The OM system OM-1 is a Micro Four Thirds camera that was released about 6 months ago. There is a back story regarding the original OM1, the acquisition of Olympus by OM Digital Solutions and where this camera fits into the already substantial line up of M43 cameras. All of this may be of great interest to photographic gear enthusiasts and historians, however you won’t find anyone fitting that description here.
Rather let’s focus on what the camera can do rather than what it looks like, where the buttons are positioned or what the manual says it can do. Like Liam Neeson in the movie Taken, this camera has a ‘very particular set of skills’ and while it won’t hunt you down and kill you, it may well help you get shots you otherwise wouldn’t, with the gear you currently have.
Let me explain.
In this post I am going to cover 3 pictures I have taken with the OM1 and explain why I wouldn’t have got these with gear that I have used in the past which in my case would be either Nikon or Canon. They are both fantastic brands of camera and I have taken many great shots using both of them, however as I said the OM1 offers a very particular set of skills or rather features. Some of these have been seen before, especially in other m43 cameras but they have been refined and improved with the OM1.
So let’s start with this first picture. It’s a shot of a very wet Brown Hawk Owl perched in a tree. At first glance nothing special. The leaves were surrounding the bird, leaving the background looking busy and not especially pleasing. The expression of the bird isn’t particularly compelling and the only things that separates this from an average portrait shot is that the bird is wet and that it is sharp. So why have I chosen this shot as my first pick. Well this shot was taken during a tropical downpour while I was taking shelter under the branches and leaves of an adjacent tree. Again that in itself isn’t in anyway remarkable. What struck me while I was looking at the photo on my computer that evening was that how was a sharp shot even possible while I was holding the camera body in my right hand, supporting the lens in my left and also holding my umbrella in my right hand. I have genuinely shakey hands, always have had and on the day, while holding the camera I remember thinking as the umbrella was moving all over the place in my hand that this isn’t going to work. The gear was soaked anyway because I couldn’t control the umbrella but convinced myself that it might be worth it as I rarely encounter these birds. So my already shakey hands were moving even more as the umbrella was swinging left to right and at 1/30 shutter speed at 800mm equivalent focal length with that much movement, a sharp shot isn’t possible, it just isn’t! Well that’s what I thought. The detail in the bird’s feathers genuinely surprised me and the much hyped in body image stabilization really did deliver on this occasion especially as this was a non Olympus / OM1 lens on an OM1 body. If I had used the Olympus 300mm F4 lens, I would have had the benefit of sync IS where the Lens IS combines with the 5-axis IBIS to give even more stability. All this technical terminology is like Arabic verb conjugation, I don’t understand any of it but with this shot and many others I have taken with very low shutter speeds, I can wholeheartedly state that the image stabilization is pretty remarkable.
On to photo number 2. Here we have a black wasp in flight as it moves from flower to flower. The area was particularly busy with lots of different flowers and different insects moving all over the place. Having made a decision on the type of shot I wanted..the black wasp in flight, I decided where I was going to take the shot because it was only going to work with a clear background. Due to the cluttered nature of the scene , there weren’t too many clear spots for the shot to work but eventually I settled on this small area as the best place to get the shot. I also wanted to include the flower in the scene to give the whole image some context. Now how does one take a shot like this. With huge difficulty to be honest. I was zoomed out at 800mm equivalent focal length and despite the wasp being larger than regular wasps that might land in your beer on a summer afternoon, they are still insects and way smaller than even the smallest birds. They are also very fast, too small to notice any triggers movements that might signal imminent flight, and take off in all and every direction. With 800mm field of view in your viewfinder at a distance of about 2 metres, traditional tracking once they take flight is nigh on impossible. One might get the very occasional shot in the frame, but it won’t be in focus and that would rely completely on luck. This is where Pro capture comes in, a truly remarkable and revolutionary tool that allows the photographer to focus on the subject wait for it launch into the air and then press the shutter. The camera then does the work, capturing all the shots that took place just prior to you pressing the shutter. Again this existed before on several Olympus cameras and versions of it are starting to appear on cameras like Nikon and Canon but again it has been refined in the OM1. Olympus have been doing it for a number of years and OM1 have again upgraded it. I’m not going to get technical here, so if you would like to see how it has changed with the OM1 and what the differences are, there is quite a useful resource with a lot of information you might like to try called Google.
Finally on to the 3rd photo that I believe I wouldn’t have got had I not been using the OM1. While stuck at home with Covid-19 I desperately wanted to get out of the house but obviously wasn’t allowed to leave the property. We have a very small garden that on occasion can attract critters, on which I can practice my macro photography. I ventured out into the garden over a couple of days seeing what I could find as potential subjects. I got very lucky when I found this relatively large Praying Mantis. Unfortunately the little grasshopper it had in its claws wasn’t quite so lucky and although nature can be difficult to watch sometimes due to the brutality animals inflict on each other, I was eager to capture this moment on my camera, The stabilization really helped with the handheld 4k video I shot and I decided to use the in camera focus stacking to try and get everything important in focus. Anyone who has tried macro photography knows full well how shallow the depth of field is and the difficulties with images like this of getting both the eater and the eaten as they are on slightly different focal planes. Now before I continue I will again stress that Olympus cameras prior to the OM1 had in camera focus stacking and indeed did it very well. The problem arose however when the subject was moving and the final image could display slightly unusual artifacts or rather not work at all as the computational technology of the older cameras was really pushed to it’s limits. The OM1 boasts a new and much faster processor and this is why it is able to capture in camera focus stacks even when there is slight movement within the scene. This of course will not work every time. If there is substantial movement then yes there will be weird ghosting or artifacts that will affect the final stacked image. In this case the OM1 will save all the raw files anyway and one could then edit the picture themselves using software, potentially removing any distracting or unwanted elements and producing their own final image.
Back to the hungry Mantis. I lay on the grass so as to get eye level with the insects and took this shot handheld. The camera was set to take 8 consecutive frames at a distanced differential of 3. Again a little background reading about how one can operate and input the required settings for the in camera focus stacking, will make the previous sentence easier to understand.
So there you have it, 3 images I wouldn’t have been able to make had I not been using the OM1 camera and it’s particular set of skills.
My camera and Lens
Olympus 300mm F4 Pro https://amzn.to/46qLZ3Z
*My Computer * *Macbook Pro M3 14inch * https://amzn.to/3RhN75r
My vlogging camera https://amzn.to/46X00GJ
Nikon Z6ii https://amzn.to/4af0I4W
Nikon 500mm F5.6 PF https://amzn.to/3R7Taba
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