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Lympa Log - Leica R lenses on Olympus E-330 DSLR

Photos and Text © Gary Todoroff  2006 All Rights Reserved

Mar 20, 2006

Commander Steve Foley of the Blue Angels prepares for boarding his F18 Hornet.

Olympus had kindly loaned me their Zuiko Zoom 90-250 f2.8 to take to the Sacramento Capitol Air Show.  With so much action going on, I kept things simple and mostly shot with this fast telephoto.

E-330, 1/1000th, f4.5, ISO 160 at 250mm zoom.

The air show turned into more adventure than I ever planned on. So it goes when you join a group of 21 high school kids at 3:45 in the morning. I showed up with my overnight bag for the 300+ mile ride from Eureka to Sacramento . Wrong assumption number one – we were just going down for the day – a long day. Wrong assumption number two – I wasn't riding, I was a driver. One of the expected cars had not shown up.

 

So we shoe-horned three freshman girls into my 1988 Toyota Supra, and the caravan drove off into the night to find our way to Mather Field and the Blue Angels. After six hours of driving, assumption number three met us head on, namely that somebody in Sacramento would had thought about directing traffic. Cars were backed up for one mile on the freeway before the exit ramp to the three mile road to the airfield. Once off the freeway, traffic was slow enough for the girls to get out and stretch while we were at a standstill for minutes at a time.  Occasionally we would catch a glimpse of airplanes flying in the distance.

Average road speed of a mile and a half per hour was quite a contrast to the aircraft zooming over our heads when we finally got in. A little tail-gate lunch in the parking lot cheered the kids up, and I was temporarily relieved of chaperone duties to go take pictures.

The Olympus zoom on the E-330 was not very fast at finding proper auto-focus. Many of my shots were not in focus and the lens appeared to rack focus in the wrong direction sometimes for quite awhile before stopping and going the proper direction. I tried a couple of ways to speed up focus:

One - autofocus on a tower across the field to get the lens set close to the proper focus, then track the aircraft with the focus already set close to the eventual focus.

Two - get a focus lock on one jet fly-by, then set the camera to manual focus, which locked in that focus setting.

I tried briefly to track and manually move the focus ring at the same time, but wasn't very successful.

Of course, you can't get much faster action than the Blue Angels zooming by, so this was quite a test, especially on my first real use of the lens.

E-330, 1/800th f 4.5, ISO 160, full zoom, vertical crop of landscape mode photo.

Once or twice at the air show, I remember thinking, "Man, if this were film, I would be spending a fortune!" The hit ratio at action type events like this is often not very high. It was especially low for me because of all the new equipment, coping with focus issues and then having the E-330 start making up its own mind on some issues with proper exposure, too. Not to mention my usual fumble-thumbs, especially after an eight- hour drive! About 400 shots on 35mm transparency film would have cost almost $300 in film and processing costs.

I kept waiting for the jets to fly between me and the cumulus clouds on the horizon directly across the field. They just wouldn't cooperate, so I took a photo of the clouds and shot several close-formation shots.

Back home with Photoshop, the combination looked too good together to pass up. Both shots were taken with the 90-250 zoom, which did a great focus job on this tight formation. Each photo is the full frame version at maximum jpeg (SHQ) setting.

With such fast action, I needed to take many exposures in order to get a few good ones, so I did not shoot the E-330 in RAW mode, mainly to maximize photos on my 2GB Compact Flash card.

Focus was spot-on with angels filling the frame in portrait orientation at 1/2000th, f4.5, ISO 160 at 210mm zoom, then combined in Photoshop with the background portrait-format cloud image taken a couple minutes before.

About half way through 400 photos at the air show, I noticed on the LCD quick-review screen that shots were starting to look even dimmer than normal in the bright sunlight. (Note to self - next time I shoot in bright sunlight, bring a small dark cloth to prevent reflections in the LCD and be able to see it better.)

The E-330 was underexposing by about four f-stops, no matter what mode I shot in. Even with the dial on manual mode, exposure that showed "zero" in the middle of the plus/minus scale was way underexposed with a histogram showing the whole "peak" in the graph at the left-most ten percent of the x-axis.

Finally, I put the camera-dial into manual (M), aimed at a typical exposure scene, and reviewed each photo until the histogram showed a proper exposure spread across the x-axis, then shot in manual at that exposure. Frustrating, but it worked.

Turning the camera on and off to "reboot" did not help. An hour later, the exposure seemed OK again. This intermittent problem did not help my good-to-bad-shot ratio. It also made me realize that many of my underexposed snow scenes from last week (Mar 10 entry) with the E-330 were not my fault - the camera had been exhibiting the same erratic behavior then as well. I had blamed myself for underestimating how much to compensate exposure for snow. However, looking back now, the shots were way underexposed, even with the plus one-stop exposure I had given them.

The underexposure problem on the E-330 led to a couple of interesting photographs, before I discovered the problem and switched to manual exposure mode and used the Histogram for proper settings.

The blue sky was already almost black in this underexposed full frame color digital file, so I just converted the whole photo to black and white. Then I applied a typical "S" curve in the adjustment Curves layer of Photoshop. That provides a high-contrast graphic effect. A red filter on black and white film would have given a similar look.

1/1600th, f10, ISO 160 at 90mm on Olympus 90-250 f2.8 zoom.

A call to tech support at Olympus today did not solve the underexposure mystery. Many years ago my office manager and I started a log sheet of how many times we called tech support centers, mostly for computer and programming issues. We were astounded at how, right here in little Eureka, California, we were without a doubt the world capital for "We have never seen that problem before" problems! Who would have thought that Eureka - "I have found it! - would so often apply to brand-new, never-seen-before, we'll-have-to-call-you-back, technical problems!

Enlarged crop is at full pixel size of the original photo file. with about 80% Smart Sharpening applied in Photoshop CS2

A long telephoto lens gives that crowded, compressed look above, much like it must feel to the pilots when they are flying formation a couple feet away from each other at 300 miles per hour. I used the E-330 on a monopod at 1/640th, f7.1, ISO 100, at 250mm on Zuiko 90-250mm f2.8 zoom lens. After carrying around this heavy seven-pound lens for a couple hours, the monopod was a welcome relief.

The new E-330 is opening up the world of black and white to me again. There is a quality to the digital files that promotes experimentation with the monochrome view of things. In this case, I photographed first in color, then

"Desaturated" in Photoshop.

Also, using two PS Curves Adjustment layers, I selected the C-5A Galaxy dark part of the photo and decreased the contrast a bit to bring out some slight mid tones. Then I inverted the Photoshop Selection to make another Adjustment layer on just the sky, this time increasing contrast like a yellow filter would do on black and white film.

 

1/200th, f20 in Program mode at ISO 100 with the E-330 14-45mm f3.5-5.6 "kit lens"

Amazingly, the same number of cadets from the Eureka High School NJROTC program that we brought to the air show actually showed up on time for the trip home. Without them I would have never gone to the air show. Before leaving they lined up for the group photo. What a feeling of power when I shouted "Eyeballs!", and in perfect unison at the top of their lungs they shouted back "YES SIR!!!" 

Ok, girls -you were such good sports folded up in the tiny back seat of my car for almost fifteen hours, you deserve some special recognition. You took turns in the front seat, didn't complain (much), and shared your potato chips with me. Pretty "snap" as high school freshman seem to say these days.

Hannah
Randi
Patricia

Mar 21

If the Blue Angels can make flying into an art form, why not get artistic with photographs of them? Going back today through the many recent photos of these aircraft in flight, I was struck by the graphic beauty in both form and flying formations.

This inverted formation fly-by photo had a sharpness to it and a certain richness of data in the file.  People who worked a long time with film and darkrooms were able to develop an ability to visualize the world in black and white. In a similar way, you can see scenes and photographs as data; not dry, digital bits and bytes, but a numeric spectrum of rich hues, contrasts and degrees of color saturation.

 

  © Gary Todoroff 2006

 

When a lens and camera capture that special depth of reality in a perfect exposure, the range of data available in a digital photograph is like having a symphony of instruments to interpret the melody. Using the musical analogy, Ansel Adams once said that "the negative is the score and the print is the performance." I think Ansel would have really liked the instrument called Photoshop.

The "performance" above involved two Photoshop adjustment layers for Curves to change contrast and eliminate the blue sky background, and Hue/Saturation to emphasize the blue and yellow. Some sharpening filtration did the rest. Except for that and some cropping, the photograph itself was not added to or manipulated.

Mar 23

A lunch yesterday at the US Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Air Station with pilot and friend, LT Shawn McMillan, turned into photo session with a helicopter training session on Trinidad Head. Just happened to have the "Lympa" along!

To give you some geographic bearings, Trinidad Head is 25 miles north of Eureka, California. The fog is starting to lift over the light and foghorn house on the western slope.

The photo is from a year ago with Leica R8, Vario APO Elmarit 70-180mm f2.8 with 2x APO extender on Fuji Velvia film.


Rescue swimmers practice "vertical operations" on the sheer cliffs in front of the Trinidad light. Ocean breakers are about 200 feet below the helicopter. I went along with the two Coast Guard ground crewmen, who strap onto railings at the edge of the cliff and then toss a practice dummy on a line down the precipice, which gets "rescued" by the helicopter crew.

 

"Relax by Hanging Out with the Coast Guard"

I wasn't able to always keep sharp manual focus on every frame using the Leica Vario APO Elmarit 70-180mm f2.8 as the helicopter moved a bit. But when focus was correct, the detail was excellent on the E-330.

The above shot of AST2 Tony Puglia would have been a good opportunity to use manual focus in Live Mode B, which gives a 10X enlargement on the Live-View LCD. However 10X is too close for the kind of movement and framing going on. I wish there were a way on the E-330 to dial down the enlargement in Mode B. With something around 5x, I could have focused more precisely and kept the correct framing at the same time.

Exposure time of 1/1000th froze the scene above just fine, with me probably shaking more than the calm-looking rescue swimmer. With the Vario-Elmarit zoomed out to the full 180mm, I believe the f-stop was about f4.

 

The view from inside the light tower put me at about eye level with the HH65-B Dolphin rescue helicopter hovering over the rescue swimmer on the cliff below. The 7-14mm Zuiko lens zoomed at 14mm gave a wide perspective and plenty of depth-of-field at f11. 1/250th ISO 100, minus 0.3 stops exposure compensation. Note how the fresnel lens projects the outside scene on the ceiling.

From the deck that went around the outside of the light, I could not see over the lip of the roof. However, with the E-330 in Live-View, I was able to stretch the camera over my head like a periscope to follow the graphic scene above. All the glare made the screen somewhat difficult to see, but the live image was enough for me to know when the action looked about right. In any case, it was certainly more view than I would have seen with today's crop of professional DSLR cameras that give you the choice to put your eye up to an optical prism viewfinder.  Wait a minute, is only one option a choice? E-330, 14-45mm "kit lens" at 19mm 1/1250th, f8, ISO 100, Live-View Mode A with screen tilted back as my only window on the scene.

 

Ground crewmen, AST3 James Moore and AST2 Pat Roach, are CG rescue swimmers, too. They keep in constant communications with the four-man crew on the HH-65 Dolphin helicopter, made up of two pilots, a flight mechanic and rescue swimmer.

The Zuiko 7-14mm lens is at super-wide 7mm and aimed up, giving a distorted but dramatic shot directly into the sun. Some flare shows at the right, but not bad given the conditions.

This portrait-orientation shot (with sky cropped out a bit at the top) is where I wish that Olympus engineers had taken the LCD screen one step further and made it twist, too. Then I could have set the camera on the grass instead of my head on the grass to look through the optical finder.

1/200th f6.3 7mm ISO 100, Exposure Bias plus 1.3.

 

Olympus E-330 with Leica Vario APO Elmarit 70-180mm f2.8, full-frame. You could have taken a shot like this on the ground as well, although there is somehow a feeling of "buoyancy" that implies flight. Or maybe my ears are still ringing from twin turbine engines powering a full hover just feet away.

Pilots LCDR John Hammond (left) and CDR Rick Christoffersen finesse their HH-65B next to the bluff, maintaining position while the rescue swimmer, still attached to the hoist cable, maneuvers on the cliff below.

After the Blue Angels taxiing shot above (Mar 20), taken with the Olympus 90-250mm f2.8 zoom, I felt the Lympa configuration needed some equal time with an enlarged part of the frame. The crop below show the Leica APO 70-180 zoom to be very sharp and good at capturing shadow detail in the glare of the windscreen.

  


[Gary Todoroff was the first photographer appointed to the Coast Guard Art Program, which has provided opportunity to tell the story of dedicated crews and personnel serving in air and boat stations all around the United States.]

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