I wrote about
my new lens a couple of posts ago. One very useful side-effect is that it has a 52mm filter thread which just happens to be one of the sizes I have of Lee filter system adapters. This means I can finally use my Lee filters on my Olympus OMD-EM10, especially my neutral density graduated filters. Ever since buying the Olympus with the kit pancake lens, which had an absurdly small 37mm filter thread, the fact that I couldn’t use the ND grad filters on that lens was the main reason I carried on using my Pentax. No longer. I went out yesterday and shot for the first time with the new lens and using ND graduated filters on the Olympus.
It didn’t work quite the way I thought it would. On an SLR you look through the viewfinder and use the depth of field preview feature to stop the aperture down so you can line up the filter and get the light/dark transition in just the right place.
I tried this on the Olympus. Out of the box it doesn’t have a dedicated DoF preview button but using the ability to assign functions to buttons I have assigned DoF preview to the video button (red button on right of top plate). However, as soon as you slide the filter down to line it up while stopping the lens down, the display (which of course is an electronic live view) compensates for the effect of the filter and brightens the scene.
What I found instead to be more useful and practical is to set the display to show red flashing on any over-exposed areas. Then slide the filter down until all the red flashing areas (presumably in the sky) disappear. Then you can increase the exposure (shutter speed or aperture) until just before the red flashes reappear.
This may actually be more accurate than it is on a normal DSLR with optical viewfinder. It certainly seemed to work well yesterday.
This is likely to push my Pentax right to the bottom of my bag and I expect nearly all shots from now on will be Olympus shots.