Olympus IBIS + Kase Wolverine Filters = Dream Team

Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men... Originally we had planned to go up the Branderschrofen near Füssen today to scope some sites for the next astro shoot, but there's still a tad too much snow, the weather forecast wasn't really playing ball and we would have had to have tested to get on the cable car. Not really an issue, but a faff nevertheless. So instead we packed the car and headed off to the Starzlach Gorge near Sonthofen to stretch the legs and play with my new filters; the Kase Wolverine magnetic filters. I figured that if they're good enough for Nigel, they're good enough for me 😉. 

Hard and Soft || Olympus 44 mm, f/4, 1/2", ISO 200 

My previous filters were a set of Lee Seven5 90 x 75 mm rectangular filters with a traditional filter-holder. These were always such a fiddle to mount, plus the astute reader will remember from my comparison with the Kase system that as soon as you put the polariser on the front of the filters, the system becomes completely unusable at wide angle because you can see the filters in the corners of the photos. Well, more than the corners actually. In fact they were so unusable on a day-to-day basis that I did the unthinkable and bought myself a sneaky cross-pol variable filter (but shush, don't tell Matthias, he'll disown me).

The handy alternative is the Kase Wolverine magnetic filter system. You screw a circular metal plate to the front of the camera lens and layer the filters you want in front of the plate. They stick to the plate using powerful magnets and stay reliably in place, even with the camera attached to my shoulder strap using the Peak Design capture system, though I would be wary of doing this when climbing. I absolutely love the ease of use of the Kase filters, the leather box fits conveniently in the side pocket of my lens bag and are always on hand. If I had two complaints, it would be that there's no marking on the CPL to tell me where the maximum filter mark is (I've overcome this using Tippex) and that I can't use the system in conjunction with my lens hood, which has lead to some sun-flare issues.

1. Attachment ring, ND 8 filter and CPL
2. Filters Stacked...
3. ...and mounted

The first significant water fall in the gorge is just below the ticket booth. They charge € 3.50 to use the path along the gorge, perfectly fair in my mind as they do a fair amount of upkeep with railings and footings to keep you safe in very slippery conditions. The Starzlach Gorge isn't as well known or long as the Partnach Klamm near Garmisch or the Breitach Klamm near Oberstdorf, but it's an absolute delight with some very picturesque cascades. The gorge runs roughly from west to east if you want to bear this in mind for light direction. I usually find shooting gorges works best on overcast days where the clouds form a giant softbox, otherwise things can get very contrasty leaving you with completely burnt out or dark photos.

They also sell a local cheese at the booth. If you like character cheese, something which is normally quite hard to find in German supermarkets, get some. It has a wonderfully nutty flavour, like a good Emmentaler and you'll be supporting local farmers. There are a lot of local cheese sellers all around the Allgäu and we've yet to be disappointed by them.

Entrance to the Gorge || Olympus 13 mm, f/8, 2", ISO 200

The length of exposure under these conditions is purely a matter of taste. Some people don't care for long exposures at all, which is fair enough. I dislike long exposures of the sky with stretched out clouds. But I do like a wispy waterfall image. Depending on the speed of the water, generally anything from 1/5" up to about 5" should cover most eventualities. Most cameras would struggle with exposures like this hand held, but the Olympus have industry-leading IBIS - In Body Image Stabilisation, meaning that I can shoot around 2" and still come away with a sharp image, depending on the focal length of course.

Dual Flows || Olympus 12 mm, f/7.1, 1/2", ISO 200

Shooting in a gorge is usually from a narrow pathway and most people wouldn't take kindly to getting stuck behind someone setting up an unwieldy tripod, so generally you'll need to take most of your shots hand-held in relatively dark conditions.

Coffee on Tap || Olympus 100 mm, f/9, 1/2", ISO 200

Sometimes it isn't about getting the bigger picture, but about finding a detail that captures the mood of the place. This short drop in the water gave a nice little curve and helped emphasise the coffee colour in the water caused by all the recent rain that we've been having. The photos are all about balance and flow - images that aren't weighted down on one side or the other - which would be the result of a clean rule of thirds composition.

Gorge Bridge || Olympus 34 mm, f/6.3, 1", ISO 200

Deep Water || Olympus 24 mm, f/7.1, 1/2", ISO 200

Once we were out of the gorge there was time to look around a little more. The forest floor is really greening up right now, ferns are unfurling (I would have shot some as this is a favourite motif of mine, but I couldn't find any where I would have been able to get good separation between the foreground and background.

Separation was easier on these two members of the broader thistle family with its white seeds against the greenery in the background and isolated completely from the background with the macro lens.

Thistle Thingy I  || Olympus 92 mm, f/4, 1/30", ISO 200

Thistle Thingy II  || Olympus 60 mm, f/6.3, 1/200", ISO 200

Twenty-Four Hours in the Mountains

New moon is upon us once more and I was itching to get out and test not only my E-M1 Mk III that I bought after the but also Move Shoot Move star tracker that would let me break the 25 s exposure limit that I was experiencing with my present set up.

Mittenwald and the Karwendel || 6-shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/5.6, 1/500 s, ISO 200 

It's been a while since I was this keyed up for a trip of any sort and by Friday evening I must have had packed and unpacked my gear around 4 times already. Saturday morning and my rucksack was feeling suspiciously light. Huh? Oh yes, the all important camera gear bag. Phew.

It had been a couple of weeks since we'd had a leg-stretch and so Sharon and I set off for Garmisch after a comfortable breakfast on Saturday morning to hike up to the Hausberg. It had been raining on and off for the previous few days in Kaltenberg, but in the mountains it had been snowing. In the first light of sun, the tops were shining pristine and I was really excited about the night to come and the images we would hopefully be able to make. After last year's successes in the Allgäu I have absolutely fallen in love with taking photos in the mountains in early summer as the sun goes down. The snow fields radiate in the late evening light both before and after the sun goes down and I was trigger happy after a few weeks out of the field.

Wetterstein || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/640 s, ISO 200 

The hike up the Hausberg afforded us occasional glimpses of the surrounding snow peaks but no real photo opportunities beyond the occasional spring flowers and a friendly squorrel. The saving grace of the tour was Weißbier and Wurst at the kiosk at the Bayernhaus. It's been too long! 

Alpspitz through the Trees || Olympus 57 mm, f/8, 1/500 s, ISO 200

Forest Foliage || Olympus 100 mm, f/8, 1/640 s, ISO 200

Friendly Squorrel || Olympus 100 mm, f/5.6, 1/160 s, ISO 200

We were at the Mittenwald car park 10 min after Matthias arrived - not bad considering the different journeys we'd had. Sharon then returned home complete with my woolly hat and thermos flask of hot tea (entirely my fault) whilst Matthias and I headed up the Kranzberg via the delightfully situated Korbinian Hütte. Although my shoulders were aching like heck at this point due to all the photographic gear and warm clothing I was carrying in my ancient Deuter rucksack, our spirits were still high at this stage as the clear skies looked set to last.

Korbinian Hütte and Karwendel Spitze  || Olympus 20 mm, f/5.6, 1/800 s, ISO 200

Unfortunately this wasn't the case and we arrived at the summit only to find clouds rolling in from the west. Although this might be fun for the sunset, it was not what we were looking for for the night. We used the time to set up the tripods and snap a few evening shots as well as taking a blue hour panorama of Mittenwald and the Karwendel that would later serve as foreground for the starry landscapes. We waited for the lights in the town to come out for this; a darkened-down shot of a light-less town would not look right and if we left it too late then the difference between the bright lights and the dark mountains would have been too much, plus the exposure would take several minutes at low ISO, time that we'd rather invest in the sky. The combination of sky and ground has to look natural for the photo to work.

Blue-Hour over Mittenwald || 6-shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/8, 2 s, ISO 200

Now it was just a question of waiting for the clouds to go and the stars to come out. Olympus cameras have a built-in intervalometer and can automatically generate time-lapse videos from the shots. Here's my offering from the evening's shenanigans. I'd hoped to catch one of the Milky Way rising over the mountains as well, but failed in that undertaking. 

Video ©️ Mike Page and Rhage Designs

There were plenty of vistas to occupy us while we waited; the Kranzberg boasts a 360° view of the Karwendel and Wetterstein mountains and we must have been able to see at least 50 or more summits of the surrounding mountains. We left the tripods where they were; they were important markers for taking the later shots, and one was recording a time lapse. There was enough light left not to need them with the Olympus cameras anyway. What they lack in noise levels when you jack the ISO up they make up for in spades with out-of-this-world image stabilisation.

Solitary Pine || Olympus 86 mm, f/5.6, 1/200 s, ISO 200

Skeletal Birch || Olympus 80 mm, f/5.6, 1/6 s, ISO 200

Kranzberg Gipfelhaus || Olympus 15 mm, f/5.6, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

Austrian Karwendel || Olympus 50 mm, f/5.6, 1/250 s, ISO 200

Wettersteinspitze || Olympus 20 mm, f/5.6, 1/100 s, ISO 200

Sunset Silhouette || Olympus 100 mm, f/5.6, 1/400 s, ISO 400 

Unfortunately the clouds were teasingly reluctant. Although we could see a clear horizon to the west where the prevailing wind was coming from, the more it blew the more clouds seemed to appear. And Mittenwald is bright at night. Around midnight we began to see more and more stars appearing overhead, but the wind was increasing, the temperature decreasing and there were still bands of cloud over Munich, Mittenwald and Innsbruck that were robbing us of the darkness that you need for really good pictures of the Milky Way. I'd had high hopes of some cool blue-hour photos of the first stars over the Karwendel mountain range. They didn't manifest either.

Best of a Poor Sky || 2x6-Shot panorama, Olympus 8 mm, f/8/2.8, 1/640/25 s, ISO 200/3200

In the end I gave up around 12:30, giving it up as a bad job and retreating to the log cabin on top of the Kranzberg to shiver the night away on a hard wooden bench. Matthias stuck it out in the wind-shadow of the cabin and actually got a half-way decent shot of the arch of the Milky Way over the mountains during a 10 minute interval in the clouds, the composition that I'd been after. But even then, the galactic core wasn't popping the way it can sometimes and so I didn't berate myself for not having stuck it out. I was missing a vital bit of kit for getting a solid panorama anyway and I just wasn't feeling it after my hike during the day as well.

My sleep was interrupted around 4:00 am by a couple of revellers from the valley, who for some bizarre reason decided that the top of the Kranzberg was the ideal place to smoke some whacky baccy and sing badly to German rap blaring out of a ghetto blaster. They blinded Matthias' acquired night vision with a blast from their torch and generally annoyed us for 15-30 min before deciding that shorts and a hoody were insufficient protection from the elements and buggered off whence they had come. Good riddance.

We were up at 5:00 to catch a glimpse of first light. Of course all the interesting clouds had gone by this stage and all we were left with was that typical narrow but intense band of colour low on the horizon as the sun made its welcome face known.

Mountain Dawn || 3-Shot HDR Olympus 8 mm, f/5.6, 1/10 s, ISO 200

Pretty in Pink || Olympus 18 mm, f/5.6, 1/15 s, ISO 200

Matthias had one surprise composition left before we headed down to the car and home, an alpine meadow complete with wooden hay barn in front of the Wettersteinspitze. Another tricky exposure that I've had to exposure blend to make the barn visible against the bright snowy mountain.

Alm Landscape Underneath the Wetterstein || Exposure Blend Olympus 18 mm, f/8, 1/50 s, ISO 200

90 minutes later, after having been standing in the same clothes for 24 h we were back home in blazing sunshine. 

So was it worth it given the disappointing astro' conditions? Every trip like this I learn something. I don't always come away with the shots that I wanted. Sometimes (often) I come away with bonus images that I hadn't expected or even contemplated. So yes, I'm a better - or at least more experienced - photographer than I was this time last week and next time I'll be in a better position to get that shot.

Move Shoot Move and Olympus E-M1 Mk III

Milky Way season is upon us and so last weekend I headed out to the hills with fellow photographer Matthias Tannert to try to grab some astro shots in the mountains above Mittenwald, Bavaria. I had some new equipment that I was keen to put through its paces and an ambitious photograph that I was keen to pull off: a panorama of the whole visible Milky Way in the night sky.

The best I could make of it. My first Milky Way panorama

The trip was a mixed success, I got some cracking shots of the evening and early morning on the Kranzberg, but unfortunately the astro session was not as successful. There was a lot more cloud around as well as a lot more wind than was forecast and it was bitingly cold, leading me to give up my attempts at photography not long after midnight and seek shelter in the summit refuge.

I'll make the presentable shots the subject of another post, this one is going to be all about the technology, so if you're interested in the Move Shoot Move star tracker or astrophotography using the Olympus E-M1 Mk III, stick around. If not, I suggest you check back later in the week to see the other shots.

Setting up the MSM - Preparation

I spent a lot of time preparing for the trip last week, trying to get as much information as I could about setting up the MSM and establishing the best settings for the camera. Fortunately a lot of this information can be found in the same place as the American photographer Alex McGregor has an excellent YouTube channel (and website) called Chasing Luminance. 

One of the videos deals with calibrating the laser to make sure it's pointing straight. It's just as well I did this as my first attempts over a distance of about 2.5 m gave me a spread of around 10 cm top to bottom and left to right as I span the laser in its dedicated holder. Part of the problem is that there seems to be quite a bit of play room at the back of the laser and each time I tightened the locking screw the sighting seemed to shift a little. I've tried to partially overcome this by lining the back end of the laser holder with some thin card and there's now significantly less wiggle-room.

I ended up shrinking my target of error from about 10 cm to around 2.5 cm (4" to 1" if you haven't joined the 21st century yet 😉). There was a recent post in the MSM Facebook group from Andrew Larkin detailing how important getting the accuracy was in terms of length of exposure, varying from about a minute if you're 10° out up to 4 minutes at 2.5° or even 20 minutes at 0.5°, so setting up the laser is important. My university-aged kids assure me that a 10 cm spread over 2.5 m is approximately 2.5° - so we're already in a reasonably good place. A 2.5 cm spread is already 0.6°. Actually both of those should be half that since 10 cm and 2.5 cm were the diameter of the error field rather than the radius. So even better.

Setting up the MSM - In the Field

I have a relatively sturdy Tiltall carbon fibre tripod that I set up relatively low on the mountainside so that I could operate the camera whilst seated on the ground. I paid attention to making sure that the top of the tripod was horizontal before attaching my geared head. The MSM was attached to this and the camera to the MSM via the original Tiltall ball-head. 

I would really recommend doing a dry run at home to make sure all the knobs and levers are in the right positions before you head out to the field. Once you've established your spot, set up early if you can. If you take foreground images in the blue hour like we did, you're not going to be able to get too many compositions from just the one tripod spot, so be warned.

Setting up the MSM with my Olympus

If you're going to shoot panoramas, slipping a V- or Z-plate between the MSM and the top ball-head will add a ton of flexibility, in fact mine's in the post. This will mean that I can put the assembly on the ball-head and elevate the geared-head to the top layer for better panorama assembly. If I'd assembled it with the geared head on top, the gears would not be in a position to allow horizontal and vertical adjustment.

Sighting on Polaris was gratifyingly easy. I'd already set the elevation to about 47.5° (approx. 1° per ° of latitude) and pointed it north, I wanted to have that laser on for the shortest possible time. Then it was a case of twiddling the geared head so that the tracker was pointing absolutely dead on. The laser is really very visible to the naked eye.

Waiting for night to fall and the clouds to bugger off

Once it got dark and the worst of the cloud had gone I managed to fire off a couple of test shots simply to test trailing. My standard astro exposure with the Olympus using my Panasonic Leica f/2.8 8-18 mm is 25 s, f/2.8 ISO 6400, 8 mm (that's 16 mm to you full-frame types). I tried my first test-shot for 60 s using ISO 3200. 

8 mm (m43), 60 s,  ISO 3200 

Then I dropped to ISO 1600 and went up to 120 s.

8 mm (m43), 120 s,  ISO 1600

And lastly ISO 800 and 240 s.

8 mm (m43), 240 s,  ISO 800

It was quite windy, so there may have been a little blur due to tripod, but I find these images to have a perfectly acceptable level of star trailing. I have not stacked the images or performed any noise reduction on these images, they are single images processed in ON1 Photo Raw 2021 where I have simply tweaked the contrast up 13 points after applying the lens profile. The crops are of the area around Antares (?) top left - approximately 1/3 of the full screen in each dimension.

Olympus E-M1 Mk III

I want to start by pointing out that the images presented here are for technical purposes only. I have not done any significant editing and they're not images I'd want to be judged by. I started my astrophotography path in 2020 using my E-M1 Mk II. This time I was eager to take the Mk III for a test drive with all its astrophotography bells and whistles.

Starry Sky AF

First up is the star focus function on the Mk III. This is a game-changer for me as my manual focus can be a bit hit and miss, even with focus magnification at max. My eyesight is no longer 20/20 and getting those fuzzy little balls of fire as tight as possible with atmospheric movement and camera movement due to fiddling with the focus ring was always a trial of patience. And don't even talk to me about accidentally hitting the ring in the dark when you move the camera. All those frustrations are a thing of the past. Select accuracy (menu A4) and then Starry Sky AF under the focus options and hit the AEL/AEF button on the back of the camera. Works!

HHHR

The E-M1 Mk III has a magic high-res mode that can generate a 50 (or even 80) MP image using a 20 MP sensor. You can choose to do this hand held (HHHR) or in tripod mode. The former samples 16 images which it interpolates in camera, the latter 8 images. According to McGregor, it should be possible to use the HHHR mode to shoot stars and the THR mode to shoot foregrounds (video 1 and 2). There are two theoretical advantages to shooting in high res mode, you get a bigger image (duh!) and the camera performs about 2 stops of ISO-related noise reduction when it interpolates the images. But it does require a tracker.

There are some limits, maximum photo length is 60 s (giving a 16 minute exposure + processing time) and the maximum ISO in THR is 1600.

Tracked HHR for the Stars

This is my attempt at track in HHHR. Something has gone wrong here. Although Antares only appears once, the smaller stars all appear as dotted tracks. Alex, if you happen to read this, what did I do wrong here? You can still see the beginning of the Milky Way bottom left over the mountains, but this isn't an image that I can use. Maybe there's too much ground in the picture for the Olympus to process the stars properly, but the bigger stars have no trails.

MSM-Tracked, HHHR image 8 mm (m43) 60 s, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 50 MP 

Stationary HHHR for the foreground

I turned the tracker off and switched into THR, reduced the ISO and tried a couple of foreground shots. This works really well, but has left me with some unsightly pixel artefacts. Cloning them out will be straightforward, but they're there. The image quality is perfectly acceptable for the foreground image though. I know it doesn't look too hot in the blown-up parts of the image, but a lot of that can be rescued, if by nothing else than reducing the resolution of the image to a useable level.

Untracked, THR image 8 mm (m43) 60 s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50 MP 

Untracked, THR image 8 mm (m43) 20 s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50 MP

Lessons Learned

• Don't go on a 5 h hike with the missus on a day you plan to do astrophotography - it saps necessary energy
• The MSM is a game changer for Milky Way photography. Although I didn't show any shots without it here, anything that lets me reduce ISO and achieve the low noise levels I have here is a great advantage.
• I need a wedge for the MSM
• Starry Sky AF is a huge win for astro with the Olympus
• High res mode needs further investigation in both hand-held and tripod modes

Thanks for dropping by.