Well this is my first camera review for the products section of Garage Glamour™, and a few friends at Olympus asked me to try-out the new Olympus E-1 digital (DSLR) single-lens reflex camera—"the first 100% all-digital SLR system built from the ground up."
I decided I would mix the review up with the traditional camera review format and my actual use of the camera in my style of shooting.
I received the camera system the day before my 29th sold-out “Glamour, Beauty and the Nude” workshop held in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Naturally, like most male photographers, I didn’t read the instruction manual, I tried to figure it out all on my own, and for the most part, I succeeded—actually, the camera's menu buttons and features are so easy to use, I have yet to thoroughly investigate the manual.
Normally during one of my workshops, I don’t have time to shoot, as I’m too busy teaching—not to mention this workshop was being video-taped for a future DVD being produced by the famous photographer Gary Bernstein—so Olympus gets a generous, gratuitous “plug” in my DVD. Most of these images were shot shortly after the workshop ended at he same location.
First, let me describe the environment I used to create my photographs with the Olympus E-1. Normally, at my workshops I teach the proper use of lighting and how to make any room into a studio, so we tested the E-1 using artificial studio light provided by my portable Dyna-Lite 1000WI studio packs. While Dyna-Lite gives you the option of using radio-remote triggering with a Pocket Wizard transmitter attached to the hot shoe of the E-1 camera, Olympus also equipped the E-1 with a traditional PC cord connector on the camera’s left side—a big plus if you work in a studio or on location with artificial light sources.
I prefer Dyna-Lite because their color balance, which is important when shooting digital, keeps a tight tolerance, normally within 100K (Kelvin). The light was modified at each flash head at one point or another with either a 7-inch grid or Larson soft boxes—read more details as you click on each image. While Dyna-Lite tends to deliver around 5400K in color temperature, I prefer shooting warmer, and the E-1 allows me to custom tailor my white-balance to achieve that perfect color harmony in my images.
The first thing I did after turning the camera on was to set the white-balance at 6000K, the camera lets you choose the color-temperature from 3000K to 7500K—if you take a camera and make it believe the reflected light is 6000K, it will naturally “warm-up” your images when shooting with day-light balanced artificial lighting such as 5400K, Dyna-Lites.
Think of it like shooting on a “cool cloudy” day. Naturally if you’re outside and shooting under the shade or on a cloudy day, it’s not as “hot” as a bright sunny day so your reflected light will be cool, or more bluish than normal—the opposite of blue is yellow, the opposite of cool reflected light is warm light—which the camera adds naturally when the white-balance is customized. What I did find interesting about the E-1, you can go one step further and subtract red or add blue in small increments from plus-seven to minus-seven to “fine-tune” your white-balance results. That’s up to fifteen varieties per color temperature to fine-tune your style—this will be a knock-out for those always wanting to copy the “Maxim style” tones and shooting, without having to figure it out in post-production.
Olympus gives you three white-balance modes, either Auto, Preset or One-Touch Manual. Auto white-balance operates from 3000K to 7500K while the Preset Manual white-balance setting provides 12 different choices of temperature from 3000K to 7500K in approx. 300K increments. One-Touch Manual provides complete control from 2000K to 10,000K, steplessley through the entire range, as well as three memory settings to store the custom white-balance One-Touch settings for different shooting scenes.
Other white-balance features include adjustments of up to 200K in 20K increments in the white-balance compensation mode and even white-balance bracketing which allows for three frames to be created from one, each at a different color temperature setting. (continued on page two)
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For a larger image and camera specifications, click image below
For a larger image and shooting details click on each image
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