Fully Committed. Shooting a play with an old, manual focus lens.

Martin Burke in Fully Committed.

Camera: Olympus Pen EP3.  Lens: 45mm 1.8  ISO 1250.

One of my favorite actors of all time, Martin Burke, will be starring in the one man play, Fully Committed, at the Zachary Scott Theatre, opening this evening.  Last night was the dress rehearsal.  The play is about the person in the basement office of an ultra-trendy, Manhattan restaurant whose job comprises sitting at a desk taking telephone reservations from a group of the most entitled, eccentric and sometimes sociopathic group of patrons imaginable.  Martin plays both sides of every conversation, including conversations with the slimy head chef and the head waiter.  At the same time he also fields calls from "friends" who are anxious to let him know they've landed acting jobs in parts that he also auditioned for. 

Martin is amazing and the play is so much fun.  So fun, in fact, that I was able to convince my 16 year old son to come with me.  I was going to shoot images during the dress rehearsal that we'll be sending to the press today.  

First, let's talk about the photography part.  I would be covering one actor on a small stage. I wanted to try something a bit different and I'd been champing at bit to pit two of my favorite lenses against each other to see which would emerge triumphant.  It wouldn't exactly be a fair fight as one lens would be on my Panasonic GH2 and the other on my Olympus EP3.  What the Olympus has in design panache and build quality it gives back in resolution...Yes, that has been remedied in the OMD but I'm still holding out...

I wanted to shoot my Olympus 45mm 1.8 and my Olympus (old school Pen) 60mm 1.5.  How would the ancient legacy lens do against the young favorite of the m4:3 crowd?  How would I do pitting my skills in manually focusing against the fast sample rate and quick AF of the EP-3?  Who would emerge as the top contender in the America's Top Small Camera Contest (A trademark of the Shooting with the Stars Corporation, ltd.)?????

Martin Burke. Fully Committed.

Camera: Panasonic GH2. Lens: Olympus 60mm 1.5  ISO 1250

I brought along the two bodies I mentioned, the two lenses I mentioned and also the Pan/Leica 25mm 1.4 and the Panasonic 14-45mm zoom, as well as two extra batteries per camera.  Everything packed into one small Domke camera bag with room to spare.  Lots of room to spare. Ben and I left the house a bit early and headed to the theatre. Little did we know that the city of Austin was hosting one of those "everyone-with-nothing-better-to-do-come-to-the-park-sit-on-the-grass-and-listen-to-jazz" things where hordes of people looking for free entertainment drive in from the suburban hinterlands, and fill all the roads between me and the theatre with hapless, confused and generally incompetent drivers who are afraid to make left hand turns.

Through a combination of patience and profanity in equal doses we were finally able to arrive at the theatre with five minutes to spare.  Ben settled in to a comfy seat behind me and I got to work setting up my cameras.  They were both set identically.  ISO = 1250, manual shutter speeds, manual apertures.  White balance set to tungsten. Noise reduction on stun (low) and each camera set to large, fine or extra fine jpegs. (The Panasonic has only "fine" as a choice...).

My routine with the Panasonic was to push in the little wheel on the back, top right of the camera which magnifies the finder image.  I would fine focus the 60mm lens and then touch the shutter button which got me right back to the 100% finder image.  Then I'd be able to shoot for a while without worrying about focus until Martin moved.  The method was quick and pretty accurate.  When I hit sharp focus the lens worked well.  Most of the time I was shooting with the lens set to between f2 and f2.8. 

My routine for using the Olympus was to evaluate exposure on the VF2 screen and then rely on the camera's autofocus for the heavy lifting.  I even used the face detection AF for a number of the shots.  

I think both cameras did well.  The GH2 files seem a bit more solid and I find that I actually prefer to manually focus my lenses.  Probably a holdover from the past.  I was happy to see that neither camera seemed to struggle with noise at the 1250 ISO setting.  I found the controls on the Panasonic, especially the push wheel for toggling between, and setting, aperture and shutter speed to be more usable than the two different dials on the EP3.  I also found the files on the GH2 to be a bit cleaner and more robust.  There is a color difference between the cameras but nothing that can't be duplicated or remedied in Lightroom or some other piece of software.

The big difference to me was in the lenses. I much prefer the look of the longer, 60mm lens. I think it has a sharpness and contrast that the other lens doesn't quite share. They are very, very close and by f2.8 and beyond you'd have to have your nose stuck to the front screen of your monitor to see the difference, but, at f2 the winner for contrast and center sharpness (to my eye) is the ancient metal beast of a lens.  The 60mm f1.4.

The big caveat is the fact that it was used on a body with 24% more pixels.  

Why use the smaller cameras when I have bigger, faster stuff?  Because I wanted to and because the action in the play was constrained to a smaller space which meant fewer changes in  focal length ranges were needed.  The prime lenses are nicely sharp and gave me the opportunity to work at higher shutter speeds.  That's always nice.  Next time out I'm going to match up my old 70mm f2 against the 60mm 1.5 and see which one really is best.  Nice to see Olympus re-introducing so many high speed primes.  It's always a nice option in the age of relentless zooms.

The biggest issue I had, technically, last night was all the laughing.  Most of the play is so funny that I found myself laughing out loud with the rest of the small (family and friends) audience. Hard to keep your equipment steady during a full out belly laugh. Ben thought the play we great as well.  Score one for fighting against video games....

Both cameras made it through the show with their original batteries.  Paranoia proved once again to be unnecessary.

I've already made reservations to go back and see the play again.  All fun all the time.

Hope you've got your Summer in a good trajectory.  It's not nearly as hot in Austin as it was this time last year.  The lawns are green, the pools are cool and it's even possible to go (comfortably) for long walks.  With a camera.

Thanks for reading.

There's no law that says you can't own more than one really cool camera.

Last weekend things got a bit rocky on the blog when I suggested that the Olympus OMD camera represented a tipping point in the evolution of cameras aimed at advanced amateurs and working pros.  The cadre of very stupid people immediately started screaming incredibly silly stuff along the lines that we'd never see a micro four thirds camera at the Olympics (as though the people who photograph sports at the Olympics are a great and representative cross section of all working photographers and share the photographic interests of the vast 99% of non-professional camera buyers....). I think they meant to say something about full frame cameras having significant imaging advantages over the smaller sensor size of the m4:3 cameras.  They were unable to make the sentences and thoughts match up.

Another less vituperative crew wanted to hold forth about focusing speed in AF-C crippling any use of the m4:3 cameras but I'm pretty sure, given Nikon's great work in incorporating phase detection (fast) autofocus on the their sensor, that all the camera makers will master the vagaries of fast focus within a generation or two.

But the most obtuse group were a contingent of rabid Panasonic owners who felt that giving credit to the OMD was totally misplaced.  That all credit for ground breaking should go to the Panasonic GH2 camera and several other models of Panasonic cameras.  I think they missed the point entirely but that didn't stop them from questioning the number of brain cells I have left, my parentage, and even the veracity of my Kenyan birth certificate...

One gentleman in particular felt that I'd "jumped the shark" and "gone off the rails" in ignoring the Protean contributions of the Panasonic machines.  (Here's the article)

My point was not that good photographers and smart people would finally accept the smaller, mirrorless format (we had already done that several years ago...) but that now the mental blocks that constrained the mainstream of photographers had been removed by a combination of features, performance and handling, resident in perfect measures, in the Olympus OMD.  The Panasonics clicked a lot of boxes.  The Olympus pretty much clicked all the boxes.

But my intention was only to point out that the whole category is now pretty much ready for prime time.  And I come now not to bury the Panasonic line but to praise it.  Because I've owned several Panasonic m4:3 cameras for quite a while now and like them very much.

In fact, today I went to see art downtown and I took along one of my favorite street and gallery shooting cameras, the woefully underestimated Panasonic GH2.  I coupled it with one of my favorite mini-format lenses, the Leica Summilux 25mm 1.4.  I could have reached into the drawer and pulled out a Hasselblad or a Nikon F or a Kodak full frame digital camera or a Sony camera or an Olympus m4:3 camera but I chose the GH2 for its stealth, its smooth working relationship with the Pan/Leica lens and its convenient size and weight.

In my mind the IQ stumbling block resides mostly these days with the IQs of the users and not the cameras.  I'm sure that the Olympus is somewhat better at very high ISOs and at image stabilization.  Neither of which I needed walking down the sunny streets of America's current most popular destination to relocate...  The trick with smaller sensor cameras and super high res cameras is to work as close to wide open as possible in order to minimize a phenomenon known as diffraction.  The further you stop down, after a certain point, the fuzzier your image gets.  Wow.  Science.  Light rays bending around the edge of a lens diaphragm.  Who would have thought?  Oh, yeah.  Real photographers figured that out back in the film days...

So higher ISO would have been counter productive.  And, already working at 1/1,000th of a second I didn't feel the need for lots of IS either.

The cold, hard reality is that all the cameras on the market today are pretty darn good.  Especially when you consider that a huge, huge percentage of the images output are viewed at no larger than 1200 pixels wide on the web, and that fewer than 30% of all images generated by advertising and commercial photographers will run in printed applications.  Wow.  So Olympus was pretty much right on the money---for most users---when they said that 12 megapixels was the sweet spot for resolution.

People talk a lot about stuff but I'm not always sure they have any knowledge about the stuff they say.  Take the bad Panasonic Jpeg Color which I've heard about for years now.  Can you say user error? All the Jpeg parameters (sharpness, contrast and saturation) are controllable in the camera.  You can literally set the GH2 files to look the way you want them to.  Is it the camera's fault if you are too incompetent to read the manual and then change the settings to your liking?

My readers tell me they love to read stuff that's more about the nuts and bolts of an interesting job or the thoughts behind a style or a technique and that they really aren't here for the equipment reviews.  That's a good thing because, based on the feedback I've been getting when writing about Olympus gear, I don't know much about equipment anyway.  But the reality is that when I write about Olympus gear my readership surges to over 50,000 pageviews in a day.  When I write about non-gear it drops by half.  After reading many of the responses I got from the latest flurry of gear reviews I think I might be happier sticking with my regular readers.

In closing I must say that the Olympus OMD is a very nice camera.  We might just be able to buy one as the next model is about to hit the market, given demand.  In the meantime the Panasonic GH2 (while not really a "break through" camera) is a really fun camera to shoot and puts out files that I think stand up quite well in real, every day shooting, to just about anything on the market in their price range....or even a bit above.

I am not an Olympus or Sony fanboy.  I am a camera fanboy.  Well, older fan-gentleman..

Kirk's Books on Amazon. Please buy one.

The invitation to coffee that will almost assuredly cost me $1500.

This is the new OM-D with a Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux hanging off the front.

I should have used caller I.D.  I should have feigned some contagious illness but I didn't.  I accepted an invitation to have coffee with my photographer friend, Frank, and now I think it's going to cost me.  Big time.  You see, I've been trying to avoid looking at the OM-D EM-5 directly.  When I go to Precision Camera I avert my eyes away from the Olympus case and chant, over and over again, "Sony. Sony. Sony."  I've been an Olympus Pen fan since the 1970's and I've been a digital Pen fan since the first day the EP-2 hit the stores.  Especially with the grace note of the elegant VF-2 electronic viewfinder perched regally but functionally in the accessory shoe.  I rushed out to buy the first EP-3 in town and it's so good I thought I'd never want to upgrade to a new Pen so quickly.

But there it was.  Unassuming but gaunt and with hip understatement.  Frank knew how to play me.  Like a sommelier showing off a wonderful vintage bottle of Petrus.  Almost daring me not to try a sample. He reached into his Domke bag and pulled out the OMD and presented it to me with the ultimate, modern Olympus lens cleverly clicked into the lens mount.  It was the 45mm 1.8, a lens that compels me to never sell a Pen body again.  Not even to make room for a new one.

I lifted the camera up, switched on the power and brought it to my eye.  I was expecting the same electronic viewfinder performance I got with the VF-2 because the specs are similar but it was nicer.  More refined.  The optics in front of the screen were clearer and cleaner.  The image was so well calibrated that I could move my eye from the finder then to one side to directly observe the object I'd focused on and the effect was almost identical.  The finder easily rivals the clarity and color accuracy of the Sony a77 or Nex7 EVFs.  

At this point you can head over to DPReview and read all the specs.  You can also read their test reports.  They'll tell you that the OMD is on par with the best of the APS-C cameras, like the Nikon D7000 or the Canon 60D.  That the high ISO is clean as fresh laundry right up to 6400 ISO.  That the buffer is quick to clear with the right cards.  That the frame rate nearly twice as fast as a D800.

But here's the one thing they won't tell you and it may make all the difference in the world to you if you are a camera sensualist:  It has the nicest and quietest sounding shutter I've heard since the Olympus e1 camera from 2004.  But it's even quieter and more refined than that high water mark of shutter elegance.  It may be the perfect camera shutter from a auditory point of view.  The sound of the the shutter is what I imagine the door of a Bentley car feels like when it shuts.  Reason enough to own the camera even if it were only as good in the files as its predecessor...

But as the web at large will tell you, the images are wonderful.  

I don't have any first hand information (yet) about the images.  But I trust some of my friends who got their cameras early and have been raving about them ever since.  No one is bothered by the much discussed noise from the image stabilization, in my crowd.  I put my ear to the camera while sitting at an uncrowded Starbucks at the end of the day and I couldn't hear it at all.  If the noise bothers people they must be living in anechoic chambers and shooting with the cameras right next to their ears.  The camera had me at......'snik'.

If you plan to get one I'm recommending the black body because it looks so stealthy with the Leica 25mm mounted on the front.  It also looks really good with the black battery grip attached. More advice?  If you don't already have a collection of Pen or Pan lenses then forego the kit lens and select the 12mm Olympus, the 25mm Leica/Panasonic and the 45mm 1.8.  You'll have the important bases covered and the whole kit will weigh less than a Canon 24-105mm L lens (without body attached!!!).  If you want to branch out you'll find a good mix of lenses between Olympus, Panasonic, Leica and Sigma. Not to mention the millions of other brand lenses you can press into service with the right adapter.  It's an amazing leap forward for Olympus.  Did I mention how much I liked the EVF?  Oh?  I did?  Okay.

Which one will you end up with? And what will you want in six months?

The Canon 5D mk 3 and the Nikon D800 are both incredible cameras.  Absolutely incredible cameras.  Each is a wonderful machine with which to make digital images.  But if you were working with a clean slate and a big, fat credit card, which one do you think you'd plump down for?  Which system calls to you with the ultimate siren song?  Or is it like the choice between two great Bordeaux wines?  Both are incredible but you can only open one...

There are some among our numbers who will own both.  A few contemporaneously and most, serially.  If I didn't have a stitch of Canon or Nikon glass and no other legacy bodies what the heck would I do?

I've played with both and I'm stumped.  The Nikon has image quality galore (especially if you are a DXO true believer) while the Canon 5D mk3 shoots much faster and whips through its buffered images quicker. Some people think the Canon has a better auto white balance while others prefer the Nikon.

The bottom line, really, is that both camera are great photo machines and for most people the choice will be simple.  If you have a bag full of L glass the increase in ultimate resolution is probably not enough to push you to change.  You know logically that if the Nikon breaks all kinds of sales records Canon will have a camera to match it in a matter of months.  In the meantime you can walk around pontificating about how 21 megapixels is really "the sweet spot for pro's..."  and you can talk about how much quicker your post processing is and how few hard drives you are filling up by comparison.  Now, there is that pesky light leak thing....  I'm sure someone who used to design LCD panel systems for Canon has been banished to Sigma or some other level of industrial hell for his most grievous errors.

On the other hand, if you shoot Nikon cameras you'll lunge, without a doubt, to embrace the Nikon D800 and won't even cast a curious glance across the fence because, for all intents and purposes, the grass (for once) is greener right in the middle of your currently occupied field.  Enjoy the camera right now.  If you can get your hands on one...

But, if you have neither system, and you were contemplating buying into one, which way should you go.  As you might expect I have opinions about that.

I've been on both sides of the fence.  Most recently I owned a bunch of Canon stuff.  I owned Nikon stuff right up to and including the D700.  I'm pretty familiar with the lens selections in both camps and I think I can make some good judgements.

If you are involved in video production and you think or know that you'll want to use your camera as a primary shooting tool I'd have to give the nod to the Canon.  Not because I think the images will be better or the sound will be better but because it's so easy to use legacy manual focus lenses from so many sources on the Canon.  With the Nikon it's just not as simple.  Leica R lenses, old Nikon lenses (usable on both) and a slew of other stuff.  Zeiss cinema lenses are a good argument in favor of Canon, for the moment.

But if that's not your concern I'd steer you to the Nikon D800.  Why? Because they seem to have figured out (after the devastatingly dismal DX years) what consumers want and how to deliver it.  They want great files, total in camera lens corrections in Jpeg and raw, and they want low noise at high ISO's.  With the D800 you get most of that and you buy into a system in which a backup body such as the D3s gives you all the high ISO performance you can ask for in the market today.
Easy choice.

Which one will I buy? Now that's a bit more difficult.  See, I think all these cameras should have really cool EVF's instead of last century prism finders.  For the moment I'll be content sitting here with my Sony SLT a77's and waiting (patiently?) for the introduction of the much anticipated Sony a99 full frame SLT camera.  If you can believe the pervasive rumors we'll be looking at a body with this century's viewing mechanism coupled with the same chip as the one in the Nikon D800, weatherproofing and lotsa of super cool extras.

For most people in the market for a new camera right now I'd say, "Wait a month or two and just get the new Panasonic GH3.  It will be smaller, lighter, cheaper and for all intents and purposes, as good as anyone will need for any medium or practical use we're looking at today."  If you can't wait for the GH3 then get an Olympus EP3 or OMD.  Heck, they're more fun to shoot than all the bigger cameras I've played with. But if you go with the Olympus cameras don't forget to bundle in the miracle lenses.  Those are the 12mm, the 24mm Leica Summilux and the 45mm.  And don't you dare buy an EP 3 without a VF-2 finder.

Finally, all these cameras have one thing in common.  They'll shoot better video with LED light panels than they ever will with flash.  Pick up one of the Fotodiox 312AS two color LED panels.  Then, at least you'll be able to see what you're focusing on.....

For current Canon and Nikon users the pathways seem fairly clear cut.

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