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| Mandarin Drake by TheDispossessed from Ducks Unlimited | As in Days of Old by Birdman50 from Down on the farm | +U3073694 by stokey from A Big Year 2023 | Shell Bubbles by mikero from Patterns, with Color and Light | Descending the bank by fulviavecchia from Wild Descent: Heading down! |
I have 3 Olympus cameras that I don't use anymore. I used to use them with underwater housing when scuba diving with strobes. But for land, the small sensor just can't handle low light situations. Poor dynamic range and a lot of noise. I could see the noise via the viewfinder. Now I use a Sony A1 full frame, and get better results. I will say the Olympus works well between 10 am and 4 pm... unfortunately the light is pretty harsh then. I prefer dawn and sunset.
Unless it is for travel purposes, why would anyone want a short tripod? Even the standard 58 inches seems to short for me. If I am doing birds in flight and am pointed upwards into the sky, I really do not want to ruin my back by hunching and crouching to see into my viewfinder. I dream that someday, tripod makers will standardize on perhaps 60 inches. Even another 2 inches would help.
The Sony A7Riv (a great all around camera) also needs firmware updates. As a person who uses this camera 3-4 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week, I am all too familiar with some Auto Focus quirks. I rotate through the options: Wide, Zone, Spot, Expandable Flexible spot, Tracking Zone, even Center. Sometimes the camera will just not lock on to a bird sitting in a bunch of irregularly shaped bushes. The camera keeps reaching for the "nearest item" within the spot. I called Sony for advice. They told me that with the A7Riv to set the tracking to "human" when I am wanting to track a bird. That is unreliable also. I hope there is a firmware upgrade that improves this situation. If anyone reading this-- can tell me where I am going wrong, please post. Ideally I need a AF procedure that when I focus on a bird correctly, it will still track the bird when it gets up and flies! "Spot" does not work for that.
I would like to see some Birds in Flight. Does the eye focus on flying birds work well? It does not work consistently on the A7Riv, so it would be great if there were an improvement.
mosc: f4.5 with a 1.25x TC is by my math on the edge of diffraction at 20mp for m43, isn't it? That really doesn't leave them much room to grow for such a professional lens. Needed to be faster IMHO even if it didn't get to 1000mm.
I'd also love to see it compete with a 40+mp FF body with a 150-600mm cropped to 1000mm. Certainly the FF body + lens is way cheaper than this Olympus monstrosity.
on diffraction: https://photographylife.com/what-is-diffraction-in-photography
Says: for a 1.5x APS-C crop-sensor camera, multiply your aperture by 1.5 in order to see the equivalent diffraction on a full-frame camera. for micro-four-thirds, multiply times 2.0
While this is nice, I would like to see them take a photo that has more details in it so that I could get an idea of the resolution. When the photo is of the sun, which appears as a white ball, above a black silhouette of the mountain... I can't tell anything about resolution. I would like to see a picture of a bird taken from far away. That way I could see what kind of detail there is in the eye and the feathers. If the lens & camera combined can take great pictures of birds, especially flying birds, then that would be intriguing.
Even before this firmware, I occasionally need to take the battery out and re-insert to get the camera to work again. This is not good when I am taking action nature shots, because I miss the shot entirely. Let's face it, Olympus quality control is not good.
I take photographs about 20 days a month. This camera can do a lot, but here is what it cannot do:
-- cannot track flying birds. If I see an eagle and focus with continuous track, the camera cannot track the bird even if it flies right in front of my face.
-- cannot get the blurred background that a DSLR can get. This is an important with birds or butterflies when there is a busy background. Comparing my photos with those of friends taking the same shots at same location, my camera falls short.
-- this camera has difficulty focussing in low contrast situations, because it relies heavily on contrast detection.
-- there are not enough megapixels to get details as modern cameras do. 16 megapixels does not get detail as 50 megapixel cameras do. Olympus needs to upgrade its sensor..
-- this camera burns though batteries quickly. I carry 5 to shoot all day.
-- there are no published lens specification that can be used with Photoshop for automatic "len correction."
I have owned this two years. I shoot raw and in a contrasty environment, I have been bracketing then doing HDR in Photoshop. I recently tried the "in camera HDR" and it did not turn out as well. And the camera only gave me a jpeg result. So I prefer post processing for HDR. Features that only work when using JPEG are not of interest to me because I want full color to work with.
I enjoy the light weight and carry it everywhere all day while traveling 5 or 6 months a year. However, I have compared image quality of my photos with photos of the same scenery by novices using iAuto mode with Canons and Nikons with larger sensors, and I see greater clarity and resolution in their photos. With sensors, size seems to matter.
I spent several days with tripod focussing with maximum telephoto on hummingbirds. Several times a day, the camera, just could not focus. Frustrated, I would turn the camera off, then turn it back on, to try to get it focussing again. Not sure what the problem is?