Before going to Russia last January I bought a Kodak Playsport (Zx3). I knew the harsh Saint Petersburg winter meant I was going to have condensation problems moving from cold to warm environments. Having a pocketable waterproof camera seemed a good idea, especially one capable of shooting 1080P video. Also the camera is small, discreet and the shutter absolutely silent.

At the time it cost 114 euros on Amazon. It has since been replaced by the Zx5 which has very similar specifications. I assume most of what I write here will still apply to the newer model.

Since January’s Russia trip I have worked in Haiti, Benin and China. The Playsport has accompanied everywhere with varying degrees of usefulness which I will describe here.

I had better start by (1) stating the obvious – that the Playsport is exceptionally good value for money and (2) that an additional reason for choosing it was my reserves about using the iPhone as a camera which you can read about here.  There’s no Hipstamatic for the Playsport!

In Russia I ended up using the camera relatively little. This film was made mainly with my Canon 5D MKII. The sepia-coloured panning shot of the inside of the tent was made with the Playsport because (1)  I didn’t have time to let the Canon warm up when coming in from the snow outside (2) there was no space available on the floor to place a tripod (you can’t shoot the 5D MKII handheld in video mode, at least not easily) and (3) I wanted to remain as discreet as possible. Using the footage in monochrome isn’t just an aesthetic decision: it also helps hide a little the luminance and colour noise in the image from shooting in such low light.

In Haiti I shot stills with my Canons, and made a short film with the 5D MKII.  As an experiment I also shot a great deal of video from a moving car. It was a relatively short trip with lots of traveling between shoots. My vague idea was to try to make a film that reflected some of the fleeting, half-formed impressions you get when discovering superficially a country that way, perhaps using recordings of the car radio as a soundtrack.

In Haïti the light outdoors  was very, very bright indeed. There are virtually no controls on the Playsport and the user manual contains little in the way of technical information. There is a fixed f2.8 lens and I suspect that the camera is programmed to deal with varying light levels by adjusting the gain (ISO) and the shutter speed. I believe that in bright light the camera gained down (reduced ISO) to a minimum low value and then upped the shutter speed in response. For stills this works okay but for video once the shutter speed is over twice the frame rate you start to get stuttery images. In 1080P the Kodak films at 30 FPS so 1/60th of a second would be the correct speed for a 180° shutter.  In the absence of detailed technical information this is supposition but in Haït’is sunlight I definitely ended up with video images that were far too stuttery to be usable.

Note: if you open stills from the camera in Lightroom (for example) you can read the EXIF information and get an idea of how the camera “thinks” when deciding to gain up or down or use a faster or lower shutter speed.

In China the Playsport was most useful. I was commissioned to do a series of portraits of Chinese peasants. For this, because the sitters were aware of my presence and happy to be photographed, using a bigger camera (in this case my Canon 5D MK II) wasn’t a problem.

But making spontaneous images while walking around was something else. I feel increasingly uncomfortable using a DSLR for street work and decided to have a go with the Playsport. There was no risk involved: the job was taken care of, this was an experiment. The great thing about the Playsport is that nobody really knows what it is: a camera? a phone?

The first thing to say about the stills is that straight out of the camera they look pretty dull: low contrast and flat colours. Like this:

At first I was disappointed but on closer examination in Lightroom I discovered something interesting about the files: the flatness is anadvantage. Kodak seems to have set up the Playsport so it retains a lot of detail in the shadows and highlights making the JPEGs  (fofiles coming from a cheap camera) surprisingly good for retouching.  Meaning you can turn the above image into this:

There’s a great deal of room for adjustment in the files. Yes, I know that retouching 8 bit JPEGs is far from ideal but what do you think the iPhone does when you use Hipstamatic et al? Nobody seems particularly worried about that…

The smallness of the camera’s sensor means that there is great depth of field, even at f2.8. Further than a meter away, everything is pretty much in focus. One problem with this is that you have to be very careful about keeping the glass over the lens clean. Anything on it shows up far more clearly that you would expect on a larger camera.

So here, then, is a small selection of “street”  images from China, all taken with the Playsport..

Note: clicking on the images will open them up full size in a new window. I don’t normally do this but thought it would be useful here so you can see exactly what I’m talking about.

And finally, despite all I’ve written about it, there are a couple of photosets from China here that show I still can’t resist a little Hipstamatic from time to time.

In an earlier post I wrote about my reservations concerning many of the photo apps for the iPhone. I won’t repeat what I’ve already said and most of them still remind me of adolescents all dressing up the same to show how unique they are.

That said…
I was in Greece. A short family holiday on the island of Paros.
I knew I would take photos, didn’t want to carry heavy gear with me and wanted to use the opportunity to run one of the many tests on my Things I Really Must Try list (which gets longer day by day).

So I decided that all my pictures would be done with my iPhone (modest 3GS) and, gulp, the ubiquitous “alternative” look of the early twenty-tens, Hipstamatic.
The results are in the slideshow. My feelings remain much the same as before: whilst this is all technically wonderful, Hipstamatic et al simply add the veneer of someone else’s vison over the subjects. The narrative is determined by the app.
It’s like too spicy food: after a while you long to taste the meat underneath.

The pictures have been run through Lightroom. I decided I didn’t like the Hipstamatic border that much (partly because it was affected when I adjusted image levels, resulting in borders of different densities and colours in the corrected images). The white balance has been slightly adjusted in some cases.

Oh, and I also made an on demand printing book which, if you’re really interested, you can actually buy.
Trying the printing service was also on The List.
Actually, unless you are ultra-curious, I don’t suggest you buy it: there’s no way (as far as I can figure it out) for me to share profits with the printers who kindly allow me to let others buy my work from them.
Sounds like bad business. At least for me…

The iPhone 3GS’s small (in pixel dimensions compared with the iPhone 4) images held up well when printed to 21.4 x 21.4 cm, the size of the printed book.

Mouse over image for navigation.
Click on image area to enter and exit full-screen mode

I’ve been very busy photographing and filming on foreign assignments and have only just got around to updating my website with work from Russia and Haiti.

Doing that reminded me I had some EPL1 pictures from Saint Petersburg that might be worth sharing. These are shots I took “for myself” during down time or while on my way to shoot something that was part of my “official” story.

With the announcement of the EPL3, the EPL1 might seem old tech already (even though I bought mine in January!). For me the EPL2 doesn’t count because the sensor remained the same. However, the EPL1 is still available and at prices that make it incredible value in my opinion. Anyway, you get to keep the lens even if you end up upgrading the body.

I look forward to the EPL3 mainly because of its higher video resolution. That said, I think the video from the EPL1 is actually very good, despite being “only” 720P.  The image stabilization works a treat and if you have the excellent VF2 mounted the camera, handheld, is remarkably stable.

A mixed bag from Russia, then… Mouse over image for navigation. Click on image area to enter and exit full-screen mode.

And by the way, the more use this camera, the more I like it. But I’m convinced that getting your sharpening and noise reduction settings right when shooting raw is the absolute key to getting the most out of it.

Little footnote: I was sufficiently happy with my results from Russia to try to contact Olympus France to get a loaner second body – in exchange for photos – for subsequent trips Haiti and Benin (done) and China (yet to come).
I was so impressed by the quality of the video – even if it was only 720P – that I wanted to leave my Canons at home and do everything on Pens.

I’m convinced that the videos (the top two here) could easily have been done with Olympuses, and propably more easily than struggling with my Canons. Unfortunately I never got an answer.

Photos from Haiti and Benin here.

Containing some of what was overlooked in part one…

I know the EPL2 is just about out now. I suspect much of what I write here will apply to the newer model and, for the moment, the EPL1 is still available at a very reasonable price

In Russia I used my EPL1 with the excellent Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens. Because I always lose lens caps and try to take care of my kit I fitted it with a protective glass filter.

At the end of the first day’s shooting I was dismayed to see I had so many apparently unsharp images (the great thing about digital is that you can see what’s going wrong during your shoot and not just at the lab back home when it’s too late to save the job). I had taken a lot of pictures where there were very bright light sources behind the main subject. Normally this isn’t a problem but the 20mm has a very curved front element and, because of the filter, I was getting a serious internal reflection problem. Now this has nothing to do with the quality of the lens and was entirely my fault but I was surprised by just how much these reflections degraded the quality of the image. Perhaps a lens hood would have attenuated the problem: I ordered a stepping ring from eBay to be able to mount one before my trip but it still hasn’t arrived. I haven’t seen a dedicated lens hood manufactured by Panasonic for sale anywhere.

Cropped example of flare from backlight when using a filter on the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens. Click on image for full-size version version.

In similar lighting conditions, just moving the camera slightly dramatically reduced flare. Click on image for full-size version.

The Photo JPEG video from the EPL1 is very nice and you can fit “legacy glass” (in my case AI Nikkors) to the camera via an adaptor. If you do, you can use a magnified view of part of the image to manually focus when you are in stills mode. Not as fast as autofocus but accurate nevertheless. In movie mode, however, this magnified view is not available which is, to say the least, inconvenient.

In stills mode you can opt to focus on a smaller portion of your subject, making focusing more precise but then the “Info” button is not operational. You have to exit the magnified view if you want to see the live histogram, for example.  Inconvenient again.

Following on from the previous post where I compared output from the Olympus  and my Canon 5D MK II, here, to illustrate my point, are two shots of the same subject made made with each of the cameras (as I said before, I can’t publish yet the whole of my story on the homeless of Saint Petersburg: I’m making a single exception here to illustrate my point). Clicking on the images should bring up a full-sized version in a new window. Draw your own conclusions…

Canon 5D MK II, 35mm f2, 1/50 sec f3.5, 3200 ISO. Click on image for full-size version.

Olympus EPL 1, Panasonic 20mm f1.7, 1/40 sec f2, 400 ISO. Click on image for full-size version.

Lightroom sharpening and noise reduction settings for the Olympus EPL1 image. As I’ve said before, this is where you make or break your RAW files, especially when working with smaller-sensor cameras.

Okay, I know this isn’t a scientific test. Don’t call me on that one! It’s just that there are so many of them on the web, accompanied by photos of cats or lighthouses etc. that I thought it might be interesting to some of you out there to compare images from a real-world photo assignment. The 5D MK II produces a much larger file than the EPL1 so we’re not strictly comparing like with like. My point is simply, taking into account the two stops difference in depth of field between the two, how little difference – to my eyes at least – there is between the output of the two cameras. As far as file size goes, the more pixels you have the larger you can print (obviously) and (more important to me) the more you can crop your image if required. In reality I have clients that repeatedly ask me to reduce the size of files from the 5D MK II because their computers and servers can’t deal with that amount of data. The 12.3 megapixels of the Olympus are more than enough for any regular magazine publication.

It’s been a while…

Lot’s of work and trying not to post for the sake of posting.

Just back from a job in St Petersburg, Russia, documenting the town’s homeless population. 30,000 people and temperatures down to -20°c in the winter.

Note: the story won’t be published until this autumn which is why I can’t share now any of the work that was the real reason for my trip. The photographs used as illustrations here were made on the periphery of my main activity.

The pictures delivered to my client were about half from my EPL1 and half from my Canon 5D MKII. The Canon was used in situations where I needed to be able to focus rapidly and shoot people in dark environments at ISO 3200, 1/20 sec at f2.8. I assumed the EPL1 would have had trouble focusing rapidly in those conditions although now, with hindsight, and having processed the few shots like that I did take with it, I’m not so sure. End of note.

I knew from the start that the cold was going to be a problem, especially moving my cameras from a outside at night to a warm environment. The correct way to do this (and avoid water damage from condensation) is to wrap the camera in a bag while still in the cold and then let it slowly warm up once you get inside, unpacking it only when it gets to room temperature. This takes time and I knew it wouldn’t be an option for me in this case. I absentmindedly brought an unprotected camera indoors once during the trip and spent the next twenty minutes frantically mopping of the water that condensed on it. A mistake you try not to make more than once.

The only solution I could think of was to have a cold-weather camera for outside and another one for indoors and quick shots that I would constantly keep inside my parka when not in use.

The problem was finding something small enough to fit comfortably under the coat. In the past I’ve used compact cameras for professional jobs but, knowing that there wasn’t going to be too much light so far north in winter, this time I wanted something with better low light performance than  a tiny sensor could offer. As this was something of an experiment and I don’t work in the cold that often, I didn’t want to invest a great deal of money either.

So I ended up buying an Olympus EPL1 with the 14-42mm kit lens and a Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens. I added a mounting frame for my Zacuto Z-Finder, in the same way as I had done for my Canon S90 in the past. This worked well but I would have liked the option of using the Olympus EVF. Apart from being adaptable to any camera with an LCD of the right size, the Z-Finder has the advantage of not taking up the camera’s hot-shoe, meaning that I can use it and, for example, a PocketWizard to trigger an off-camera flash. It also makes holding the camera steadier although at the price of considerable bulkiness.

Now I like Olympus cameras and if I had sufficient funds I would definitely have an Oly SLR kit for when I want to travel light. I like the 4:3 image size and the out of camera JPEGs are excellent. In the past I have owned a C7070WZ and a C8080. There is an ancient OM1 on my bookshelf.

The first thing I thought when I got the EPL1 was just how good value it is: if you take the time to learn how to get the most out of it, you get a great deal of camera for your money. The key to using any equipment is to take the time to master it and, as I’ve said before, small cameras can take more mastering than large ones.

To avoid confusion, let’s get clear what the EPL1 won’t do for you: autofocus is a little slow and high ISO performance is not as good as with, say, my Canon 5D MKII. Given the size of the sensor and the difference in price between the two cameras, that’s hardly surprising. The kit lens is surprisingly good but a little slow. Again, considering the price, it’s exceptionally good value.

But here’s something important to consider: the EPL1′s sensor is smaller than that of my 5D MKII and, consequently, the depth of field at any given aperture is greater. To obtain the same depth of field with the 5D MKII as the EPL1 (or any other camera with a sensor of the same size) you need to stop the lens down two stops more. This means that ISO 1600 1/60 sec f4 on the Canon is the same as ISO 400 1/60 sec f2 on the EPL1. Yes, the small sensor may not perform as well in low light as a larger one but the increased depth of field lets you keep the ISO two stops lower. To a large extent this offsets the “probelm” of the apparently noisier smaller Oly sensor.

The EPL1 has in-camera image stabilization. This means that I can mount (with the appropriate adaptor) a forty year-old Nikkor lens and suddenly use it with IS.  Magic!

I shot everything in RAW on the EPL1 and processed it in Lightroom. At first I was disappointed with the results, especially when I compared them to sample JPEGs I had found on the web. In fact, there were two problems: the EPL1 copes very well with over-exposed RAW files but under-exposure rapidly adds noise to the image. In fact (and this is a purely un-scientific observation) when processing my files it seemed to me that a shot made at ISO 200 and under-exposed one stop and pused one stop in Lightroom looked better than the same shot made with the correct in-camera ISO 400 setting. This may be nonsense and needs some more experimenting with… The default Lightroom sharpening and noise reduction settings do not bring the best out of the EPL1 files. You need to experiment and there is a very good little online tutorial available here. I found that reducing the “detail” value and adding a little luminance noise reduction worked wonders.

All in all, I’m very happy with my EPL1. I’ve got a trip coming up soon to a remote area of China and I’m thinking hard about adding another EP or EPL Olympus to my bag and leaving the Canon gear at home. I forgot to mention the other big advantage of these Micro Four-Thirds cameras: they’re light. I simply can’t cope with carrying a huge bag with two DSLRs all day. Too heavy and far too conspicuous. And, increasingly often these days, far too big to be taken as carry-on baggage when flying.

The black and white photographs below are general walking around street shots made, for the most part, on my way to official appointments. The colour ones are from the annual commemoration ceremony for the end of the 900 days siege of Leningrad.

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