The awesomeness of the Pen-F flash

Arctra wrote:

Skin tones? White balance? I've never experienced better than the Panasonic AWB. The way it handles fluoro + flash + natural light is excellent. I am on AWB with both my GX7 and G6 99% of the time.

I have to respectively disagree with you here.

I find Olympus' AWB (with keep warm colors off) to be very accurate, especially with flash. I've never really had to switch it due to it being fooled. Not only that but I find it be very consistent shot-to-shot.

Now with my GX8 I've found its WB system to be my biggest gripe with the thing. It's constantly getting fooled in mixed lighting and with flash I always have to tweak it to get it right. Now full disclosure, the GX8 is my first foray into Panny-land and my issues may be purely from inexperience with their system. It's definitely not a deal-breaker for me, but I find I gravitate back to my OM-D whenever I do any work with flash.

My inexperience with flash photography aside, I have to agree with you. I've had over the years Olympus E-620, Panasonic GH2 and GX7 and now I am back to Olympus. White balance, color balance, and flash were all perfect on the E-620. GH2 and GX7 work too and over the years became an acquired taste. Now I am back to Olympus and boy did I miss the colors.

OlegDulin wrote:

As I pointed out in another thread, I've moved from GX7 to Pen-F. I hated the built-in flash on the GX7 -- it was offset, too harsh, and casted nasty shadows. GX7 also wasn't particularly good with the hotshoe flash -- colors were off, white balance was off.

At least the GX7 HAS a built-in flash. Being offset is actually an advantage, in that you can shoot the camera vertically or horizontally and the flash will still be above the lens if you're holding the camera correctly. It casts nasty shadows because it's a point light source; that's a physics issue and not a problem with the camera, and will be indistinguishable from any undiffused, shoe-mounted light pointed straight forward, on any camera.

I have Pocket Wizards and Softlighters for eliminating those shadows when needed, but for what it is, the built in flash of the GX7 is fine. Also, I've only ever used it or the FL360L or the FL580L and I've never had issues with white balance or color with any of them.

Boy, am I happy with the Pen-F. With the Pen-F I am back to the "Olympus colors" I so missed since I gave up my E-620 in exchange for the GH2. Look at the perfect colors and skin tones here.

Bounce flash off the ceiling

This doesn't look any different from bouncing a flash off the ceiling using a Panasonic (or any camera, for that matter), except you'd have to crank it to Vivid on a Panasonic to overcook colors this badly. If your subject has a flushed face (from drink, rosacea, or whatever) and you're not going to bother tungsten-balancing for the background and gelling your flash to match, then you might have gotten a better result toning down the saturation in this particular case.

I'm not slamming the Pen F, I'm sure it's a fine camera. But saying that not having a built-in flash is somehow better than having one is nonsensical, and these cameras, like most enthusiast-level cameras, offer enough controls that if you can be bothered to make use of them instead of shooting full-auto smartphone style in factory default mode, then it's not difficult to make the final results very similar to indistinguishable.

A quick adjustment and we have a much better result (imo). I would have done this in-camera by using tungsten balance, and a CTO or CTS gel over my flash, and using Natural. (Because the skin tone is so distractingly ruddy, I wouldn't have used Portrait, which accentuates reds.)

Are you using the fl-lm3 flash?

My GM5 has no built in flash, it came with a small external flash but can not bounce. I don't use a flash that often on my GM5, but found the fl-lm3 on sale and picked it up. It will tilt and swivel to bounce off ceiling or a side wall, giving some good indirect light. It is fairly powerful for such a small flash, and since it uses no batteries, it's so light it's easy to slip in your pocket.

I don't know the built in flash on the GX7, but I'm sure this little flash is better. It will not work on the gx7, but will on the gx8, I would recommended as a small take anywhere flash.

Great little flash, love it for my GM5 and sure you are getting great results on your Pen F.

I have a gm-5 and am looking for a small compatible flash.  Will this flash sync higher than 1/50 second?  The gm-1 didn't.

The GM-5 has the same flash speed limit as the GM-1.