Full-framer logic

Real world, I'm not a camera pro, but I get accredited and I sell a few auto racing images in support of articles I publish.

I've tried shooting 600mm f/6.7 on the long end of an M43 zoom because I'm a little guy hiking around a road racetrack in the desert all day at 95F+. OLY 75-300 lens.

In bright light it does pretty well, still not the detail of a Nikon D700 with a 70-200 a friend uses when I'm shooting next to him, but you have to be really picky to care. By the time you print in a magazine at 1/4 page or smaller, or post to the internet in 1280X960, or share on a big 2,000 monitor it hardly matters. You lose a lot of the detail anyway and the noise - if you have much, goes away. The images are very close, when I'm shooting about f/5.6 zoomed out half way to match his 70-200.

When the light drops after the sun goes over the hill late in the afternoon, say 5PM on, that's when this lens doesn't work and my kit can't keep up with the Nikon. The IQ drops way off when I have to go to ISO1600 and 1/500 because for these images you want to be able to count rivets shooting from 50-yards away, but with a f/2.8-f/3.5 lens I can keep up with my buddy with his Nikon.

I'm no longer using a 10oz lens, though, I'm using a FT 50-200 which weighs more than two pounds, so I've lost a lot of the size/weight of the system, but with a 50-200 M43 f/2.8-f/3.5 I could keep up with a D700 all the time, everywhere for this event. It would still be much smaller and lighter than anything that reaches out to 600mm on the Nikon.

Not a flagship PRO FF to M43 camera comparison which I think may be silly, but a reasonable idea of where an EM1 1.0 is in the big picture compared with a quality ASP-C camera. To my eyes, with equal lenses, M43 does just as well and has a big size/weight advantage.

You have to have a competitive lens though, or when you lose the light, its no contest. You can't go to an event like this one thinking you will get great photos in bright sun and not so great ones in early morning in clouds, or fog, and late afternoon when the sun drops, or in rain and gloom because it might be that's where you get the best photo ops - or not. You have to be able to get the shot under all conditions, so reluctantly, I have to take the 50-200 and I have to put it on a monopod. I can shoot the 75-300 hand held and hike 20 miles with it. A delight when the weather cooperates. I'll replace the FT 50-200 with an M43 50-200 if its fast enough and live wiht the size/weight of it because I have to.

The specs, the math, and technical theory and calculations are not so important to me. the results are.