Olympus E-PL3 | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

My new Olympus E-PL3 sure is beautiful! It is also 30% smaller and 40% lighter than my Canon and has an amazingly quiet shutter. Of course I had to go out to test it properly. My impression after the first time shooting: What a great camera!

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

Yep, this guy is actually blowing up a balloon while crossing the street.

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

Just a moment later the little girl was crying, because the boy was being mean to her. Ah, family bliss.

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

Not sure what the girl on the left is holding. In any case, I like the way the man is carrying the baby!

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

The little boy just wanted to stay on the floor and was trying to pull his mum down. Here you can also see that the noise at high ISO is a bit worse with the E-PL3 than what my Canon does. This was ISO 1600, 17mm, f/3.8 and 1/250. I should have pushed the shutter speed a bit down. The noise level makes pushing the exposure up in post-processing less of an option. I’ll need to keep an eye on it. I still had the camera in the sRGB colour space, so maybe choosing Adobe RGB might make things better as well, not sure yet.

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

Although generally the autofocus seems really good – face centred focus and quite fast – there were maybe 3 or 4 shots out of 90 that were slightly out of focus. Not bad I’d say. My Canon does a much worse job of it. I like this picture even though it’s not quite sharp.

Berlin | © Lilly Schwartz 2013

In this I actually like that the boy is half out of the frame.

What’s best about this camera is really the quiet shutter. When I was shooting the two kids in the supermarket I actually took more than one picture and nobody noticed! Quite a difference to the rather obvious and loud Canon. I also took a few pictures that I wouldn’t have taken with the Canon, because the people in the frame looked slightly menacing. In fact a lot of people in this area look quite menacing, must be the male centred culture of the mostly foreign inhabitants, so a less obtrusive camera is actually a good thing. After all I don’t really want any confrontations with some dangerous looking Turkish youths.

Also cool: image stabilisation in the camera instead of the lens. None of my Canon prime lenses have IS and therefore I need to go up to 1/400 or 1/500 when shooting while walking if I want to make sure that there will be no shake. With the E-PL3 I was at 1/250 most of the time and had no shake.

I’m still trying to get the hang of the lens. It’s a 14-42mm zoom lens, so it’s hard to judge the distance when shooting from the hip. I only notice now that it actually has focal length markers, so next time I’ll try to set it to somewhere around 20mm for my typical shooting length.

By the way, I post-processed these in Lightroom and first I was a bit confused because there were no lens profiles for Olympus. The lens correction in Lightroom is great, so I immediately googled for more information. Finally I found out that there is an Adobe Air App called Adobe Lens Profile Downloader, where one can find the right lens profiles for the lens. All one needs to do is select the profile, click download and restart Lightroom. Very simple. I’m really happy with Lightroom by the way. Since I installed it I opened Photoshop only once to remove some black and white conversion noise.

All pictures apart from the first were taken with my Olympus E-PL3 and my M.Zuiko Digital 14-44mm f/3.5-5.6.
The first picture was taken with my Canon EOS 450D and my Canon EF 35mm f/2.0.

I have decided that I need to re-think my picture posting process a bit. For a while I’ve been going chronologically and posting all the pictures I liked, which only works if you’re actually taking less pictures per day than you post (or you need infinite time, something humans lack). The opposite was the case for the last few days, so I’m going back to posting the best from the previous day, unless I didn’t go out to shoot.

My health was acting a bit up yesterday and I was busy trying my new camera, so I haven’t practiced my drawing already for a few days. That’s ok though, sometimes it needs a little break as well. Apart from taking pictures I was reading my new book about Henri Cartier-Bresson and almost finished it today, so these days are really filled with photography. Very enjoyable!