Traveling light on your vacation
Jason is back from a vacation and discusses his single lens kit for casual shooting while on a trip. We’ll also go back in history to look at the Olympus OM-1 and OM-2 film cameras and discuss their features.
Category Archives: Olympus
OM System Lenses for Travel Photography
These lenses will make your next photo trip even more memorable
As you probably know, I moved over to OM System gear last year. After trying the OM-1 as a wildlife camera, I quickly realized that it was perfect for just about everything I do these days, which is a combination of wildlife, landscape, and travel photography workshops and tours.
In my new video, I wanted to talk about a variety of lens options for travel photography. These are all lenses that I’ve purchased myself; I’m not sponsored by OMDS in any way. What I really came to appreciate within the lens lineup is that there are a LOT of good choices and you can go from a single lens kit (14-150mm or 12-100mm) to 2 or 3 lens kits of differing sizes, depending on your needs.
You can check the prices on all of these lenses here.
POTD: Ladybug Convention
Our weather has warmed up and the yuccas are starting to bloom. That means ladybugs are in abundance, preying upon the aphids which feed on the yuccas (and are often tended by ants).
For this photo, I used my OM System OM-1 Mark 2 body and the Olympus 60mm f/2.8 macro lens. This tiny lens is quite sharp, and incredibly lightweight (185 g / 0.4 lb), which makes it super-easy to manage in the field hand-held. A side benefit of Micro 4/3rds format for macro photography is the 2x effective DOF (meaning you can shoot at wider apertures to keep shutter speed up without sacrificing depth of field) and the 2x equivalent magnification factor (1:1 with this format actually frames like 2:1 on full-frame).
For this shot, I was set at 1/1000s f/6.3 ISO 1250, hand-held. The equivalent setting on full-frame (to get the same DOF) would have been 1/1000s f/13, ISO 5000. Sometimes it’s good to go small!
Pushing the envelope
Testing the Olympus 100-400mm with a teleconverter
The Olympus 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 lens is a surprisingly good performer, especially considering its sub-$1500 price point. It’s not a lens that I’d even consider using with a teleconverter, because you lose quite a bit of light in that scenario. Nevertheless, I figured I’d try it out when I was in San Diego last week leading my birds in flight photo workshop.
I put the Olympus MC-14 1.4x teleconverter on the 100-400mm and happened to encounter a song sparrow at relatively close range. So I gave it a shot. At these extreme magnifications, the lack of a good optical image stabilizer was noticeable (IBIS gives better results with this lens), but I kept the shutter speed high, and hoped for the best. I surprisingly got a couple of keepers, but autofocus accuracy was reduced somewhat (not unexpected).
In the past, I might have tossed these images out… ISOs 20,000? But by using DXO Pure Raw 3 to de-noise the raw files and a little Topaz Photo AI sharpening, the results were quite usable!
Faroe Islands Photo Safari 2024
Landscape and Nature Photography with Jason Odell & Matt Suess Aug. 8-15, 2024
I’m extremely excited to announce that I’ll be traveling to the Faroe Islands in 2024 as a co-instructor with OM Digital Ambassador Matt Suess for a weeklong photo safari! The Faroe Islands is a legitimate bucket-list destination, as it was named the Faroe Islands the most authentic and unspoiled group of islands in the world by National Geographic.
The Faroe Islands are located 320 kilometres (200 mi) north-northwest of Scotland, and about halfway between Norway (580 kilometres (360 mi) away) and Iceland (430 kilometres (270 mi) away).
From rugged seascapes to fishing villages and puffin colonies, your time in the Faroe Islands will be unforgettable. And with the help of Matt and myself, your photographs will be unforgettable, too!