Wolfgang Lonien

I’ve decided that it’s enough. I get frustrated much too often when trying to reduce myself to using the DSLR and its “kit zooms” solely for one month. This is old technology, and while there might be some use cases for these, they’re mostly for things I don’t do anyway – like sports (greetings and congrats to the German team for winning the FIFA world cup btw), or for birds / wildlife and so on. For about everything else, we have much better stuff by now.

Couldn’t have taken this with my DSLR for instance:

Karipap. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/1.4. Cropped 3:2. Very low light from next room (our kitchen).

Zuleikha and Mitchie made karipap today, for explanations see the Malay, English and/or German Wikipedia pages.

I took this hand-held with an f/1.4 lens wide open at ISO 2500. No sharpening, no noise reduction.

Is it noisy? Yes. Does it bother me? Not at all – this is still far better than ISO 400 film in a “full frame” camera, and also better than using ISO 800 with my DSLR. For which my fastest lens is the Zuiko Digital Macro 50mm/2, so there’s another stop advantage for the smaller but more modern “Pen” camera.

Also, the white balance was set to “Auto” with the additional option to “keep warm colors = off”, something the DSLR couldn’t do. The focusing is much easier and more precise with the newer camera as well, and even in crappy low light like this, these cameras have a wonderful and fast working autofocus. I took this in aperture priority mode with the lens wide open, the rest is more or less point & shoot (except the composition and framing like always).

About the only advantage of an optical viewfinder vs. an electronic one is that the former doesn’t drain the battery, you can look through it as long as you want. For everything else, electronic viewfinders are much better than their pentamirror or pentaprism cousins already, and even the VF-2 has an image much larger than the one from most of its DSLR counterparts – the newer VF-4 is the same as the one in Olympus’ OM-D E-M1 camera, which is as big as the best “full frame” DSLRs (Canon 1-series), but with much more information displayed.

So in my case, it’s a clear 1:0 for mirrorless (or mirror free) cameras against DSLRs, which are becoming a thing of the past in my opinion. And it’s also – and again – a clear 1:0 for fast prime lenses against zooms, but I knew that already.

My DSLR is 5 years old by now, and it’s still a nice or at least usable studio camera, and for a portrait its 10 MP are more than good enough as well. For everything else, the “Pen” wins easily and clearly – in fact, it’s no competition at all. Maybe it’s about time to reduce the weight even more, and to get an E-M10 for the studio work. For about €600 for the body, I’d clearly prefer that to any DSLR I could think of.

Thanks for reading.

As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I’ve decided to use my older DSLR – and only that – for a whole month again. But of course it would be unfair to use it only with ambient light. First, the two zoom lenses it came with are of a variable aperture type (f/3.5 to 5.6 and f/4 to 5.6), and so they have a huge disadvantage when compared with my fixed focal length “prime” lenses which I normally use on my mirror-free “Pen” camera (they have maximum apertures of f/2.5, f/1.4 and f/1.8). Second, even with these I use flash indoors quite often, since it simply gives much better colours than whatever “available” room light there might be. So last evening I took a shot of some berries which Mitchie bought, using my studio strobe with a beauty dish attached to its front:

Berries. Olympus E-520 with 14-42mm lens at 42mm, studio strobe.

To give you an idea of what that “strobe” (= flash) looks like, here it is, taken with “uncorrected” room light:

Studio strobe with beauty dish. Olympus E-520 with 14-42mm lens at 21mm. ISO400 with +0.5EV correction during the raw conversion with Olympus Viewer 3.

That’s a Simock E300 strobe with a Jinbei 20″ beauty dish attached which also comes with some nice add-ons like a grid and a “sock” which you see here. The strobe itself can be bought as a kit with a light stand and a 36″ Octabox for around €200, which is an incredible value for the money (cheaper than most on-camera TTL flashes, and much more powerful than those, also giving nicer and softer light). Dangling from behind the flash you also see a Yongnuo CTR-301P radio remote which I use for triggering, and which is also cheap and works flawlessly since years. Highly recommended stuff if you’re on a budget and still want good light.

Oh, and because someone asked on Flickr: yes, I’ve tried one of those berries by now, and yes, they taste really nice.

Thanks for reading.