Olympus E-M5: Post #4: Image Set #1

For some reason I have been reluctant to use the E-M5 during this period of getting used to its menus and settings.  On the other hand, the weather hasn't been conducive to getting outdoors much, notwithstanding that the E-M5 is weather resistant.

I did, though, take a few indoor shots the other day, when my granddaughter came to visit.  The pictures below don't reveal much, however.  They're not particularly good or particularly bad, and could have been taken with most any camera.  And I should have stepped back on a couple of occasions so as not to crop her head and/or feet.

One was taken at ISO200 and the remainder at ISO400, so the sensor was certainly not stressed.  The best thing about these images is the subject!

Lenses Used

50 year old Nikkor 58mm F1.4

Olympus 14-54II

Sharp enough?  Not really.

All of the following were shot at 1/60th and had a bit of bounce-flash.  But since most of the light was ambient light, I wish I'd shot them at 1/125 to freeze the action a bit more.  On second thought, perhaps I was having difficulty focusing.  The Nikkor lens must be manually focussed and the Olympus lens has a slow auto focus (the Olympus lens is optimized for phase detection focusing on the Olympus dSLRs and not contrast detection focusing on the micro 4/3 cameras).  And of course, there's our granddaughter constantly moving, making accurate focus all that more difficult.

I do feel that these images are soft. But that is operator error, not camera error.

JPEG Versus RAW

My E-M5 is currently set at the default color settings: natural picture mode, contrast and saturation set at "0".  I have turned noise reduction to "off" and sharpening to "-1".  Auto WB. 

Immediately below are two images processed from the same file.  The first shows an out-of-camera JPEG image, and the second shows a JPEG processed from the RAW file with Lightroom 4, on my computer.  I found the JPEG to be a bit off, with bit too much saturation, in particular too much red.   I really like the processing done on the RAW image with Lightoom, using Lightroom's default setting and color profile. 

Interestingly to me white balance seemed to be too amber and too green on the images taken with the old Nikkor lens.  I can't figure out why that would be the case because the white balance readings are made through the lens.  Anyway, I did make some white balance adjustments for Nikkor shots, using the Lightroom sliders.

Taken with 50 year old Nikkor 58mm F1.4, set at F2

Taken with Olympus 14-54II, at F3.2

Once I test the camera outdoors, I may make some adjustments to the camera; for example adjust the white balance to read more blue, amber, green or magenta.  Like most advanced cameras, there are settings available to make adjustments to white balance, whether it be making fine-tuning adjustments to the automatic white balance or to any of the white balance presets.