Small Camera Street

Nothing is better than to chance upon a street festival or jazz outdoor event or Toronto Comicon, a three-day celebration of all things comics, sci-fi, horror, anime, gaming, or cosplay featuring hundreds of dressed up kids (and some adults).

What’s even more fun is doing the shooting during an outing of The Toronto Photo Walk.

Even more fun I intentionally shot all my shots using the tiny and older Olympus E-PL 5 with a first run through DXO Pure RAW noise reduction software.

The E-PL 5 is a 16-megapixel pocketable camera that takes all the amazingly sharp Olympus lenses including the pancake 17mm f/2.8 lens and for that matter the 150-600mm if one was so inclined.

This makes for a very small street camera that still can run with the big boys when it comes to producing really decent images. Where a lot of small cameras run into trouble and the E-PL 5 is no exception is under heavy use. For single shots it’s fine. It’s not bad shooting multiple images. But where it starts to hesitate is under heavy use like when you’re standing at the top of a long staircase indoors under so-so lighting shooting one costumed kid after another after another after another.

It’s at that moment you remember why you bought that big DSLR or mirrorless camera that can fire multiple frames for minutes at a time and weighs a ton but is just a killer when it comes to anything you throw at it.

Nevertheless the E-PL 5 did alright. Even its unprocessed images were pretty clean and Exposure 7’s built-in noise reduction software was very good at cleaning up a slight amount of digital noise.

Having said that a pre-dip in DXO Pure RAW which was very fast considering I was doing a batch noise reduction edit of 20 or so raw images at a time was breath-taking in how good the images looked after processing.

And remember I still am working at figuring out DXO but so far it’s turning out to be a super investment in noise reduction especially when it comes to micro four-third sensors.

More images are in my gallery at: www.streetshooters.ca