Much of my printed photographic output is in black and white. I haven’t, therefore, given a whole lot of thought to the white balance capabilities of my 4/3rds cameras. For snaps, close enough is good enough, and for my occasional forays into colour work I’ve been happy to spend time on individual images getting the colour the way that I want it (as distinct from “right”).
I was working with some Rowan leaves earlier this week. I’ve put a roughly corrected version of one of the sighting shots here so that you can see the colour problem. That’s problem in a technical sense. The two main components of the scene are the nearly black slate, and the vivid yellow of the leaves (well out of gamma even in ProPhoto). The only other element of signficance is the bright red stalk.
Not surprisingly the colours popped up on screen way way too blue. Either the auto WB in the camera, or the profile in the converter didn’t believe a photo could be that yellow. And if you deduct yellow, you get a terrible blueness creeping over everything. The leaves looked quite plausible, but nothing else did.
I have one of those nifty WhiBal sets which I’ve never used very much. This seemed an opportunity to get to know it.
The idea is that you put something neutral gray into the picture to give you something to click the white balance eyedropper on. Simple, and it works.
Sighting shot for this picture.
Playing around, though, I was interested in how much sample variation I could come up with by repeatedly clicking the balance eyedropper. It was easier to see the impact on the numerical scales rather than on the display, but there were visible differences that would have been obvious on a picture with more subtle colours.
I can see that if you cared about colour accuracy then the whole white balance question would occupy a lot of your time. I used the “correctly” balanced colours as a starting point for a liberal interpretation of the subject.
Did I ever mention that I like composing on the large LCD screen on the E-330?
Well, I’m mentioning it again.
Here you see the camera set up ready to take a quasi macro shot with monochrome preview and nothing else on screen.
You can cycle through clean; image plus shooting information; and image, cut down shooting information plus focus patch, by using the ‘info’ button.
Hitting the OK button when the focus patch is visible brings up 10x magnfication. The arrow keys move the focus patch around. It doesn’t go quite up to the edge of the frame, but beyond that it is pretty flexible. It moves in discrete steps which sounds like you might not be able to get the patch where you want it, but as you are focussing by eye on the 10x magnification it doesn’t matter if your point of focus isn’t in the middle of the screen.
When working with the completely uncluttered screen (as shown) changing one of the major controls will temorarily bring up the detailed data overlay. So the act of changing aperture brings you the information that you need. You don’t have to go to another screen first.
Bright sunlight takes the shine off the enterprise (or perhaps I should say, puts a shine on the enterprise), but it has to be bright and direct sunshine to really matter. Although, as I’ve discovered, there is an easy solution to that.
And yes, I know I could fake a picture like this on any digital SLR by using a review mode, but this is live. This photograph was never, in fact, taken. I went in closer.
Sighting shot in preparation for this picture.
A quick note about raw….. Iridient Digital has added raw support for the L1 in version 1.6 of Raw Developer. The update also adds some tools for pattern noise suppression (which was an issue with the E1 in some circumstances). I’ll be looking at those shortly.
You will have realised, if you follow my photoblog, that I don’t use flash often. I have some experience with macro flash, and I’ll occasionally hand hold a flash to point it into dark corner, but generally speaking I don’t do flash.
However, there are times when flash is needed. This was one. I just wanted a few quick snaps to illustrate something to the manufacturer of camera cases. I am writing a review of their products and we were discussing different designs and uses of cases. An obvious job for onboard flash. I only wanted to end up with email sized jpgs and I didn’t mind hard shadows. These pictures were simply a way of saving a few dozen words (doesn’t sound very grand, does it? Your picture is worth 50 words….).
The flash on the L1 has a little party trick all of its own. It has two postions. The normal full speed ahead flash and a mechanical option to point the gun at a ceiling for a more diffuse effect. That adds a lot of versatility to a simple little flash.
Working out how to start the flash up and control it was simple enough. There is a flash exposure compensation button on the back of the body to keep things straightforward.
A few clicks and flashes later, and, er, a load of rubbish. As illustrated below. The lenshood gets in the way (and this is the kit lens remember). Easy enough to fix in this instance. I needed to take the hood off and back off from the subject a little. It probably says somewhere in the manual that nobody will ever read ‘don’t use flash for subjects closer than a metre’, but as I haven’t read it I can’t be sure.
If I had been using an aftermarket lens, or even something a bit extreme from Panasonic’s own range, I’d have just shrugged and thought peaceful thoughts about not trying to mix and match. But this is the kit lens.
At least with digital you get to find this sort of stuff out quickly.
Not so good.
Flash. Damn
The Panasonic UK website lists dealers who should have an L1. For the most part the dealers listed are small, single, or dual shop, outfits. None of the big web or mail order companies are on the list. Neither are any of the national bricks and mortar chains. Whether that is a viable strategy or not remains to be seen.
I bought a full UK model and not one of the Hong Kong ebay (”we’ll lie on the customs declaration”) versions that have been around for a while. So I was very unhappy to find that mine had the dreaded dynamic buffer problem. However, just as I was considering boxing it up and sending it back as not fit for purpose, I happened upon Michael Reichmann’s report of a firmware update which fixes this most buggy of bugs. Installing the update was easy (and much easier than the Panasonic website suggested) and I was happy again and could concentrate on the real machine.
First impressions of the body are that it is very well made if rather boxy looking. There are a couple of details which mean that it isn’t quite in the E1 range (and there is no suggestion of weather proofing), but the build quality is well above the E330.
I happen to like the ergonomics, but then I’m still using the 1980’s camera on the right whose ergonomics are very similar. It is a bit of a stretch to the shutter button if you hold the camera like a modern dSLR (roughly, you want the shutter button to be where the Lumix logo is). However, hold the camera as you would have done your metal bodied film SLR and the shutter button is in the right place.
Like the E330 (with which is shares internal parts) I get the impression that it was designed without a clear idea as to who would buy it. Some parts of the camera seem designed for one target market and other parts for another. This isn’t necessarily a great flaw, but it does result in some oddities. For example, turning on raw capture doesn’t turn off jpeg capture. You get both. This just wastes disk space as far as I’m concerned.
In the publicity pictures the camera looks small. Review reports suggested that this was an illusion and that is indeed the case. The camera looks small to my mind because the kit Leica lens is enormous. It is substantially bigger than the Olympus Zuiko digital lens with the similar specification. The lens appears well built - smooth to operate and well finished - although nothing like a manual focus Leica lens on one of their own cameras.
I happen to like the manual aperture ring (which has one third click stops, so you don’t lose anything in accuracy over the thumbwheel method of changing aperture) - I have never quite grown accustomed to not being able to select aperture this way.
The lens works on Olympus fourthirds bodies. The camera just ignores the aperture ring and makes you use the on-camera controls. The stabilisation also works (although only in always-on mode). I’ll be testing how useful this is. The stabilisation machinery is audible which suprised me. Nothing a subject would hear, but a definite sound for the photographer. On the L1 this won’t be a nuisance as there is a mode which only operates the stabilisation at the time of exposure (less battery drain, less noise, more accurate stabilisation. No competition). However, it is a minor something to bear in mind if you plan to use the lens on an Olympus.
If you mount an Olympus lens on the L1, one of the buttons on the body (the ‘Func 1′ button on the top plate) automatically changes its function to become an aperture selector. To change aperture you press this button (it doesn’t need to be held) and then use the command wheel to dial the aperture. This is one more step than you would be used to, but it’s not bad and does give reasonable compatibility to lenses like the Zuiko macro lenses that won’t have Leicasonic equivalents for a while.
And a final observation for this first hour of experience. The firmware update also prepares the camera for lenses faster than f2. This is because Panasonic have got the message about fast primes (even if they didn’t listen to the small part of ’small fast primes’), and the Leica 25mm f1.4 is expected on the shelves well before the end of the year. Olympus have recently announced that they too have got the message about primes (although they seem to have heard the small, but not the fast, part) and have said that PMA 2007 will be where customers get to see them first. More options are good.
The L1 is a Panasonic camera with a Leica lens built around an Olympus standard. I haven’t installed the raw converter yet, so I don’t have any pictures taken with the L1 to include. However, this is a picture of a Minolta camera with an Olympus lens built around a Leica standard. There is nothing new
While I sort out a raw converter for the L1 I thought I would start to put the lens through some tests on the E1. Compatibility is as compatibility does, after all.
Others have already taken head to head comparison photos with the Leica 14-50 and Olympus 14-54 and shown that, well they’ve shown slightly contradictory results, but the general idea is that the Leica lens doesn’t perform dramatically differently to the Olympus one. No surprise there. I might replicate these tests at some point, but to me marginal differences in edge resolution are not what the Vario-Elmarit is about. No, what it is about is a manual aperture ring and in-lens stabilisation. The so-called Mega O.I.S.
The pictures on the right are details taken out of the rather dull picture at the bottom. The Vario-Elmarit was mounted on an E1 and the files were identically processed through Raw Developer. The extracts are 100% crops which have been identically compressed for the web using ’save for web’ in Photoshop.
To get shutter speeds slow enough for the test I had to use ISO 100 and f22. By f22 the lens is probably not at its best, but what I was looking for was the difference between shots, not absolute sharpness. The OIS mode used was the ‘always on’ mode, which is all that works on an Olympus body. Panasonic claims that the other mode, where stabilisation only works at the point that the shutter is released, is better.
The top shot has no stabilisation. It is handheld at 1/13th of a second at a focal length of 25mm. The point of focus was the bag used in the crop.
The second shot is identical except that stabilisation is on. It is much sharper.
Comparing a whole sequence side by side, I can see that the stabiliser off sequence matches the stabiliser on sequence two stops apart. So, to get a result as good as the second picture without the stabiliser, the shutter speed has to increase to 1/50th.
This probably understates the improvement as the shutter speed was being changed by altering the aperture, and thus using the lens closer to its design optimum.
These results are not a rigorous testing as I would need to design some way of equalising the results for optical quality variations caused by aperture selection to do that. However, they do support Panasonic’s claim that OIS is effective to at least two stops.
Update: see the reviews linked here.
Top shot no stabilisation at 1/13th of a second. Middle shot stabilised. Bottom shot, the full frame.
