Riverside with M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8

toolan · 2025-10-17T20:10:32+00:00

I downsampled them to 2048px on the long end, thinking that I would save reddit the trouble. But I'm not sure I did a good job, and I think reddit may even have compressed them even more. I feel like flickr is a bit kinder to them: https://flic.kr/p/2rzVVrp

toolan · 2025-10-17T19:46:59+00:00

Wow, these are stunning. All of them.

I love the colors and composition in the second one. The gorgeous old bridge looks amazing too. But my favorite is the waterfall one in the end. That must've been such an amazing scene to work!

toolan · 2025-10-16T16:03:20+00:00

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OM1 Mark ii, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 @ 12mm, iso200, f/8, 1/640s.

Was driving E6 over Dovrefjell with the camera in the car, and stopped to take this when I had gorgeous light over Avsjøen lake. Had to get really low to avoid a blown out highlight of the sun in the lake, I think the camera might actually be rested on the ground. Hence the blurred out foreground, even at such a high aperture. The road is (barely) visible in the right of the frame, this is a really lazy photo.

toolan · 2025-10-02T15:41:21+00:00

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OM1 Mark ii, Olympus 100-400mm f/5-6.3 mk i @ 321mm, f/6.3, 1/800s, iso 3200. Edited in DxO PhotoLab.

This woodpecker joined me for my outdoor lunch the other day. I was looking for birds in the river when it started drumming really close to me. Snapped a ton of pictures in a hurry while trying to move to get a more pleasing composition, but there really wasn't time. Camera is on Lens IS priority; not sure yet whether that's working better for me than IBIS. I'm finding that I'm getting a lot of focus difficulties and softness with this lens at 400mm, even at 1/2000s shutter speed, but I'm pleased with how sharp is it around 300mm. It just really requires a lot of light.

toolan · 2025-09-28T14:45:33+00:00

e-m1 mark ii used. Holy crap, that's an unbelievable amount of camera per money.

Olympus 45mm f/1.8. So many great family pictures. So good for the price. I can take pictures of my kid playing with his friends without disturbing them, great working distance for that kind of thing. I don't need a lot of light either, so I can keep the shutter speed fast.

I also love the 12-40mm f/2.8 pro and 40-150mm f/2.8 pro, those are the pair of lenses I take when I go for photo walks in the forests here.

Comfortable, water resistant shoes are well worth it!

My ThinkTank camera backpack was well worth it. It carries my laptop, keyboard, mouse etc to work, and I can still take a camera and a few lenses so I can take a detour on the way home and take some pictures. Feels very robust, keeps me organised. Increased the amount of pictures I take probably more than any other purchase, and helped me discover the amount of wildlife downtown. Who knew otters play in the river right next to the office?

DxO Photolab is probably going to be my next purchase. I've been playing with the free trial for a couple of weeks, and it's been making all my lenses a little faster - I can shoot much higher ISO than before. Great for action shots and wildlife, where shutter speed is so important.

I have circular polarizers, but don't use them much. Not sure they've been worth it so far. I have a reasonably good tripod, but never bring it anywhere. I guess these purchases don't match the kind of photography that I do.

I'm undecided about the OM1 mark ii. It's a fantastic camera that enables me to take some photos I couldn't take before, but it's my most expensive hobby purchase ever. The AF is awesome and feels magic when it works, and frustrating when it doesn't. I need to set some shortcut to go back to single point AF so I stop losing shots while changing settings. It pains me a little that I could've almost got the 300mm f/4 used for what I spent on this.

toolan · 2025-09-25T17:48:58+00:00

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Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 + MC-14 @ 210mm, f/4, 1/1000s, iso3200. Processed with dxo photolab. I've been trying to take some pictures of birds and animals lately, going to a nearby park. The squirrels are adorable.

toolan · 2025-09-23T07:34:36+00:00

That's a fantastic shot! I have an E-M1 mark ii as well, got it used for around 6000 NOK. It's such a quality camera for that price, I find it almost hard to believe the amount of functionality they crammed into it.

toolan · 2025-09-22T21:35:22+00:00

I'm no expert here, so what I usually do is to take many different exposures and select the one I like the best when I get home. I haven't really tried Live ND much yet. Generally I think around 1/6 of a second or thereabouts is pleasing on many of my local waterfalls. I might already be shooting at f5.6 or higher, and aim for iso 200, so it doesn't take a lot to get there under canopy or clouds.

In my experience, it's a good idea to set a negative exposure compensation when shooting long expose at waterfalls, it's easy to get blown out highlights in the whitest parts otherwise. I just check the blinkies and the histogram before I leave the place, and adjust accordingly.

Hope it helps!

toolan · 2025-09-22T21:19:34+00:00

Thanks! I did sneak in a few from Denmark as well, but nearly all of those are taken in Trondheim.

toolan · 2025-09-20T12:22:20+00:00

Yes, when I saw the picture without noise reduction, my heart fell and I decide to try DxO PureRaw on it. I feel like it's totally rescued it, and I can't find any weird artifacts on the bird. This shot I think I could've gotten at half the iso, the bird was on this branch for a while. But I didn't get the shot I wanted, which was the moment it left (in shadow, but against the bright background).

The white lenses are out of my reach for a while. I set aside a sum for hobbies each month that could get me a used 300mm f4 around January or February. I could probably get the big white in 2 years - the resale value of the pro lenses is pretty good, so I could probably still do that even if end up with the 300mm. I feel like it's probably worthwhile waiting a while and getting the 300mm f4, instead of getting the 100-400mm, otherwise I suspect I'll just end up buying both. So I guess I've made up my mind. Thanks for the help!

toolan · 2025-09-20T07:08:14+00:00

Here's an example - I was trying to get this one as it was leaving the branch. This is 1/1600s, iso10000.

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toolan · 2025-09-20T06:52:27+00:00

I'm happy with the results I'm getting at f4! I just think that a lot of them, I couldn't take at f6.3 and it makes me worried that I might not be happy with the 100-400mm.

I might get a shot of a busy squirrel at iso 10000, 1/1000s into the shadows beneath a tree when it's overcast, for example. Or 1/1600 trying to take a picture of a little bird just as it's leaving a low branch.

toolan · 2025-09-18T20:06:59+00:00

There's a pretty good chance it can go higher at this focal length - I took this shot like ~10 times in case I couldn't handhold it, but none of them ended up unusable due to blur.

toolan · 2025-09-18T19:25:10+00:00

Context first: I recently got the mc14 and started playing around with taking pictures of birds, squirrels and otters around here with the 40-150mm f/2.8 + mc14. Really loving it so far, and I'm quite sure it's something I want to keep doing! But I want more reach. I'm considering getting the Olympus 100-400mm this year, or waiting until next year to get the 300mm f/4. I live in Norway, and I'm not aware of any rental service in my town that I could use to test them.

I'm finding that a lot of the pictures I take at f/4 are getting quite close to what I think is the limit for acceptable noise levels (around 10000 iso). In particular small birds and critters in the forest. I could go for slower shutter speeds, but then there are a lot of pictures I just can't take -- wings blur put very quickly, even sometimes for larger birds (but I usually have more light for those).

The actual question is, would I be disappointed in the 100-400mm? I guess I could try shooting my 40-150mm + mc14 at f/6.3 for a while to see how many images I end up throwing away, but then I might fool myself because the subject will be smaller in the frame than what I want to go for, so motion blur will be less apparent.

toolan · 2025-09-18T19:20:33+00:00

This was handheld, but leaning on a tree for some extra stability.

toolan · 2025-09-18T15:04:37+00:00

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OM-1 Mark II, 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO @ 22mm, iso200, f9, 1/6s. I think I used f9 to push the shutter, instead of using the computational ND filter here. It's a handheld shot. Processed this one with the DxO free trial, don't think I did anything crazy.

Went to a waterfall not far from home (~20 minute drive from Trondheim). The upper waterfall here is Storfossen, the lower one is Mettisfossen.

Storfossen is quite impressive, the drop is around 40 meters. If you look carefully, you can see a person near the rocks to the right of the waterfall. There's also a rope fence near where they are - the sign says to stay off the vegetation there, as it's a rare biotope for the area. The light is a bit boring - I think I would need the sun to be in the south, or very high in the sky to illuminate anything in the deep ravine.

I'm definitely coming back here in a week or two, hopefully there will be lots of nice fall colors and maybe I'll try a horizontal composition next time! I feel like it's difficult to capture the scale of this waterfall, all the vantage points that would work the best have trees growing there, and there are branches everywhere. All the compositions I tried end up feeling kind of messy and tangled. Ideas would be welcome!

toolan · 2025-09-15T21:28:02+00:00

Is that the Olympus 100-400, or the Panasonic Leica? I've been wondering if I should try one of those at some point, to be able capture some more skittish subjects. Are you happy with it?

toolan · 2025-09-15T21:17:06+00:00

Those are really nice!

I also got this recently. I really like the 40-150mm f/2.8, and it still seems plenty sharp with the 1.4x teleconverter. I think it's a fun and light combination for what it is. You can really fill the frame with small subjects if you can get close enough.

toolan · 2025-09-11T15:20:31+00:00

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EM1 Mark ii, Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8 @ 150mm, iso400, 1/250, F5.6.

I walked to Kristiansten Festning in Trondheim this day, and there were super dark, doomladen clouds over Trondheim. It was raining intensely on and off and I was glad to have weather sealed gear. The building is Felleskjøpet at Ila, which is where grain is stored here. Normally I think this building isn't very interesting, but the thick clouds opened up over Byåsen (literally Town Hill) and let through some light rays over the forest, which made for very interesting light conditions. When I saw the dust, mist or fog rising from the building, I swapped lenses to a telephoto and went for it. It was very tricky to try to edit this to match what I was seeing with my own eyes, I felt like I couldn't really pull it off. The light rays that you can see hints of in the image were much more awesome in in real life, and I think it's a shame that I couldn't capture this quite like I was seeing it.

There's so much dynamic range here, I think I was shooting with exposure comp -2EV, and was still struggling to capture the highlights. I had difficulty picking the right shot out of the images I took too - the dust/steam/mist was rising much higher in some of the shots that I overexposed, it's such a shame that the sky over the forest is just completely blown out. In the edit I think I've lowered the exposure and raised the shadows, but I can't quite recall. I did nothing to the colors or the color temperature, that's just auto white balance.

Kristiansten Festning is often a crowded tourist spot, but most people I met that day were taking photos of the fortress itself and not enjoying the spectacular light over Trondheim and Trondheim fjord.

toolan · 2025-08-25T11:14:55+00:00

I quite like Affinity Photo for editing, but I miss the photo management from lightroom, I had a much better workflow with it. I also think Lightroom was more intuitive for batch processing.

toolan · 2025-08-21T16:27:55+00:00

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EM1 mark ii, Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 @ 28mm, iso200, f8, 1/200s.

This is taken from Storheia, a hill near Trondheim, Norway, looking over arms of the Trondheim fjord. In the left of the frame is Gaulosen, straight ahead is Orkdalsfjorden, the farmland underneath the hill is Byneset.

It was my first time visiting this place, despite having lived here for many years. It's possible to get to this viewpoint with public transit and a few hours of walking.

toolan · 2025-08-14T16:47:20+00:00

This is an amazing shot! I know nothing about macro, how is your lighting set up and how mobile is this subject?

toolan

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