My Pen is Sexy

Posted on Aug 26th, 2016

by Thierry

Olympus

To cite a quote from a photography/camera reviewer, DigitalREV, this post will be about the Olympus Pen F.

You may have noticed, following my Instagram feed or my Facebook page, that change quite often of gears. Not that I have GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) but because I love playing with toys..

We have come to a time and age where we all expect a lot from technology and when one piece of gear does not do one thing, we, or at least I, don’t hesitate to change.

Olympus Pen F & Olympus 25mm f/1.8 at the Sydney Beauty Salon (Av mode | Auto ISO)

I am an active user of Canon, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Olympus, Panasonic just to name a few. I am also a member of CPS, NPS, LOG (Leica Owner Group) and HOG (Hasselblad Owner Group).

There has been a lot of requests from people for me to review my gears and to be honest, I don’t know if I could bring to the table more than what other people are already putting out there on the net/youtube.

There’s been review, then pre-review (or preview) and now we even have unboxing … Soon there will be videos of .. boxing before shipping :).

Olympus Pen F & Olympus 25mm f/1.8 at the Sydney Beauty Salon (Av mode | Auto ISO)

Somehow, reviews that I am really interested in are the one that have proven over time. I am looking more on thoughts of people who have used a piece of gear for 2, 3 or 5 years. The kind of time that would have allowed you to push the gear to the extreme limits of its capabilities to actually give a meaning on what you say about the equipment you’ve been using.

Olympus Pen F & Olympus 25mm f/1.8 at the Sydney Beauty Salon (Av mode | Auto ISO)

What does a preview of a beta version of a pre-release series worth? Aside from getting everyone excited and start swiping the credit card waiting for something that will take pictures for you .. May be it’s the whole idea. The people who praise to much about pre-order are the one who don’t use the gear.

Sydney Beauty Expo 2016 – Napoleon Perdis space | Olympus Pen F & 25mm f/1.8 Av mode Auto ISO

Here and there, people want cameras that are limitless in ISO capability. Camera that have no noise at ISO 512000. Cameras that give you magnificent images straight out of the box.. I truely believe that technology will give us this camera one day, but then, what are you worth with such piece of gear? pushing the button? They may already have an app for that.

After a few years of using Leica, from the M9 to the M240, I started getting used to manual focusing lens and use more and more semi-auto modes. For Leica I just set the camera to aperture priority and auto ISO mode. All I have to worry about is focusing on the action and freeze it.

With the technologies we now have, I think we need to use and abuse of it more. Go manual if it excites you, but engineers who put in years of research may not be that “dumb” to create modes that we can not use.

For the Sydney Beauty Salon 2016, I packed the Pen F with a few lenses, but only used one: the Olympus 25mm f/1.8

The camera is set on Av mode (aperture priority) and auto ISO. The aperture was locked wide open at f/1.8 with one single AF point activated: the centre point.

If you use mirrorless, you might have heard talks about the battery life. I said might because despite all the low rating for battery life, I have always managed to pull at least twice or more shots from one battery charge, compares to manufacturers or reviewers’ ratings..

How? Just turn useless things off.

But how..?

The first thing you need to do, if you want to haver more shot counts is to turn of auto replay. There is nothing more annoying than re-playing the last image for a few seconds after you have taken the shot. That way, you will also loose the habit of click-and-chimp.

The second thing you want to do is to turn of the back screen. Some cameras let you do this, Sony for some reason doesn’t. I tend to use my cameras looking through the viewfinder rather than using live view. Well just like a normal camera would be used.

The third thing … Shoot

The awesomeness with mirrorless and EVF (electronic viewfinder) is what you see is what you get, from the exposure and composition point of views. unless of course you are in a studio/manual mode strings where you would use the EVF boost option.

PS: EVF boost options means regardless of your exposure settings and the exposure of the scene, the camera will (try) to give you a visible scene..

DM me if you don’t know what I mean.

There are a couple things that I have noticed with the Pen F:

it is lazy
it is slow to wake up
the first focus is slow

What it means is I started setting the camera to sleep after a couple of minutes when not in use. I noticed that the camera would (normally) wake up when you hit the shutter or press a button.

The Pen F is very slow to wake up, slower than my Olympus OMD EM-1.

Using the camera on auto focus with a single centre AF point, I also noticed that thePen F is slow, very slow, in getting that first image, after waking up, in focus. You may see this on some of the images here.

The auto focus is also trying to guess where it should focus and most of the time fails, at least for the first image after waking up. This can be a real drama if you shoot streets. the first shot is the candid one and the second, for most of the time, your subject would have noticed you.

The OMD EM-1 excels in this regard. I would expect the next version of the OMD EM-1 v2 or OMD EM-2 to be doing as good or better.

About laziness… The Pen F takes significantly more time to wake up than the OMD EM-1 or even the Panasonic GX8, for that matter. This can be decisive in missing the shot, and I missed a few with this.

From this laziness, I have changed my settings to keep the camera awake for longer and even hit the shutter on the regular basis to keep the camera from going to sleep mode. The first image auto focus still fails.

Hip shooting.

Mirrorless are compact and fast enough, obviously the Pen F is not there yet, to allow you to just “point-and-shoot” from the waist level. This can be fun and give a different perspective.

Shooting from the waist is well known in fashion and this is why Hasselblad and Rolleiflex have been popular back in the time.

Awesomely gorgeous Makeup Artist at the Napoleon Perdis stand. Makeup is more than just eyes and smile. It’s a bout attitude and identity. Makeup rules.