Olympus E-M10 ii not producing optimal images

Hello guys, I recently got my Olympus E-M10 ii and 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens. It's my first mirrorless/interchangeable lens camera, I have previously been using my phone and an Olympus point and shoot.

I have read up a little before my trip and I know that I still dont fully understand the mechanics behind operating this camera and lens, I only read generally about the rules of photography eg. sunny 16, higher f for deeper depth of field for landscape photos. It's an amateur mistake as I didnt take my lens into consideration.

I'm not very satisfied with the photos I took recently, shot on A mode. The colours look dull and the photos don't look too sharp. Anyway, here's an album to some shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fixingyellowcars/albums/72157667328263619/with/38869866261/

I set my ISO to 200 and followed the sunny 16 rule. You can see the specs below the images in the album. Are the photos not optimal because I set my f too tight, since the lens is F3.5 - 5.6?

Thank you and sorry if this question is silly!

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

First a few things, not because you read about the sunny 16 rule, it means you should use it all the time. The sunny 16 rules was used in the days of film photography, when you knew that your light conditions would not change for a while, fully sunny day for example, and you won't be walking inside a building, or shooting through doorways, because you are locking the exposure.

I can see that your images look sharp to me, maybe some of them are underexposed, so is harder to see detail in them. You should research and lear how to use the AF system of your camera. Letting it select the AF point automatically, is an exercise in futility, because you are letting the camera decide for you what is the part of the image that you want it to be in focus, and you should be the one making that decision.

Your E-M10 Mark II is a very capable and modern camera, you should use the tools it provides to your advantage. I strongly suggest to keep learning and practicing. Specifically I'd go much deeper on:

- The Histogram, what it is and what is useful for, measuring exposure using the Histogram, etc.

- Metering modes

- Shooting modes

- AF modes

etc. I'm pretty sure others will chip in with specifics on videos or books you can read. I'd start with a good read to the users manual, back to back.

BTW, you have a good eye for composition, you only need to master the technical side. Keep it up.

fixingyellowcars said:

Hello guys, I recently got my Olympus E-M10 ii and 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens. It's my first mirrorless/interchangeable lens camera, I have previously been using my phone and an Olympus point and shoot.

I have read up a little before my trip and I know that I still dont fully understand the mechanics behind operating this camera and lens, I only read generally about the rules of photography eg. sunny 16, higher f for deeper depth of field for landscape photos. It's an amateur mistake as I didnt take my lens into consideration.

I'm not very satisfied with the photos I took recently, shot on A mode. The colours look dull and the photos don't look too sharp. Anyway, here's an album to some shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fixingyellowcars/albums/72157667328263619/with/38869866261/

I set my ISO to 200 and followed the sunny 16 rule. You can see the specs below the images in the album. Are the photos not optimal because I set my f too tight, since the lens is F3.5 - 5.6?

Thank you and sorry if this question is silly!

Click to expand...

They are under exposed because you went too high on your aperture setting, you don't want to go above F8 with that lens tbh. Boost the shutter speed instead when needed, forget old film rules. That old rule translates to 'sunny 8' for MFT.

Don't shoot at f/16 unless you really, really, really need that depth of field. f/16 will produce noticeably softer images than at f/8. Even with a cheapo kit zoom.

If you are not shooting RAW, then start doing so. Out of camera JPEGs tend to have a lot of noise reduction and sharpening applied to them, which can produce a bit plasticky images (in my opinion at least). If you are not shooting in low light situation, keep the noise reduction (Noise Filter in Olympus nomenclature) at it's minimal setting.

It's more difficult to see on Flickr than in the DPR galleries, so I don't know whether this is true or not in this case: but people warn against using apertures above f8 because diffraction can set in and reduce sharpness. Mostly in M43, the sweet spot is f4 to 5.6.

But I do think there is visible under-exposure. Oman has very high levels of sunlight (compared to e.g. Europe) and it might be that you see similar effects to when you shoot in bright snow scenes: the camera tries to compensate and gets the exposure wrong.

Maggie

Apart from the manual, this is a good starting point for learning to understand the camera:
check out the comments section as well for additional tips and tricks.

fixingyellowcars said:

Hello guys, I recently got my Olympus E-M10 ii and 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens. It's my first mirrorless/interchangeable lens camera, I have previously been using my phone and an Olympus point and shoot.

I have read up a little before my trip and I know that I still dont fully understand the mechanics behind operating this camera and lens, I only read generally about the rules of photography eg. sunny 16, higher f for deeper depth of field for landscape photos. It's an amateur mistake as I didnt take my lens into consideration.

I'm not very satisfied with the photos I took recently, shot on A mode. The colours look dull and the photos don't look too sharp. Anyway, here's an album to some shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fixingyellowcars/albums/72157667328263619/with/38869866261/

I set my ISO to 200 and followed the sunny 16 rule. You can see the specs below the images in the album. Are the photos not optimal because I set my f too tight, since the lens is F3.5 - 5.6?

Thank you and sorry if this question is silly!

Click to expand...

Getting the best photos requires a little editing. If you have a smart phone, download the Snapseed app. You should be able to transfer the photos to your smartphone using your camera's wifi. I typically use Snapseed's HDR function (down very low on the portrait setting, which does not look unnatural) and boost saturation quite a bit. Then I increase the tonal contrast (only the high tones). This makes the photo pop without looking unnatural.

Also, these tiny pancake zoom lenses are not the best in dim light and shady/cloudy situations. Colors just come out very flat and cartoonish like a water color painting.

Jasmine, welcome to the forum.

Love your shot of the dune with moon.

As others have said, avoid using apertures smaller than f/8, specially with most kit lenses. At f/11 and smaller, diffraction will cause softening with many lenses. Film exposure guides are most useful if shooting with film, and don't have a light meter!

Learn how the five metering modes work on your camera - spot, centre weighted, matrix, high key and low key.

If you want very sharp photos with a M43 camera, you shouldn't go above f/11, or better above f/8. Diffraction reduces sharpness on the entire image.

But you can go above 200 ISO; results are still excellent at ISO 800, and still fine at ISO 1600.

fixingyellowcars said:

Hello guys, I recently got my Olympus E-M10 ii and 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens. It's my first mirrorless/interchangeable lens camera, I have previously been using my phone and an Olympus point and shoot.

I have read up a little before my trip and I know that I still dont fully understand the mechanics behind operating this camera and lens, I only read generally about the rules of photography eg. sunny 16, higher f for deeper depth of field for landscape photos. It's an amateur mistake as I didnt take my lens into consideration.

I'm not very satisfied with the photos I took recently, shot on A mode. The colours look dull and the photos don't look too sharp. Anyway, here's an album to some shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fixingyellowcars/albums/72157667328263619/with/38869866261/

I set my ISO to 200 and followed the sunny 16 rule.

Click to expand...

"Sunny 16" implies ISO100.

Moreover, f16 is ok for FF senzor but *not* for tiny m43.

You can still use the aforementioned rule but with adjustments for ISO200 and new f-stop (set to say f8.0).

fixingyellowcars said:

Hello guys, I recently got my Olympus E-M10 ii and 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens. It's my first mirrorless/interchangeable lens camera, I have previously been using my phone and an Olympus point and shoot.

I have read up a little before my trip and I know that I still dont fully understand the mechanics behind operating this camera and lens, I only read generally about the rules of photography eg. sunny 16, higher f for deeper depth of field for landscape photos. It's an amateur mistake as I didnt take my lens into consideration.

I'm not very satisfied with the photos I took recently, shot on A mode. The colours look dull and the photos don't look too sharp. Anyway, here's an album to some shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fixingyellowcars/albums/72157667328263619/with/38869866261/

I set my ISO to 200 and followed the sunny 16 rule. You can see the specs below the images in the album. Are the photos not optimal because I set my f too tight, since the lens is F3.5 - 5.6?

Thank you and sorry if this question is silly!

Click to expand...

Personally I don't see too much wrong with these photos.

I agree with what most other replies said, use F5.6 -F8 and Auto WB. Check Noise Filter is Off or Low and Gradation is Normal.

Were they shot in Raw or out of camera Jpegs?

Did you do any editing? Most images can do with a bit of extra tweaking in an editing program.

As to colour that is subjective but you could try using Picture Mode Vivid.

What I would do is take a few Raw test shots of a colourful scene. Then import them into Olympus Viewer 3 ( The free Olympus editing software). Open them in the Raw editing settings and play around with the WB, Picture Mode, contrast, saturation, sharpening settings until you get what you like. Then adjust your camera to those settings.

Thanks Martin for the advice. I’ll look into them in detail this weekend.

Thanks Maggie. I tried using f8 as test shots for my sister’s birthday but only certain parts of the photos were sharp. The faces are all sharp but the cake looked soft, though not blurry.

I suddenly remembered that I also did some trial and error to find the optimal f that doesn’t blur the background (f8-11), but I forgot all about it during the trip!

Can I say that for landscape photos, f4-5.6 is enough, but if I have close or detailed foreground I should increase it up to 8-11?

Thank you!

Thank you! I did read the blog post but didnt read many of the comments. Will do that, thanks!

I did import them to my phone and used Snapseed on some photos, but the photos I posted on Flickr are all unedited.

Thanks for the suggestion! Will using Snapseed reduce the resolution?

Thank you John, I’ll keep that in mind and read up and experiment more!

Thank you, many have been saying that and I’ll keep that in mind. But what if I have a person’s face relatively closer to the camera than the sceneray, and I want to capture both?

Thanks Emil. I Guess f8 is the max I should go. The lowest ISO I can go is ISO200 though!

I have auto WB, keep colour warm Off, noise filter Low and normal gradation. They were shot out of camera jpegs and I did not do any editing for these photos!

I do have Olympus palette on my phone. Is viewer 3 on desktop?

Thanks for the advice, I’ll try tweaking the photos and see which setting is best!

When should I use F4, F5.6 and F8?

Thanks for the feedback! F8 will be the max I go. But one of the reasons I used 16 was also because I wanted the background to be sharp, especially if I take travel photos with people’s faces in the foreground. So which aperture should I use for that?

Would 4-5.6 for pure landscape and 8 for landscape with people or foreground detail work? (Will also try to experiment in real life as well).

Thanks!