this post, I’ afraid, and a little more photo geekery. Hope that’s not too off putting – if anyone wants to pop back in a few posts time, I might have some proper camera prn for you. I gave in and tricked it out a bit (with a purpose, I promise…)