Recently, for Christmas in fact, I was able to grab myself a new toy in the form of an Olympus OM-D E-M5. That’s right, a Micro 4/3 aka “mirrorless” camera. As much as I love my Nikon D3S, it’s not a camera that I wanted to carry around with me everyday and wherever I went. Mostly because it’s a beast of a camera, and it’s not the most discreet camera body out there. I also love shooting with my trusty iPhone, but for some time I’ve been interested in something as compact as the phone but with much better quality. Something that I can tuck into my pocket or book bag and have with me at all times, that and the tech geek in me naturally looked into the Micro 4/3 cameras. After reading nothing but positive reviews about several cameras it finally came down to my pal +Jason Arney nudging me towards the Olympus. He has one of his own and let me play around with it when I last hung out with him in Tokyo and I absolutely loved it. This camera also gave me a wider selection of lenses that I could choose from if I decided to buy more, and, being that I like to bracket shots for HDR every now and again, this gave me the same set of bracketed shots and stop as my D3S (5 shots, 1 step between each one).
That being said, you know I simply had to try out this cameras bracketing capabilities. So a few days ago during my break from work, me and a couple of my co-workers decided to walk over to the St. Augustine Church in Culver City. It was late morning so the church was empty aside from 2 or 3 visitors, so we pretty much had our run of the place. After shooting from the entrance looking towards the altar, I decided to shoot from the altar looking towards the exit. After a couple of shots from there, with the sunlight shining through the stain glass window, I decided this was a perfect opportunity to try some bracketed shooting for an HDR shot. So after setting the camera up for some high speed bracketed shooting, I flipped up the LCD and place the camera on the floor and aimed slightly up towards the exit and window. I hit the shutter and fired off my 5 shots, and here you have the result after my typical workflow in post. Not bad if I do say so myself, and it has me excited about the kinds of shots I’ll be able to take from this point on now that I’ll always have a DSLR quality camera with me.
I plan on doing a more full post talking about this camera once I get more shooting time with it, but consider this a preview of what’s to come with the new addition to my camera gear family. He he.
