(This entry is duplicated at the DPReview Olympus SLR forum) Although I've been photographing for many years, I've never been a flash user. I've only ever used flash on point&shoots for family-type photos. During the last few years I've been getting more interested in wildlife photography, and can appreciate the benefits of fill-in flash. Thus I'd like to buy my E-1 a 1-year birthday present. I'm not sure if to buy the FL36 or FL50, and apart from the power I'm not sure I understand the difference between the two. Given that I'm unlikely to get into anything like portrait photography or anything where the flash is the principal light source, and that my main interest is going to be fill-in, can anybody tell me which I'd be best served with ? I'm a bit wary of buying the FL36 and then feeling I sold myself short in 6 months, but then again I don't want to buy the FL50 and find it is total overkill.

Ok, I haven't written anything in this so-called blog for ages, but actually I've got a few things in the queue. The first is a brief write-up on using the E-1 for infra-red (IR) photography. Why IR ? Well it certainly gives a different perspective on things. Infrared photography uses either IR sensitive film, or an IR-sensitive digital sensor, to record an image at light frequencies lower than the human eye can detect, and to present a rendition of the scene which we can see. I have the distinct impression that whilst IR film is specifically designed to do this, digital camera sensors more or less do it despite the design. Most, if not all, digital cameras include an IR filter, I believe to reduce noise. This means that some are totally insensitive to IR, and those that are not require long exposure times, essentially to allow the light to leak past the filter. However, when IR photography does work with a digital camera, it has several advantages over film. First, IR film is very grainy (although some would not see that as a disadvantage). But the second is significant - you can check the exposure immediately after capture. This is significant, because exposure of IR film is largely guesswork and experience. There are no IR-sensitive lightmeters that I know of. A third advantage is the fact that you don't have all the problems associated with loading and developing IR film. This image is a photo taken with Kodak High Speed Infra Red film, using a Hasselblad Xpan. The standard characteristics of IR photography can be seen - the bright vegetation, the other-world effect, and in the case of film, the very coarse grain. Note that this photo was taken handheld, probably at around 1/60th second at f8 or thereabouts. The same photo with the E-1 would take somewhat longer. A number of different IR filters are available on the market. Some allow a small amount of visible light through, giving a deep, dark red effect. But "real" IR filters are blocking filters, so called because they let no visible light through at all. They appear black to the human eye. I tried two IR filters on the E-1, a B&W 093, and a Hoya R72. The B&W was too dark, but the Hoya works well provided long exposures are used. It goes without saying that IR photography with the E-1 requires a tripod, for two reasons - one the long exposure, and two, you have to frame the shot first with the filter off. Some digicams, such as the Nikon Coolpix 950 (still highly regarded by the IR community), allow you to preview the image on the screen. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered that on a reasonably sunny day - and you need sunlight for IR photography - using the Hoya filter requires exposures of between 45 and 60 seconds, at apertures between f4.5 and f11. I also quickly discovered that at such exposures the E-1's sensor shows a lot of thermal noise. Fortunately, switching on Noise Reduction fixes this, although at the cost of doubling the exposure time, which really taxes the battery. The two images above are 100% detail from a scene shot without noise reduction (left) and with (right). The image you get, after all this, is very red. Since the effect we're after here is to duplicate black & white IR film (colour IR film is another story altogether), we need to convert this to black and white. First of although you need to convert it from RAW (I don't recommend shooting JPG here). Don't use C1 for IR shots - obviously its well document difficulties with reds have a field day here. Use Photoshop ACR or Viewer/Studio, and ideally just go at default settings. If you use Photoshop ACR, you might see that the red channel is way overblown. Don't worry, but pull it back a bit using Exposure. Next, converting to black & white: Photoshop has several tools for converting to black and white, the most obvious being Desaturate. Don't use this. Use the Channel Mixer, preferably as an adjustment layer. The actual values you dial in to the Channel Mixer are a matter of taste, but generally most useful information is in the Red and Green channels - Blue is pretty noisy and dark. The image below was taken with the E-1 is bright afternoon sunlight, with an exposure of 60 seconds at f/11. In this case arguably it was slightly over-exposed. It was processed using the Channel Mixer settings shown here. So, in conclusion, IR photography with the E-1 works and is good fun. Long exposure times mean that you will need a still day, or will accept (or welcome) wind motion blur effects. It is different to film IR, but well worth exploring it its own right.

Following the less than perfect support for the E-1 in PhaseOne CaptureOne, I decided to go back to ACR, and, armed with Bruce Fraser's Real World Adobe Camera Raw, and his earlier Creative Pro article, I tried recalibration ACR for my E-1. I photographed a 24 patch Macbeth Color Checker in ambient light, downloaded the ProPhoto reference file from Bruce's website, and got going. The basic results were as shown here: If you can't read the image, the numbers are: Green Hue +8 Green Saturation +6 Blue Hue +20 Blue Saturation -15 Red Hue -20 Red Saturation +31 Be aware that you must first use the Adjust tab settings as Bruce describes to reach a neutral white balance. I'm not sure how "portable" these results are - I'd be interested to hear. Generally speaking the results are not bad at all - far better than my first attempts. I reached them after 3 iterations, and was in the ballpark from the 1st. The biggest problem is that the E-1 reds are very hot - this I believe is typical of all DSLRs, but the E-1's sensor definitely has a different kind of response to others. Not worse, not better, just different. We know it is different in design to, say, the Sony CCD used by Nikon and others, so no big surprise there. You have to basically try to achieve a good relative balance between the complementary colours on each main R/G/B patch - in other words, sort out the R/B balance for G, R/G for B, etc. I think you have to live with high R everywhere - bringing R down to the "correct" value badly distorts the overall balance. but letting it ride high doesn't seem to matter too much. Getting a good balance is the main thing - global corrections can be made, as ever, on an image by image basis in the Adjust tab. Two things are worth emphasising: first, before starting, play around with the calibration sliders to understand what they do. The thing to get in mind is that each colour slider affects the other two colours, not itself - hence Red Saturation affects Blue & Green together (increase Red and the other two go down) and Red Hue affects the balance of Blue & Green. As Bruce says, start off with getting Green Saturation right using the Adjust Saturation slider, then balance the Red & Blue in the Green patch using the Green H/S sliders, then move on to Blue, and finally Red. It works, once you get used to it. The other thing is that Bruce Fraser needs a technical editor. The two versions of his instructions (see above) are not totally consistent. It isn't so much that they are contradictory, more that they both tell 80% of the story. Together they make up the whole. A few other things let him down, for example he advises that there should be no specular highlights in the frame when you shoot the checker, for example a metal clip. Good advice, but what do we see in fig 3-25 ? Yep. a metal support with a specular highlight. I think that the book has been artificially extended to make it "long enough". There is far too much repetition. But there is also a lot of value, especially on the file browser. Possibly this is repeated in Real World Photoshop CS, I don't know, I haven't read it. But it should be.... Personally I would have preferred to see a more in depth (and far better laid out) section on calibration - for example a cut'n'paste from Creative Pro (!) and a bit less fluff. Maybe this would not have satisfied his editors - technical publishers seem to rate value by weight these days. In that case maybe a self-published, downloadable PDF would have been better (in the style of Digital Outback's guides). So what is the bottom line on RAW converters ? Adobe ACR - very deep potential, advanced highlight recovery, direct access to "gurus" (and the guy who wrote it) on Adobe forums, workflow advantages if you're using Photoshop CS anyway, free if you're using Photoshop anyway.... but a Macbeth color check is vital and is not cheap. And time is money, and it takes time to get it right. Nevertheless, you learn a lot of useful information going through the calibration process, which can be applied elsewhere. The Photoshop file browser is highly configurable, and basically is as good as (or better than) anything else apart from the lack of a histogram display. I'd expect it to improve... Capture One - very nice software, very good workflow, very good browser, a few quirks to get used to, but the pre-conversion crop & rotate, and the background processing are killer features. If you don't mind some issues with reds in extreme cases, have faith that they will fix these in the long run, don't mind being outside the Photoshop workflow, don't mind somewhat uneven technical support, and can tolerate the price, then this the winner at present. Olympus Studio - some nice concepts, excellent browsing and selection options, good downloader, camera control, "intelligent" lens distortion correction, but horrible, badly documented and limited RAW converter interface, and abysmal performance. On the other hand many people (including me) believe it gives the best absolute results. And only Olympus know exactly how their sensor works. It is also very prone to crashing on my system. I'm not sure about Olympus Viewer, but anyway who need that (at least) for firmware upgrades. In the long run we'll have to see what Olympus and Phase One come up with. But if they wait too long, ACR has a very good chance become the defacto standard.

Well it's finally here: PhaseOne's Capture One SE with Olympus E-1 support (or C1SE for short). I've been watching PhaseOne's web site like a hawk, waiting for this release, which feels long overdue. C1SE is reputed to be the best raw developer on the market, and with the shortcomings of Olympus Studio and of Adobe Camera Raw, I was hoping it would solve the raw workflow problem. I've been using it extensively over the last week - here are my first impressions.

For most of the past four weeks I have been travelling around Iceland with my Olympus E-1 (and Hasselblad Xpan). I shot 2700 frames, about 26Gb of Raw files, and used all 3 E-System zoom lenses. The camera behaved perfectly all the time, and stood up to rough handling and repeated soaking without a whimper. Using the battery grip, I found that one charge was good for up to 700 frames, which is quite exceptional. One peculiarity I found was that when the low battery warning appeared, turning the camera off, leaving it a few minutes, and turning it on again appeared to give the battery a very significant new lease of life. I changed lenses often, in a sometimes very dusty environment, and the sensor cleaner worked perfectly. I have not found any evidence of dust on any of those 2700 frames, which I think is more than can be said for the people I spent some time with, who were all using Canon or Nikon systems. The E-1 looks a bit lonely amongst all these big D1s etc. But when you point out that the 50-200, coupled to the 1.4 converter, gives a 35mm equivalent 560mm lens, they look very thoughtfully at their huge 70-200 IS lenses!


Early morning light over Kjalfell, Iceland, July 2004.

Whilst I got some good photographs, on the whole I was a bit disappointed with the results. Partly due to technique, partly due to tripod problems I suspect, I ended up with an embarassing number of out of focus shots. I also had problems with the eyecup falling off, and the diopter moving. But in general the camera behaved very well - it was just the photographer at fault. What is interesting is that I have just had a first look at the 12 rolls of slide film I shot with the Xpan. It is indisputable that my success rate here is much higher. This may be because I'm much more familiar with the Xpan. It may also be because I'm a more naturally "panoramic" photographer (I suspect this may have something to do with it). But I won't give up with the E-1. It is a wonderful camera to use, and when I get things right, it delivers. I suspect a little more practice on auto focus, and learning to use AF lock might help a bit. We shall see...