Olympus e-PM2 - what am i doing wrong?

KeMc wrote:

Ok here's some photos. A couple of good ones and some bad ones. The house ones were taken right when it got dark, about 6:30pm in Sydney. There was a little bit of light to start with but after that it got really dark and i think these were taken when it was pretty dark. I can't remember the settings - some on auto and some on shutter priority and using a railing to steady the camera and keep it still.

Thank you for your posting. We suppose should know better now.

Were all those shot hand held? If so, and if you could get a sharp picture (except for the last photo of your boy), I suppose you must be the ironman having the steadiest hand in this world and tripod mfrs would have to close their door!

The 1st one was using 4" shutter speed (the "S"), max aperture (the "A") of f/3.5 of your kit zoom at ISO 200! Without IBIS, there is a so called theorical safe S since the film day. i.e., 1/focal length. Within this guideline, you should be able to shot a clear image without much hand shake. e.g., as you shot at 14mm (i.e., eq to 28mm of FF), your S should at least be 1/28" or roughly 1/30". Under the best 5-axis IBIS like that of EM5 and EM1, it may give you a benefit of around 3~3.5 stops, i.e, a steady shot at around max 1/5"~1/10". Dear friend, you were using 4"! At such S, your image actually was very very outstanding....

The Second one was reasonable because it used 1.3" at f/3.5 & ISO1600. It was expected to be blurred. However, it demonstrated that your EPM2 knew to increase ISO for a faster S. Unfortunately, it was still very slow.

The Third one was using same setting as the Second image. However, you hit luck this time.

The Fourth was shot at 1", f/3.5 at ISO1600. A blurred image would be expected for such low S. But you could see a relatively darker image because of slightly under exposed caused by a faster S.

Therefore, for similar shooting scenario in future, you better increase your ISO more to 3200 or 6400 (although it would give you very noisy image), or using a faster lens like f/1.4, f/1.8 or so. Both would allow you to shoot at a faster S. Easiest of all, put it on tripod since a flash (no matter how powerful it would be) couldn't reach such far distance. Putting the camera on a table top, bean bag or leaning over the window etc could also help to increase your stability.

Finally regarding your lovely boy's image which used 1/50", f/11 and ISO200. 2 things were observed.

1st, 1/50" may be a bit slow for subject moving in such speed. Like said before, 1/125" up would be better to freeze movement. In fact, there should be sufficient room for a higher S at that time. Your camera, for unknown reason (might be because it was under sun), selected f/11. Says, if f/3.5 would be used, you might have faster S like 1/125" or so. If going up a bit to ISO400, then, 1/250"~1/500" might be possible....

2nd, for M43 camera, f/8.0 or around would be the smallest A for general use. Any smaller A, e.g. f/10 upward (unless intentionally looking for deeper dof), diffraction would start to kick in and would result soft images. It is very difference from APSC and FF that their best A (sharpest result) would be around f/8.0 up. For M43, the best would generally be at wide open (or step down a bit like f/4 would start be the best for a f/3.5 lens etc) and would be peaked at f/8.0 around.

Wishing it might be of any help....