Controlling the Camera in Studio

This subject has really been covered to death already on the site, but basically Studio, if used for no other reason, has the ability to control the camera on your laptop. You can have live view and total control of the camera right on your screen. You can even setup time-lapse photography shots, as you desire. The only thing that you cannot control is manually focusing the camera. Studio 2.X is really growing into a very good raw converter. The file management system is quite good, to quickly sort your shots. In fact, Olympus has improved this functionality quite a bit. The Raw converter is also quite powerful, but still a bit slow. I also do not like that it still cannot save your changes in the EXIF data so that it would remember what you have done. Also with 16 bit files, I believe that it again drops the EXIF info, which until those 2 issues are fixed, Studio will not be my primary raw developer. However, if those features are not important to you, you will most likely be quite impressed with Studio as your primary raw converter. For more information please see Article 1 and Article 2 about this feature.

Speaking of raw converters, many photographers on the market use either Photoshop CS3 or Lightroom to convert their raw files. Adobe was very quick to release an update for the E-3 and the results are very pleasing in my opinion. I for many years was not a fan of the raw conversion of Adobe Camera Raw (The engine that powers the raw converters) but Adobe has done a lot of work this last year to make a very powerful raw converter. In fact Lightroom, is now powering and organizing my 500 GB of images from the last couple of years.

Flash System

The E-3 has introduced a built-in flash, it sits quite high on the camera, but is not designed to be a full strobe. It can be used as a small catch light, but do not expect it to replace the FL-50, or the FL-36. In fact if you have that misinterpretation you will be quite disappointed. Its primary purpose is to control the wireless flash system. I have recently picked up a FL-50R and have been very pleased with this setup. The built in flash synchronizes the flash information to the camera to give valuable information about shutter speed, ISO and F-stops. It also provides TTL, auto, manual settings. Finally, the built in flash can even be set to slave and control, from the back of the flash, the settings to use off the camera. All in all this is a very good setup, and I will share more of my findings about that later.

About a year ago, I started asking for some type of wireless flash system, after I had spent a lot of time, energy and money attempting to get Quantum's system to work correctly. However, I finally gave up on that endeavor. With the wireless flash system of the E-3 we now have a reliable wireless flash system that at this point I am quite happy to use.

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