Making The Most Of 5 Megapixels.

I have mentioned in a previous post that the Olympus E-1 is a 5 megapixel DSLR camera. That is a 5 million pixels. The dimensions of which are written as 2560x1920.

The eagle eyed amongst you should recognise that as not a million miles away from some computer monitors these days. What that means is that when viewed digitally the images still look pretty good, there is detail in there. What I have noticed is that I am happiest with images of subjects that are closer to the camera. The resolution of small distant objects suffers due to to the smaller number of pixels used on this sensor.

Here is an example of the detail on a close up of my live-in model:

Here we can see fine detail in her fur is resolved really quite well, that is because I effectively filled the frame with this portait making the most of the pixels available on the sensor.

In contrast the camera fairs much worse when trying to display the small details in the distant trees. They are mushier and much less defined because the resolution just isn’t there in comparison to a modern camera.

Crop of the above image to show what I mean about the resolving power of the camera.

The details here blend together and look a little painterly here. Now at normal viewing distances this is less noticable and I am greatly increasing the effect by cropping in so much into this image.

Now, confession time, I have used software on all these images to squeeze as much out of them as possible wirth regards to the sharpness and resolution. This has involved careful and light pushing of the files sent through Topaz Photo AI. Topaz allows for sharpening and noise reduction that is both powerful and subtle.

This additional pop of perceived sharpness added to the image really complements the already standout colours.

The one thing that is difficult to compensate for is the lower dynamic range offered by this old sensor. This most often rears its ugly head in scenes like the one above. The dynamic range between the dark woodland and the bright sun hitting the tops of the tress is just too much for the camera to cope with, and you end up with highlights that are completely blown with no data at all.

Bracketing your shots can help here, another alternative is to take the image and convert it to monochrome. This does not resolve the issue but may make it less noticeable. I think this might be because the brain is more forgiving of blown highlights in a black and white images because there is no unnatural looking colour cast to them.

Monochrome conversion of the previous image.

Finally this brings me to one last point about the old E-1 with regard to its imaging. Built in to the camera are controls for managing the JPEG engine’s handling of colour imagery, interestingly there is no way to ask the camera to save a black and white image. Any monochrome work you see from this camera has all been created in post production, which means the photographer had to work hard to previsualise what that scene would look like in terms of light and shade and not hue and saturation of colours. Just another interesting part of using old gear.

There is one other more invasive technique I have tried with this image using Photoshop to take the texture from the tree next to the overexposed one:

Making The Most Of 5 Megapixels.

A Few Weeks In.

James Warner