Backpacking test

I went on a short backpacking overnighter with the kids and thought it would be a good opportunity to test the Olympus E-P2 in a real usage situation. There is no way I would have brought the big camera (60D) on an occasion like this. Previously I've used the excellent compact camera Canon S90 for this purpose. A compact camera fits into a pocket or a very small camera bag on the chest strap of the backpack, but the E-P2 is a little too big for that. Instead I put it in a larger camera bag I happened to have and put the bag on the waist belt. This camera bag was a little too big, so I will have to look for something that fits just the camera with a mounted lens as well as another lens.

The camera worked as is should and I had no problems with the autofocus, the traditional achilles heel of cameras with contrast detect autofocus. The new E-P3 should be among the absolutely fastest in this regard for static subjects, the E-P2 is fast enough with the new lenses and new firmware. Only when it was very dark it had trouble, but it was still possible to focus against the horizon. Looking at pictures taken when it was dark revealed some noise even at ISO 200 on pixel level, but there are different levels of noise reduction available both in-camera and in the RAW conversion software and the default one is pretty mild. The noise is not very ugly, though, and looks rather film-like. Without pixel-peeping the noise is not visible.





The Olympus RAW conversion software is poor, which I was aware of when I bought the camera. I've planned to buy Lightroom anyway, so it is no big deal. Not even Canon's DPP, which is supposed to be the best of its kind, does everything I need. I have no need for fancy stuff, but it would be nice to get some batch functionality for making the images ready for web and blog use (downsizing and applying an USM filter). I'm downloaded the trial version of Lightroom and now have 30 days to see if I like it. At first it seemed a little overwhelming, since there is a lot that can be done to the pictures. The basic work flow seems easy enough, though, and I think it will be effective and quick to use once one gets acquainted with it.

Lightroom also contains a set of effects that can be combined and I plan to experiment a little with them. Without any extra processing this picture was quite unsatisfying, but after applying a few filters I think it is quite interesting.


I had planned to take a photo of a lonely bog pine in black and white without anything extra around. but could not find a suitable tree. This was the closest, but it did not look good in black and white, but this version was better.


A little black and white.