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E510 Poor Quality shots


william_white8

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"f/11 on a 4/3's "normal" range lens will basically be similar to f/22 on a 135 film normal lens"

 

Patrick, f/11 is f/11 no matter what kind of lens or format. It has to do with the amount of light arriving at the film plane or sensor. It has no relation to the physical size of the opening from one lens to the next. Light meters wouldn't work without the constant.

 

William, As I said before don't compare a zoom to a prime. They are not equal, ever. You're going to have to adjust to the new environment, especially the PP. I know it's not the way you have worked before. Experiment with what you have and try a variety of sharpening techniques. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results.

 

Your "Henry Heath shot isn't soft." There is actually a lot that can be achieved with that raw file. I could get an image that would rival your bridge shot without much difficulty, and I'm not a master of PP. You came here for answers, and I'm making every effort to provide you with options short of selling your gear.

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William,

 

No I have not won any design awards. Its also doubtful you won anything with that shot. Reminds me of the type of pictures you used to see in camera catalogs or winning photos at camera club/county fair competitions that novices often submit. Technically well excuted boring photographs with oversaturated mickey mouse colors. About as original as your standard Golden Gate bridge photo at the "magic hour" and one that requires the artistic vision of a rock.

 

Fortunately, this type of shot has become such a cliche that even most camera companies wont use this type of rubbish for their catalogs anymore.

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so this is now an argument about the aesthetic qualities of a photo of Tower Bridge (which, sadly, did win an award in

the Evening Standard...meh.) Thanks for saying it is technically well executed though - which was the damned point in

the first place....

 

but getting away from the trolling (if you can't, please leave) and back to the subject at hand.....please feel free to post a

comparable image with the same sharpness - along with how you did it.

 

 

 

Glenn, as I have said, I am quite comfortable with PP. I am quite comfortable preparing images for print (it is my job); I

was just uncomfortable with the less than sharp images straight out of the camera. Because I am quite aware that it is

impossible to introduce real sharpness to a "unsharp" image.

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I would say its not I who has the harshest words.

 

I am anonymous because photo.net is a gear forum.

 

There is some excellent work on photo.net but its founding members place emphasis on "shutterbug" type

photography. This is great. Room for everything. Just a little different than browsing Photo District News where one sees original artistic vision. Its all personal opinion anyways. I am a gear head and admit it. But I see being a gear head as a little bit contradictory to being an artist.

 

BTW what is your name R.T? you choose not share part of your name with us? mine is John FYI

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Hi William,

 

Returning to the original subject...

 

> £500 lens that is useless at small apertures.

>(how come my old Zuiko primes were pin sharp across the aperture range? My 135 F3.5 was sharp at f22 and that cost £20)

 

Your old Zuiko primes (and all my Zuiko primes as well!) are not really pin sharp up to f/22: at f/16 or so resolution starts visibly going down due to diffraction. As a result of physics, not lens quality. On a small sensor, this effect becomes obvious at larger apertures compared to using 24x36mm: 50 lines/mm means 1200x1800 lines resolution for film. It means 650x900 on a 4/3 sensor, simply because the sensor is so much smaller. So you need about twice the resolution in lines/mm on a 4/3 sensor to get the same sharpness in the final picture. It also means that diffraction is limiting the sharpness of the final picture much earlier.

 

> How am I supposed to get long exposures? Invest in a range of neutral density filters because a £500 semi-pro lens is rubbish closed down.

 

Yes, an ND filter would help. You already set the iso to its lowest value, so there is no room in that area. But before buying the filters, I would check if the results are indeed better if you set the aperture to f/8 or 5.6 or so.

 

If you want hard numbers on the maximum resolution you can get depending on aperture and sensor/film size, look at table 3 on the following web page: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/resolution.shtml

 

As you can see there, Patrick's comment that "f/11 on a 4/3's "normal" range lens will basically be similar to f/22 on a 135 film normal lens" is true, when the detail that can be captured is concerned (I suppose he was referring to that, and not the amount of light reaching the film).

 

Hope this helps,

 

Paul.

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Glenn... f/11 is f/11 in terms of exposure on any lens and any format, but is different in terms of depth of

field and diffraction in different formats. You cannot honestly tell me that you have not noticed that 4/3's

lenses have a wider DOF at the same apertures as the equivalent focal length lenses in 35mm or medium format.

There are reasons that 35mm and 4/3's normal lenses don't go down to f/64 like large format lenses, and it's

because they don't have to to attain the same DOF and if they did, they would suffer greatly from diffraction as

the aperture sizes approach pin-holes. And f/stop has everything to do with the physical size of the lens

aperture opening.... f/stops are specifically measured as focal length divided by aperture diameter. A fixed

f/2.8 lens on a cell-phone camera basically has infinite DOF because of the changing ratio of sensor size to

aperture in terms of DOF. I would guess that the aperture of the cell-phone camera is specifically matched to

the focal length of the lens to help reduce diffraction... similar to the way pinhole cameras are designed around

aperture and focal length... something that is more difficult with wide-angle lens design on SLR's.

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William, an OM 135mm lens at f/22 is not the same as the 50mm lens at f/22 or a wide angle 24mm lens at f/22 in terms of DOF or diffraction... if you can even find a 24mm lens for OM that will stop down to f/22! Your lens isn't useless, but it very well could be that the extra f/stops are probably superfluous and are more marketing than useful stops. Any lens that I have looked at tests for seems to operate best in the middle of it's aperture range... with the highest f/stop being a little fuzzy. I would suspect that f/22 on your lens is intended more for the 60mm end than the 12mm end of the zoom range. In terms of the difference between film and digital, this is one difference that isn't related to the media itself but the format. A 4/3's sensor is the same as a 110 negative, so you cannot expect the lenses to follow the same optical rules you remember from 35mm... just like you would not expect to use those same rules shooting medium format. The problem here is that Olympus marketing has been attempting to downplay the differences between "full-frame" and 4/3s sensors instead of educating their users that there ARE differences and how to use them.
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What Patrick said. Took the words right out of my head.

 

If you look at the lens tests on photozone.de, none of the lenses tested -- regardless of make, model, or format -- perform particularly well at the smaller apertures, due to diffraction. This issue just happens to be more apparent on smaller formats, and since 4/3 is the smallest format among DSLRs, the effects of diffraction will be more noticeable on 4/3 DSLRs than on APS-C or 35mm DSLRs.

 

There is also the very real possibility that your lens has a centering defect or some other defect, and that it's not quite as sharp as it should be. I know Olympus said the lens was fine, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's perfect... it just means that it falls within their spectrum of acceptable variances. Quality control isn't what it used to be, regardless of manufacturer.

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Patrick, Since I have used every film format from 11x14 to 110, I think I have a good idea of how different format cameras perform with their respective lenses. I now shoot 4/3, E-500 & E-510, because I find Olympus ergonomics to be better for me then any other make of camera. I've managed to shoot excellent images with an appropriate amount of DOF for the shot at whatever f/stop I chose. I use whatever accessories necessary to achieve the results I want. Hell, I even use a tripod from time to time at f/22. Guess what? Sharp images. They even sell when I get the urge to show them.

 

I don't look at lens tests on websites. I physically test the camera and lens combinations to make my decisions after talking personally to professionals; sports, news and commercial; I know for their opinions. I don't care about whether there is diffraction, if I can get edge to edge sharpness when I want it.

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Pierre, very nice shots, but I can't check the results because they are not there! Any examples at 100%. Files with

reduced dimensions show nothing.

 

Glenn, that is interesting, and what I want to hear! Care to share an example (in it's RAW state) showing such

sharpness; and, if required, a sharpened final version? Along with instructions?

 

This would really help me.

 

Cheers!

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Glenn... an interesting page with both DOF calculators and diffraction limit calculator. It uses simplified calculations that don't take into account all factors, but gives a good idea of what's going on.

 

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-size.htm

 

Here is another page with a chart showing basically the same information:

 

http://www.aguntherphotography.com/tutorial/diffraction-limits-of-resolution.html

 

According to both pages, for best performance on 4/3's cameras, apertures should be f/8 and above regardless of the focal length of the lens. I don't doubt your ability to get sharp images, but this is the mathematical truth and a very logical reasoning to why William might be getting soft images at f/11 without character assassination. This is a REAL physical issue and something Olympus needs to consider in their lens designs more carefully... like not have apertures going all the way to f/22 that might be reducing sharpness while not appreciably adding DOF.

 

Also be aware that diffraction effects are worse with higher resolution cameras than lower resolution cameras... very low resolution cameras are not effected as much by diffraction because the sensor pixel size is larger than the airy disk, whereas higher and higher resolution cameras will be rendering more of the airy disks causing increasingly soft images. So as 4/3's camera bodies get higher and higher in resolution, more and more people will notice sharpness issues in magnification at f/22. With that in mind, Olympus should probably consider limiting lenses to f/8 for wides and f/11 for longs to reduce the complaints of fuzzy images which will likely increase. A more appropriate solution than using smaller apertures would be selecting slower ISO's, which will probably increase in performance with time, whereas diffraction is a physical limit set by the wavelengths of light and will never be overcome technologically.

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Through out this thread I have read nothing about the noise filter setting. Note this is not to be confused with noise reduction. I get the best results with the noise filter off. Noise reduction and noise filter are very different functions in the E510. The noise reduction is only applied during long exposures. The noise filter is applied at all exposure settings. The appearance of shots with the noise filter set at normal or high results in a noticeable reduction in detail. Here is a review that contains more information on optimizing the E510 setup:

http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/43/e510-rev.html

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Take a minute to look at Pierre Villeneuve's winter wonderland shots of Quebec and Prince Edward Island. I care not what lens was used so much as how fine the results look on my Dell computer screen. And they look pretty darn good...what more need one say than to see examples like this. I will place my money that they would also enlarge well also. I could be less discerning than others, yet I doubt it. Enjoy whatever you can afford and put aside invidious comparison now and then. Be well, gs
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In going back and reading some of the earlier posts, I see (maybe late in the case of this post) that Williams is using manual focus, and I have to say, if I were to use manual focussing on my E510, most of my images would probably turn out, out of focus too. I don't find the E510 screen good for manual focus at all. I've tried it from time to time, with little to no success. It might help to just....(gulp)....use the AF mechanism and see how it works. Amazingly, my images do turn out to be in focus when I use autofocus. It is no sin to use the technology provided if it means the difference in images being in focus vs. out of focus.

 

If I bought my E510 and planned to use it in manual focus, I would definitely invest in one of these third-party company screens made to enhance the manual focus ability. The Digital Zuiko lenses I've tried have relatively short travel distances from infinity to the minimum focus distance. You don't need to be off by much in your manual settings to be out of focus.

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Greg, that doesn't make much sense! For example, shooting at the wide-end (say 12mm) with an aperture of f11 (like the

photo above) the depth of field is enormous! Everything from a few metres from the lens to infinity would be in focus!

 

(btw I shoot manual AND auto focus).

 

It seems the problem is probably what Patrick described = the lens quality degrading after F8 or so.

 

Which is infuriating considering the e510 manual encourages you to close the aperture fully for some shots!

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In many cases it makes perfect sense.

 

No, it wouldn't make sense in a situation like that, but you can't tell me the screen on the E510 is as easy to work with as what you have on the OM4 either. Screens on consumer DSLR's are simply not good enough for manually focusing much of the time. With no focus aids, overall lower contrast screens and slower/darker zooms vs. the faster primes...not to mention (but I did above) the extremely short travel from infinity to closest focus distance, it is not easy to manually focus with these type cameras.

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If the lens quality degrades after F8 on 4/3rds lenses why is this a problem? After all F8 on 4/3rds = F16 on full frame.

 

The only problem I can see of having a lens that is not critcally sharp at apertures below F8, is you may not be able to utilise the slow shutter speeds used for artistic movement blur effects (such as water flowing over rocks etc). You can always resort to ND filters or polarisers I suppose.

 

When I use my OM4 with 24mm I rarely use F16. This is because F8 and F11 seem to give enough depth of field with this focal length if the lens is focused properly. I'm aware of diffraction and try to limit my use of the smallest apertures where ever possible.

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Jim- I was given as a birthday gift, one of the new E520s with 14-45mm f/3.5 kit lenses. Took it out west to Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons and the Badlands. The images I got back were totally flat. Lacked contrast, sharpness and just plain awfull. I also took along my Nikon D80 which produced super images. I set up the E520 just like my Nikon but to no avail. The Oly images loo.kalmost surreal and artificial, however it was my first card with a 4/3's camera. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. The camera has some great features. Perhaps I'm using the IS wrong. I'm totally perplexed. Anyone out there had this experience?
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