Jemez Mountains: E-PM2

The Jemez Mountains of New Mexico are the remnants of a supervolcano, with a caldera 14 miles across. Its last eruption was between 50 and 60 thousand years ago. The city of Los Alamos and Los Alamos National Laboratory are located here, and most of the mountains are encompassed by federally protected lands: The Santa Fe National Forest, the Valles Caldera National Preserve, and Bandelier National Monument. The mountains are also flanked by several indian reservations: the Jemez, Cochiti, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso pueblos.

Lichens and red soil on the surface of a boulder that is a solid chunk of obsidian.

Accumulation of pebbles in a depression created by a hot spring bubbling into the Jemez River at the Soda Dam.

Limestone hot spring-formed cave inside Soda Dam, outside of the town of Jemez Springs. I tried to photograph this subject last week with my A3000+Speedbooster+OM 28mm f/3.5, but it was snowing and the temperature differential was about 30 degrees between the outside air and the conditions inside the cave, and a sudden wall of humidity and condensation made photography impossible this close to the subject. This day it was much warmer and less problematic.

Sometimes a small camera is very beneficial--the last shot might have been problematic with a larger one. I managed to bang this camera on the roof of the cramped cave twice setting up different positions on tripod. My E-M1 with 11-22 would have been comparatively unwieldy.

Other than some shutter shock issues that I'm gradually figuring out how to work around (the new Shake Reduction filter in Photoshop CC seems to be very helpful to fix photos that suffer from shutter shock, if time consuming), I'm really enjoying the E-PM2, and the 14-42 kit lens is a little gem. Its zoom ring is extremely pleasant, nicer than the ones on a lot of far more expensive lenses, and the lens delivers good enough resolution for me. I might just end up picking up the WCON-P01 and the MCON-P01 in order to stretch out this very compact kit a little more.

However, contrary to what this forum keeps saying about the Sony and Panasonic sensors, the E-PM2 seems to give far more chroma noise and hot pixels than the E-M1 does in long exposures (that's with the same live time settings on both, and dark frame subtraction turned on with both-- I don't consider dark frame subtraction to be optional with any digital camera, and the only reason not to use it is pretty much just star trails).

Interesting stuff, Klarno, and nice pix.

As for the Oly 14-42 II R, which is what you have, I too found it to be very good indeed. At 14mm, it gave away nothing but an f-stop to the Panny 14mm.

I also tried the WCON-P01 and the MCON-P01 with results which made me happy. The WCON introduces quite a bit of barrel distortion, but it is a regular form so it is easily corrected in PP using Photoline -- if you wish to correct it. Most of the time, the correction was unnecessary and some of the time, the barrel distortion actually added to the pic.

The black rectangle shows the 14mm covered; the full frame is with the WCON fitted. A lot of extra picture for a modest amount of money.

A few examples:

Hmmm -- who was fiddling around with his niew piece of equipment when he should have been cutting the grass? Talk about dead give-away!

A bit of flare around but easily controlled by shading the front element with your hand. In this case, I deliberately set out to see what flare would look like with the sun just out of the frame. I thought this was a pretty good result.

Barrel distortion helps this pic! The fence was leaning just a bit, the distortion made the lean more apparent.

The barrel distortion -- but …

… because it is nice and regular, it is fixed 100% in less than a minute in PP in Photoline. (Note: some of he shelves really did sag a bit.)

I was less happy with the MCON -- it performed well, and had the added advantage of also fitting onto the excellent Oly 40-150, but it is made with very thin plastic. It felt like a toy out of a cornflakes box.

I think this is an MCON shot. A minature sunflower.

A pitu Oly doesn't offer a 2x tele converter for the 14-42 as Panasonic does.

Cheers, geoff

I really like the last two, especially the one in Soda Dam. I've lived in NM all my life, and I don't know how may times I've passed Soda Dam and have never gone up inside it.