Olympus were running an Experience Day for owners of the new E-M1 mark ii on one of the practice days at IWM Duxford last Friday, so I went along.
A pleasant day in glorious weather, with the chance to try out lots of equipment and have many questions answered.
I particularly wanted to use the 8mm Pro fisheye lens in the hangers (it's excellent, and less prone to flare than the cheap-but-good Samyang 7.5mm fisheye I've owned for some years).
It was so bright that I had to use the 300mm at f9 to 11 to get shutter speeds below 1/320th, despite setting the ISO to Low (64). This gives nicely-blurred propellers, but it's well in to the diffraction range of that lens, so I've ordered 77mm 2-stop ND and polarising filters to allow a wider aperture in case the weather's ever as good as this again! The Diffraction tool in Capture One Pro 10 crisped the images up a bit, but they're still not nearly as good as the lens is capable of providing at f8 and below. Photographing jets wouldn't cause this problem, because you could just wick up the shutter speed at ISO 200 - 400 and use an aperture of around f4.0 - 5.6, but unfortunately none were flying while I was outside.
The new camera is much better at continuous autofocus than the mark i ever was, and once I'd got the hang of panning at the right speed I got quite a few images of flying aircraft in focus. It's such a pleasure to be able handhold a proper camera with a 600mm effective focal-length lens for several hours without needing physiotherapy!
(Click on the images to open in a Lightbox)
