I love that his arm fades into the background. It has a warm radiance to it.

Thanks for the nice comment! I definitely agree with you.

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Andrew Miguelez

interesting exposure. I love the way that olympus chooses to deal with thier highlight falloff.

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Well I don't know what to say about Olympus' highlight falloff, but as for this image - it's all me. I cranked up the exposure quite a bit. I was trying different exposures to maybe build an HDR later but then when I got home and went through them, I decided that this one was interesting by itself. The sun was very bright, and this is 1/180 at f3.5, so obviously the EV was adjusted. I believe by 3 or more points, actually. As for falloff, adjusting the levels to make the highlights even more abrupt was my intention.

What do you know about Olympus' highlight falloff? I haven't heard anything about it, positive or negative.

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Andrew Miguelez

at least on the E420 the highlights fall off very smoothly in a way that seems natural to my eye. DP review commented on this. It seems that even though the olympus sacrifices a fair bit of dynamic range compared to its current competitors it does so in a pleasing manner. It seems to be sensor related though since its apparent even when shooting RAW. I've noticed I actually shoot more for bloom with this camera than my other ones. It reminds me of a comment I saw when I started lurking the sigma forums claiming that one of the hardest parts about getting good results with the sigma is that you have think of it as shooting a style of film and work around its strengths and weeknesses. The Olympus is similar, it can produce very nice sterile images but it really shines in high contrast scenes with a fair bit of over exposure. It suprises me how often I crank ot down 2/3 of a stop when shooting indoors only to push it up a stop in post production.
Of course the focus by wire is the only semi drawback I have with olympus's approach.

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Funny, I happen to love the focus-by-wire.
One of the coolest things on my camera, aside from IS and Live View.

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Andrew Miguelez

I guess it depends on where you are coming from, I shot pentax with vintage lenses for a long time so I just love the feeling of a nicely damped brass bodied lens running through its focal stops. The focus by wire is growing on me but I just always feel a bit unsure when I want to slam it to infinity. Another drawback of mine is that I shoot at night way too often so I used to make extensive use of the distance estimators, my pancake lens doesn't have them meaning I have to spend much more time hunting for the right focus point.

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Yeah, at night it can suck. Meh, oh well.

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Andrew Miguelez

shrug... just a new piece of equipment to learn. I spent a good 2 weeks before I got anything I was remotely proud of out of my Sigma and much longer learning the Pentax. happy shooting.

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