epl-1 & kit 14-42mm at light up night

[cshanaberger]

I went to Pittsburgh last night for the 50th anniversary of Light Up Night, which is a start to the holiday season here with various activities in the downtown region including multiple street, park & bridge concerts. This was my first time attending this event & was pretty impressed with all the activities to do. There were at least 4 fireworks displays I witnessed, 2 of them being pretty large displays of 20 minutes or more.
Since I did not know what to expect I chose to travel light camera-wise so I decided on the epl-1 with 14-42mm kit lens, 40-150mm micro, & 50mm 1.8 canon fd with fotodiox adapter. This turned out to be a totally wrong setup as the 40-150 never got attached to the camera & was just dead weight,the 50mm seen limited use because of the crowds, the extra second or 2 it takes to make precise focus could not be managed because of crowd movement. So the 14-42mm was attached most of the night. I shot over 1500 jpg images mostly on burst to try & achieve some keepers by helping out the IS. This proved ineffective for over 95% of the images I shot. the kit lens is just to slow light-wise to be an effective hand held night shooter. I did manage a couple decent ones at the last fireworks display largely thanks to PNC Park stadium light spilling out onto the river so here are a couple of shots from there.

[shoturtle]

The last one look very clean for 3200iso. Wow, very nicely done.

[zig-123]

Hi Charles,

As Shoturtle mentioned, these are pretty clean. Did you do much in the way of noise cleanup?

Sorry to hear of your frustrations. But I think you've illustrated at least one reason why we'll continue to use our Oly dslr's.

Zig

[cshanaberger]

Thanks shoturtle & Zig.
Zig, yeah the dslrs still have a huge advantage for a lot of situations, I didn't even consider taking the e-3 because of what I consider unacceptable horizontal banding above Iso 800 in low light & I knew that I would be shooting high iso since I would be taking shots handheld. I have never had any of the newer 12 mp dslrs like the e-30 or e-620 so they may not have this banding.
as far as regular noise I have never got to serious about noise reduction I have no noise reduction software on any of my computers although I have used a few trial versions to try & eliminate the banding in the e-3 files but none I tried did an acceptable job, IMHO of fixing the banding issue.
I processed these in qimage studio edition, mostly what I did was increase blacks with levels, dropped brightness & fill light by 10 each & some slight unsharp mask, thats it no noise reduction. the images are not noise free by any means. Here is the OOC jpeg of the majestic only downsized for the web you can see the noise in the foreground quite easily.
Charles

[Tullio]

Nice captures! Good handling of WB too. Did you use preset or manual WB setting?

[cshanaberger]

Tullio, I started out the night with incandescent setting but then switched to auto wb. these are all auto wb with no post adjustment to color temp..
Charles

[Tullio]

Thanks for the info., Charles. I haven't taken night shots with my EPL1 but will soon as we go downtown every year to see the Xmas decor.