iPhone 3GS • ©2009 James Duncan Davidson

This photo was a quick iPhone shot from the rest area just north of Weed. It’s a pretty impressive sight, no? To think, if I had spent any more time eating dinner, I would have missed the show. The iPhone photo here doesn't quite do the scene justice, however. The auto white balance algorithm (which always works against sunsets) slurped quite a bit of the intensity out of the yellows and pushed in too much blue. I’ve tweaked things back and forth a bit in Lightroom, but since it’s a JPG image, the basic color balance decisions are baked in and there’s not a whole lot of leeway.

Never fear. I didn’t just rely on the iPhone for this one. After I shot the photograph above, I pulled out the D700 and managed to get a few frames off before the sky opened up and dumped rain on me. And, of course, I shot in 14-bit RAW so that I could fine tune the white balance and capture a lot more of the range out of the scene. Here’s the result:

Nikon D700 • ©2009 James Duncan Davidson

That’s more like it. That’s the scene I remember looking at just a few hours ago. And yes, it was that intense. The iPhone did a pretty good job (especially for a tiny chip cell phone cam), but at some point, you gotta pull out the big guns. I only wish I had found a better place to stop than a rest area. Sometimes you gotta take what nature gives you.

Tomorrow, I’m probably cutting over the mountains and out to the coast. It was hot inland today and I could use a bit of time time sitting above breaking waves.

Yesterday, after lunch in Sausilito, I hung out for a bit near the Golden Gate. It’s always a fantastic place to view the ocean and get buffeted about by the wind. Yesterday was no different. The fog wasn’t thick, but the wind was certainly making its presence known on the battery area above Baker Beach.

If you want to check out this particular view, the green arrow below is where I took this particular photograph from. Ya gotta love GPS embedded data in iPhone photographs, and in this case it’s spooky accurate.

The path I was on doesn’t show up in the map right now, but the location is accurate to within just a couple of feet of where I was standing, as you’d expect from a fully accurate GPS.

First things first. In hand, the E-P1 is most definitely not a compact camera. It’s not shaped or sized like one. On the other hand, it is most definitely not a SLR of any kind. It’s size and shape is somewhere in between the two. It’ll go into a jacket pocket, as long as you don’t have a huge lens on it. It’ll go into a purse or small bag. It won’t go into your jeans pocket.

Let me try to describe this a different way. Holding the E-P1 is a lot like holding a rangefinder. Pinar noted that it felt very similar in size to her Leica Ms, though it was a bit lighter. To me, it feels nice and solid in hand. Solid like it was made out of a single chunk of metal. Solid like how the new Apple MacBook Pros feel compared to other laptops. In short, it feels good.

In operation, everything works pretty much as one would expect. I didn’t have any issues poking about its control set. In less time that it takes to write this, I put the camera into Av program mode, set my aperture to a reasonable setting, sorted out exposure compensation, and snapped off a few shots. The schnick-schnick of the shutter (yes, there’s a real mechanical shutter in there) is super subdued and would be hardly noticeable if you didn’t hear the focus confirmation beep going off before the shutter tripped. Shut off that beep and you’ll be good to go almost everywhere that requires a bit of discretion with sound levels.

Speaking of focus operation, much has been said about the fact that contrast detection autofocus is typically slower than the phase-detection systems in SLRs. And more has been written about the fact that the E-P1’s focus system isn’t as fast as the zippy system in the Panasonic GH1. Not having had my hands on a GH1, I can’t address that. But what I can say is that autofocus speed is reasonable. It’s not as fast as the autofocus system on my D700 bodies, but it’s a heck of a lot faster than any compact camera I’ve used. Faster is always better, but in the time I played with it, I didn’t have any complaints. I should note, however, that I didn’t try to take pictures of kids or pets zipping around at high speed.

If you need to drop back to plan B, manual focusing works like a charm. When you turn the focusing ring, the viewfinder zooms in letting you judge critical focus. You can move your zoomed view around the photo with the control pad if you’re not in the right place. And, the focus ring (at least on the zoom lens on this review unit) has a nice feel. It’s not so sensitive that you’d have a hard time settling in on just the right focus. With a bit of practice full-on manual focus should be easy as pie, if you’re into that kind of thing.

What about shutter lag? I didn’t notice any. In manual focus mode, I didn’t perceive any time between when I fully pushed the shutter button and when I heard the shutter release. When using autofocus, the shutter releases right after the confirmation beep. Any lag that people run into in day to day operation will probably be from autofocus acquisition. (See earlier disclaimer that I didn’t shoot any running kids or pets during my brief hands-on!)

For our lunch, we had plenty of sunshine and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There was so much Sun that I actually got a sunburn. Ouch. In other words, it was a perfect test to see if the display was usable in full on daylight. The E-P1 passed with flying colors. I didn’t have a problem using the display at all. Furthermore, while 230K pixels might be a low resolution spec these days, I didn’t notice it being a problem either. In the slightly more reasonable lighting level under a roof, I found the display to be quite colorful and easy to use. I think this is one of those cases where more resolution would be nice, but the display as-is is perfectly usable.

After playing around with the camera for a bit and talking with Derrick about his experiences with it, I think I only have two open questions left. The first is how it performs in low light conditions. Derrick posted a set of photos on Flickr showing various ISO settings, and the results look promising. I intend on printing his sample images out at 8X10 and 12X18 sometime soon and see how they look. I’m still curious, however, how the E-P1 will to perform in more challenging lighting conditions. Stage lighting, for example.

The final question is how much latitude there will be in the RAW files when working with them in something like Lightroom or Aperture. Right now, this is simply unknowable as neither Adobe Camera RAW or Aperture has support for this camera’s RAW files. Hopefully, there will be the same amount of malleability for highlight and shadow recovery as well as general exposure adjustments as what we’ve become accustomed to from digital SLRs. Obviously, I’m not expecting D700 levels of plasticity, but I am interested to see how much latitude there will be in practice.

Let’s cut to the chase. Would recommend the E-P1 as a general purpose all-around enthusiast camera based on what I experienced today? The answer is a totally unqualified yes, especially if you’re looking for something smaller than an SLR. Put it this way, cameras like the Canon G10 are no longer of interest at all to me at all. Do I want to replace my Nikon D700 bodies with the E-P1 for my professional work? Ha! No way. Do I want a Digital PEN for all those times where the bulk or noise of my Nikon or Canon gear is too much? Oh yes. Yes indeed.

Many thanks to Derrick Story for the chance to spend a bit of time with this camera!

These three photos and a movie were shot with my trusty iPhone 3GS as part of my ten a day project that I’ve been on. At least ten photos or movies a day with the iPhone was the deal I made with myself before plunking down the cash on it. So far, except for conference shoot days (I give myself a pass on these days since I’m already shooting so much anyway), I’ve been pretty good about it most days.

I did miss my target yesterday. Something about catching up on sleep after three early mornings and then catching up with email and the like. Today, however, I made sure to get back on the horse and went for a walk along the bay.

iPhone 3GS • 1/6000 sec @ f/2.8 ISO 70

To get things just right exposure-wise in this tricky scenario, I did have to do a bit of experimentation with setting the focus/exposure point. If there’s any one thing I’d love to have on this camera, it’s an exposure compensation control of some sort. Maybe a double finger gesture up and down to bias the exposure program for the next exposure?

One interesting thing I noticed about the metadata is how fast an exposure the iPhone can take. The top photo is reportedly at 1/9500th of a second. The one just above is a 1/6000th. That’s pretty spiffy quick.

iPhone 3GS • 1/1600 sec @ f/2.8 ISO 70

I find myself shooting a lot of these little 30 second clips of things. Life in motion. Simple scenes. So far, however, I remain fairly dissatisfied with uploading them to the web. So far I’ve played with Flickr, MobileMe, and now with YouTube. Still to come, I want to give Vimeo a shot. In any case, here’s a movie I shot and posted up to YouTube. You can compare it to the same movie uploaded to Flickr.

It seems that the codecs used to size things down on both YouTube and Flickr really hate the waves. At least YouTube has a higher quality option that seems to do quite a bit better. Of course, I guess I could just host the bits myself and shoot out QuickTime files.

This time, it hasn’t been coming back out of the woodwork. I’ve never misplaced so much gear so permanently before. Certainly not monopods and ballheads. At this point, I’ve looked everywhere.

After calling up hotels, double cleaning out my car, and triple going through everything in my storage closet, I’m starting to think that it’s not me. You’d think that if I had suddenly developed a knack for loosing things, I’d lose lenses, memory cards, and hard drives too. And while I do misplace my memory cards or the like now and then, I usually find them within an hour or two or three. Most of the time, it happens after I chill out and let my brain noodle on where I put them last.

Then it hit me that there was a common theme behind everything that was missing. The last time I’m sure that I saw any of these items was when I closed them up one piece of baggage or another and then checked it on an airline.

Now, I have to say that I fly with gear a lot. Cameras and computers always come with me. But things like tripods, monopods, and sundry lighting equipment are just too much to go carry on. Who wants tripods, monopods, and strobist gear anyway? Seriously, I’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Not until now. Then the next thought hit. My flying habits have also shifted around quite a bit of late. I’ve been flying Southwest more and going in and out of SJC and LAS more. Southwest is great for pricing and ticket flexibility and being able to take a straight shot from PDX to LAS or SJC is really nice. Both of these, however, are changes from my previous trouble free routine.

Is that it? Is it airport related, airline related, or some combination? It’s hard to say for sure. You can be sure that I’ll be doing a better job inventory tracking my gear after a flight from now on.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just losing my marbles. That could be it too.

Still, it’s sad. Kodachrome has a look like nothing else. And, nothing else lasts like it. You can pick up a Kodachrome from the 1950s and it looks just like it did when it was taken.

The embargo of information about the new Oympus E-P1 has expired and news about it is being posted around the net. You can read hands-on preview impressions at DPReview and Digital Camera Resource Page. DPReview in particular has posted a set of sample images that seem to indicate that the camera has the goods. Derrick Story has also posted his initial PEN thoughts and is currently in New York to test drive the camera at an Olympus event.

I’ve done no more than just read everything I can find in the hours since the embargo was lifted. Given that, I can only cheer and speculate. That said, here are my cheers so far:

• The first cheer is simply for Olympus pushing the envelope and putting out a large sensor, interchangeable-lens compact camera. A super huge cheer for this! This is what the promise of micro 4/3 has offered.
• The second cheer is that the camera doesn’t seem to sacrifice much to meet its price point of $799 with the kit 14-24 lens and $899 with the 17mm pancake. Instead, it seems that most everything that’s been pared away has been to meet its size requirements. It’s not cheap, but it’s actually a bit less than I was expecting.
• Including a histogram mode in live view. I’ve not seen a demo shot or video of this so far, but it’s in the spec list.
• Including an attachable finder with the 17mm pancake lens. That’s just cool in an old-school rangefinder way.
• Thank goodness the E-P1 uses SD cards and not the funkier XD cards that Olympus has hung onto for too long. SD has become the standard. Even hard core super-pro SLRs are going that way.
• The digital leveler is a cool feature to have. Side to side leveling is status quo these days, but pitch is novel and welcome.
• The prospect of being able to use M-mount lenses with Panasonic’s adapter is just too tasty. I can’t wait for somebody to give it a spin and tell the world how it gos.
• The first high-ISO sample images on DPReview look more than acceptable at 3200 and 6400 looks as good as you could expect.

In addition to all the product cheers, airing up with the Blendtec folks in the promotional videos is worth a cheer all its own. Check it out in the video section of the EP-1 page. The video starts out by blending up an Olympus digital SLR and goes on from there.

Along with my cheers and obvious enthusiasm for the camera, however, are a set of open questions:

• The reported feedback about the time to focus isn’t encouraging. Contrast-detection based autofocus simply isn’t as fast yet as the phase-detect systems in SLRs. It remains to be seen how big a deal this will be.
• I’m super curious to see how easy it is to use manual focus with the focus assist where the display zooms in when the focus ring is turned. If this works well, it might be the way to go if autofocus proves to be slow.
• I’m quite interested in what the shutter lag is like, independent of autofocus time. If it’s quick and snappy, like it should be, then I could see myself using manual focus a lot.
• I haven’t yet seen full size ISO 1600 samples. I’m really curious to see these, and in a variety of conditions. If ISO 1600 shots print out nicely at 8X10 or so, however, I’ll be more than happy.
• The display resolution of 230K pixels seems a bit low, especially for a camera that relies totally on live view. It’ll be interesting to see if this hurts things.
• The exposed sensor when the lens is off is a bit freaky. It’s probably OK, but it’ll be strange the first few times to see the sensor staring back when the lens comes off.

Hopefully, some of the people that are hands-on with the camera will get a chance to answer these questions in the days to come. In particular, I’ll be looking forward to Derrick Story’s thoughts on the camera after his hands on shoot in New York.

So far, however, it looks like Olympus might just have a winner on their hands.

Thousands of bikers rolled by over the course of a half hour or so. Most of the bikers were naked. Some were partially naked. All were having fun.

I love this town. Frankly, I don’t think I have the, um, cojones to do something like this, but I’m glad other people do.

Photogeek details: Nikon D700, 1/50th@f/2.8, ISO 6400.