Did I Make A Mistake Ditching Canon for Olympus? 

I only have the one pro lens at the moment but I’d like something longer and something wider…. Lenses. I’m talking about lenses.

​@@ChrisBaitson if anything Olympus lenses prove size doesn't matter 😂 I love the 45mm f1.8 lens. And am looking at some point adding 75mm 1.8 to my collection. 👍

Looks like you’re using the same camera and lens as me. It’s a really nice combination isn’t it.

Me too

Thanks John. To me the system is underrated and a lot of the negative points that keep cropping up seem somewhat unsubstantiated from what I’ve seen and experienced.

Thank you Christina 💪🏻

Agree - I've jumped into 4/3 and then M4/3 - and not once in 15 years have any publications or wedding customers ever questioned the quality of the images. The biggest nay-sayers are just Fool Frame trolls!

Thanks Cory. Looks like we took very similar paths with the Olympus cameras. I hear the Panasonic GH5 is a very good video camera if that’s the route you want to take.

@@ChrisBaitson It has been a great path to be on! Yeah I can agree with the GH5 for video. Seems to be the top choice for a lot of creators and videographers and I can understand why. If I did go that route it would definitely be a top contender. For now and for awhile I will be sticking with stills and exploration with OM System/Olympus gear. I still havent found my niche. And something I love about Olympus OMDS cameras is that they are capable of any genre of photography.

I have been using cannons for 35 years. My newest one is 12 years old. The technology that’s available in the GH5 in my recent G9 is making photography fun again.

The GH5 will be great for video (I have a GH4) but for stills you probably want a G9 or E-M1iii. All very similar used prices, I have the G9, its stabilisation is probably the best of any current camera, but only Dual and DFD when using Lumix lenses. It will handle Olympus lenses pretty well and an Olympus will handle Lumix lenses pretty well, but they are not rock solid like Dual-IS. DFD is faster than Ollie PDAF and only recently beaten by Sony. Which means Olympus lenses do focus more slowly than Lumix and can hunt. Mmm, low light is back cat in the coal hole without flash. Nighttime, low ISO, small aperture, long shutter, tripod, and don't believe the exposure meter because it is looking for 18% grey, fix the WB. One thing Olympus could do which Lumix does is make changing the metering mode quickly accessible.

Thanks for watching and supporting Andrew. Pick one up, most of the Olympus bodies from the 10s to the 1 series are reasonably priced on the used market now.

Do it,I was a Nikon D7000 series shooter until a week ago ;-)

@@fujiuser1968 Fellow former D7000 user ! I was not happy with the results I got from this camera. Then entered the EM10 Mkii and it felt like a breeze of fresh air

I’m very much looking forward to the summer. This winter has been a long one for the photography 😐

Image quality negativity is a fun one with these cameras, when you actually see the images side by side with another camera the penny drops. Yes theirs a smidgen more noise but so what. That EM10 Mark ii is a really good little camera in my opinion.

@@ChrisBaitson Quite honestly, EM10 mark II I had the most fun with. The next iteration of this model lost a lot of manual settings of the predecessor, which is sad. My friend bought one and was disappointed that they took a lot of control from the photographer. But the camera itself, to him, is still pure joy, especially for the night shots. The ability to shoot night photos handheld in the city is his biggest love. I currently use for my street photography an EM5 Mark II, most often combined with the Olympus 17 mm 1.8. Or paired with an old manual 24 mm f2 Vivitar (this glass is from 1980). I just put the combo in my jacket pocket and off we go! Such a joyful experience. And the picture quality is more than enough :)

I had a D7000, focusing problems...

I’d still love to visit NYC but it’s just far too expensive for me to get over.

Thanks for checking me out mate. I’ll have a look at your channel a little later on!

Thanks, Dude!

I swapped my Z6II for an OM1 and have never regretted it.

Thanks Colin. Do you live local to the area?

@Chris Baitson Unfortunately not Chris. I live near Leicester but holiday in that area occasionally - Bridlington, Whitby, Withernsea etc..

Thanks Blaine. It’s a really nice lens to use. My only pro lens at the moment though. Done everything I’ve asked of it so far!

Thanks Glen

Thank you Howie. Appreciated.

And both of those issues are resolved by using one of the ever increasing options of super wide f-stop lenses available.

@@lanceevans1689 the 45MM 1.8 I own is a wonderful example of such a lens.

Yup, in a nutshell.

@@ChrisBaitson Exactly Chris. And in truth, when you start going beyond that, it becomes hard to focus on anything. Anything moving at least. This is true for any format. The old 5D/FF with blurred backgrounds, same problems.

Thank you Gianni!

This is a point a lot of folks seem to miss: aperture is aperture, the light coming through is the same on which ever system you’re using. The depth of field is affected, but the light is exactly the same.

Will it? People do neglect the fact that the smaller image from a smaller sensor needs to be enlarged more than an image from a larger sensor to have the same print or screen size. When you enlarge more, you also enlarge the unsharpness of the parts of the image that are not in exact focus.

Viewing distance should also be taken into account. You can print a billboard with an image taken from a smart phone. My EM1 MKii has a smaller sensor than my old Canon 7D yet the image resolution is higher: producing a larger image.

@@RobertSigmund1 there comes a point where MP and sensor will impact the size of print but that’s often larger than people think. You’d want to be getting into the realm of 40” by 30” before seeing the benefits of full frame and more(larger) pixels. The majority of hobbyist photographers don’t print most of their work and those that do will rarely print more than 20” by 16”. Even a lot of professionals won’t print big sizes for the majority of their work, that’s why so many wedding photographers go for 24mp.

Thanks man I appreciate that! I’m not sure if my new system is in the links but it’s the K2 by Freewell that I’m using at the moment.

@@ChrisBaitson Thank you. I’ll check it out.

Thanks Nige! Appreciate it mate.

Thanks Doug. So do I. It’s a great area to explore.

There is actually a beach down there, I promise!

Welcome to the club. You won’t regret it.

They're tools. You can have both 😎 My FF is 135 film 😉

Is it a 400D? That’s ace you recognise it 🤪

Using the "equivalent lens" for portrait does not work. We still need to use the same focal length to get the same foreshortening on MFT but move back (typically the 45mm not the 20mm). Which changes things so we need an even longer lens. And then the further to the subject so the deeper the DoF, close in the DoF is shallower. Portrait is possible but we have to re-think it. It's not the same set up. We cannot do the super shallow DoF. And then I'm thinking more weddings where you're probably not right in close to the portrait model. It should be possible to get better low light with MFT than with a big sensor. The first instinct is to use a wide aperture but this is the wrong way, it wants to be closed more, still use a low ISO if possible but a longer shutter, which is where the stabilisation comes in. The tighter aperture cleans up and sharpens the image. This actually applies to any camera but you do need stabilisation to hand hold a slow shutter. Where you must use a fast shutter in low light is where it gets tricky and you have to use that high ISO. My G9 is not at its best at ISO 25600 but can be acceptable if the light quality and contrast is good enough.

@@jeffslade1892 I agree, it is not worse but different. One of the benefits is you do only need to stop down half as much on MFT to get the same DoF as with full frame! This lets you shoot with lower ISO or faster shutter speed in low light compared to full frame to get the same exposure and equivalent composition. So unless your portraits really need the extreme shallow DoF only full frame can get you, the difference is not really a disadvantage.

Thanks Gordon. The video is recorded on an EM5 Mark ii with the kit lens.

This I have found. f11 has suddenly become f5.6 and the images are by proxy a little sharper. It’s a fun little thing isn’t it.

Bailey adds, "comfy shoes". If you care to look at the actual sensor noise (e.g. Photons to Photos) you will find the 4/3 sensor is quieter than the big ones. The reason being it is easier to control noise on a small sensor, and they don't produce as much heat, which is noise, as larger sensors do. The most popularised "low light performance" divides the result by the ratio of sensor areas, which is 3.98. Which is wrong. The code of practice (test standards) for sensor testing says, "thou shalt not correct for sensor area". Comparing my GH4 alongside the Nikon D600 some years ago we could see little or no difference, and the GH4 would continue shooting through dusk after the Nikon had packed up and gone to bed. My G9 can eat three GH4 for breakfast now (except movie). Perhaps strangely the G7 which was the GH4's B-cam, is still a current model, it can do everything the E-M5ii can but not as nice to fondle. But that is camera technical capability, not six inches behind it.

@@jeffslade1892 The sensor might be cleaner according to the numbers, but in practice, the shadows are noisier and they also suffer more if the exposure is biased towards controlling the highlights. What you can draw out of near blackness with a D810 is nothing short of astounding, but this is not the way I shoot. My roots are still in film photography, so I try and get the exposure right in camera where possible.

Have a look at computational high res mode. It not only raises the resolution from 20mp to 50 or 80mp on a tripod, dynamic range, colour and overall image fidelity also take a big step up. The only downside is the subject needs to be rather static. Look for a recent video by Thomas Eisl about it, in the end he shows that it even can be used for portraits. He found out that using it with ISO as high as 100000(!) produces a very unique filmic look in this application.

@@sourcebased Thank you for the heads up. This ' Computational High Res ' is not a new trick. It was not invented by either Olympus nor Panasonic or Sony. It was invented by Nasa during the first missions of the Hubble Space Telescope, when they found out that the Deep Sky Imaging camera of the telescope was undesampling, or in simple terms the active matrix mirror array of the telescope had much more resolution than the onboard camera/sensor was able to resolve. The process is commonly known ( in astronomical circles ) as DRIZZLE, but the proper name is Variable -Pixel Linear Reconstruction. We used to and still do employ this process when deep sky imaging by moving the imaging scope randomly ( order of seconds of arc ) during imaging, in fact the computer moves the EQ mount. It is a very complicated and involved process. As years have advanced and so has the technology, Olympus and Panasonic used the highly advanced IBIS mechanism of their MFT sensors to simulate DRIZZLE in camera. To explain how noise is reduced during the ' Stacking ' process is beyond the scope of this text, but random noise is reduced and since this ' Dynamic Range ' depends very much on the ratio of ' Good ' signal to Bad ( Noise ), so does the apparent Dynamic range, although neither the Dynamic Range nor the sensitivity ( this so called ISO ) of a digital sensor can be altered. The use of this High Res Mode, is strictly for instudio product photography, where the camera has to be mounted on an absolute solid base. An EM1 MKII has Pixel Pitch of 3.3 Micro Meter ( 0.033 Milimeter ), You can work out yourself how much the camera moves even mounted on a solid platform during a 10 mph breeze. As for the flm look, I just use my Leica Ms or 4X5 cameras when I have the time.

@@lensman5762 Wow thank you for writing this up, I did not know this! Very interesting indeed. This mode is not a toy at all and has been improved greatly with the OM-1 regarding speed especially. With the hand hold mode it works even without a tripod. A Leica and or medium format would be on my whish list indeed but as long I am discontent with important aspects of my photography like composition, I do not yet allow myself to get one.

It has been said…. I don’t see it 😂

Mic sounds ok. Works well enough but sometimes audio drops out but for the money it’s a decent mic.

A lot lighter to carry around? I got sick of lumping all the Canon gear around all the time.

I love the 12-40 2.8!

Once you get used to the menu system it’s not actually too bad. Coming from using Canon cameras for so many years it’s took some getting used to but they’re not as scary as they seem.

That’s called a Capture Clip, mine is the V2, from Peak Design.

@@ChrisBaitson Thank you, will chase down.

Shoot long, wide open and close up. Plenty of shallow DOF to be had. MFT and shallow depth is a myth.

LUMIX do a 100-300 which would work really nicely.

@@ChrisBaitson I’ve just bought an Olympus OM-D E-M1 with 14-42 and 40-150 for just now , hoping to get a bigger zoom next couple month , you made me jump to 4/3 but I’ll start with the mk1 for now

I’ll be honest I almost crapped myself trading all of the Canon gear I had for the Olympus stuff. I’ve not looked back. Granted my Canon mirrorless was only the RP and my main camera was the 5DMkiii but I’ve honestly not missed them.

@@ChrisBaitson yeah I know the feeling my last big swap like this was just couple of years ago had the 7dmk2 5dmk3 ef 100-400 mk2 px the lot towards the mirrorless r6 and 100-500 now on the fence again I’m almost at the point of clicking choose pick up day with mpb but it’s scary lol

@@tintin69rr if you’re scared about the whole MFT thing from full frame here’s some advice. People buy my prints. Not once had anyone asked about the sensor size, camera make or model.

I had an old GX7 and I was never all that in love with it. My old Canon 5D3 was fantastic and Canon really did get that one right. The Olympus stuff is nice though, give it a try.

Yea it was. I didn’t notice until I got home. The area is full of them.

I can make a video around this if it’ll help, certainly.

Please do! I am also curious about out of camera images with no editing. I would love to see the noise or not people talk about. Everybody talks about noise reduction software. I just want to shoot a photo, crop and rotate if necessary and that’s it.

Ok, next video I’ll do JPG out of camera images!

I was at times struggling with editing pictures taken in low light conditions. First step for me to help with this issue: get a great fast lens. I also decided to limit my auto-ISO min and max to avoid my camera to go crazy to not select higher than 1600, and also trust more the awesome Olympus IBIS. Then I use a post processing app with AI de-noizer feature. There are plenty available, mine is Luminar Neo, which works great.

@@ElectronInc I use topaz denoise, I find that it tend to destroy many details though. Is there a difference between first editing picture in Lightroom and then removing noise or first removing noise?

It all depends what you’re looking for. I got my Olympus EM5 Mark ii and a couple of lenses for around £400.

You’re not the first to make that reference. I wonder if anyone sees Linus and thinks “Is that Chris Baitson?” Now that’s a question 😃

He’s a mate of mine. I did it on purpose 😂

@@ChrisBaitson I got you both in my RU-vid rotation 🙂 Subscribed to both.