John & Maria's Photography Pages

Monday, January 15, 2024

High Res Shooting with the EM1 Mkii

The Olympus EM1 Mkii offers a high resolution mode, activated from the shooting modes button on the left side of the top plate. Although not as sophisticated as with more recent models it offers the opportunity to produce 50MP JPEGs or an 80MP ORF (RAW) file by compositing a series of pixel shifted images in camera.

Frankly, I haven't found much use for it. For the system to work without horrible artifacts creeping in from subject movement between the image frames the camera has to be securely tripod mounted and the subject(s) to be absolutely still. Achieving that outdoors in the windy environment of South West England is, to say the least, problematic.

Witness this shot of snowdrops at The Garden House. This the 80MP version. Resized for this blog post it looks fine:

But look closer at 100% and the problems start to show:

The slightest trace of wind and the photo becomes blurred. Even downsizing doesn't help - unless you downsize to the native 20MP resolution of the camera - and where is the point of that.

So, for my garden and nature work, the Hi Res mode doesn't really work for me.

Until I hit a situation where it did. And, one that, confusingly, involves considerable movement.

At Burrator reservoir, on Dartmoor, there's a man made waterfall that feeds water from Drake's Leat down to the waters of the lake. I wanted to get a couple of shots using as long an exposure as I could to smooth the water as it cascaded over the rocks. What I didn't have was a neutral density filter to allow me to get that longer exposure. The best I could do was 1/15th sec. Then I remembered that because the Hi Res mode composites a number of shots it also lengthens the exposure time. Apart from the rushing water the air was still and, being in midwinter, what green existed was hugging the ground so I gave it a try.