The Oly OM-D goes to the Good Guys Hot Rod Show

[AudioNut]

Yeah, Stephen, You do great work and I do think that any old picture you take with any old camera would look significantly better than I could take with the latest and greatest.





Except you do seem to choose near state of the art equipment on which to craft your art.

And, I do wonder how the Olympus seemed to "sneak into the mix". I recall when you got it and seem to recall several pictures you referred to as having been taken by the Oly. but this thread seems to indicate that the Olympus may now be your mirrorless camera of choice.

Has the Fuji been superseded? And, if so, would you be willing to undertake a comparative analysis?

I've been reading Lindsay Dobson's blog for a good many months now (I do love her photographs!) and recall when she used/tried the Olympus and Fuji side by side, settling on the Oly, mostly for focusing reasons. As I recall, most of her objections to the Fuji have been overcome by later firmware downloads.

I've seen your entries in that blog and had felt that she might be one of your photo heroes as well.

What say you Stephen? How does the Fuji stack up in your camera love-life now?

P.S. I do wish I had your photo budget !!!!

[Puma Cat]

Hi Julian,
The Fuji, hands down, produces the finest image quality of ANY camera I have personally used, including the Canon 1Dx. It remains my "go-to" first choice as a camera, both in terms of the exceptional images it produces and for the user experience, which I love.

And yes, I also follow Lindsay Dobson, as well has correspond with her personally on a regular basis. She's an amazing photographer. She settled on the Olympus OM-D series because it was the camera whose AF performance and suite of lenses that best fulfilled her professional requirements. At the time she evaluated the X-E1, both the RAW conversion and AF performance were not up to her specific set of requirements, and the Olympus system better met her needs, so she went with that. Lindsay has historically shot with the Canon pro system, but like many pros, she has repetitive stress injuries from using such large and heavy gear for long periods of time day after day, and she needed something that could replace her Canon system with comparable performance (this is why I was making my point in the Nikon Df thread that many pros very much want to move to lighter and more compact systems. It's one thing if you use a big pro-sized body as a hobby on an occasional day out, and an entirely different thing if you're pro that has to haul and use all that gear around all day long, day after day, year after year). Lindsay's very sharp, and acknowledges that many fine pros use the Fuji X system, including Damien Lovegrove, David Hobby, etc, but for her specific needs, the Olympus OM-D system works really well.

I bought a used E-M5 for $700 from a seller on Fred Miranda that was moving into full-frame as I wanted to try it out based on the performance that I saw Lindsay and Ming Thein were getting from their systems. It's turned out to be a really great system for me to use at the track for what I refer to as "atmosphere" shots, but which the track really wants a lot of content around: driver candid portraits, pit lane and paddock shots, spectators having a good time, vendors, safey personnel, etc. I use it with two small Olympus primes and a Panasonic 12-35/2.8, which serves as a "standard zoom". It's fast AF and through the lens electronic viewfinder works well in that application, and it saves me hours of wear and tear on my body in not having to carry a big pro body around with two big zooms.

I use the Fuji for everything else....it's my real love, and when I was in Wyoming photographing the Grand Tetons, I used the Fuji 98% of the time. If I had to give up all my systems, the legacy Canon system or the Olympus (I only have three lenses for it presently), the one I would keep would be the Fuji.

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by AudioNut

Yeah, Stephen, You do great work and I do think that any old picture you take with any old camera would look significantly better than I could take with the latest and greatest.

Except you do seem to choose near state of the art equipment on which to craft your art.

I don't know about that, Julian. Until I got my X-Pro1 and OM-D this year, I was using a Canon 1D MkII dating from 2004! Almost 10 years old! I recently picked up a used but mint (LNIB, actually) 1D MkII N, which will be nine years old next year to replace my old warhorse, which sadly, has an out of alignment mirror box. Guess it got slammed into the K-wall one too many times!