My experience is that the E-M5 will often get exposure pretty close. Closer than any camera I have used other than the Fuji X10. But it also almost always seems to have a lot of ton of headroom to pull back overexposure. So I usually try to over expose a tad as recovered highlights look a lot better than recovered shadows.

Have you adjusted "Exposure Shift" from Custom menu K, or do you adjust to +0.7 manually when you shoot?

I usually find my exposures to be pretty accurate in ESP, but I've found ETTR to work well in tricky situations.

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GX1 - OM-D E-M5 - Lumix G 7-14 | 12-35 | 20 | 35-100 - Samyang 7.5 - 500px

I just googled what ETTR was and I don't get why you'd use it. If you're worried about noise in the shadows, wouldn't you prefer a lower ISO with a normal exposure to a higher one with an exposure that will need to be 'pulled' later? In overcast conditions, I'm usually much more worried about my GF1 blowing out the sky than noise or lack of detail in the shadows.

No, I leave the exp comp set to give me reminder on the screen to be careful with exposure. I find this to be safe enough on the E- M5 with it's greater headroom, but the E-PM1 has to watched more closely. I shoot this way in the knowledge that I will be making adjustments to the raw file in PP to make the end product look right.

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Nic
E-M5, GH1
Flickr Photostream
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I guess there's no 100% solution, but I can't say I've encountered the situation you mention more than once or twice.

Definitely a good test to try, thanks for the idea. Funny thing is that I used to use the blinkies religiously on the E-P2 because the histogram wasn't very good. But it does make sense to get a calibration. In theory, setting the JPEGs to something plain and flat should make the whole thing more accurate, but in practice I'd rather the image in the camera be close to what I expect to see on the screen, even at the cost of less accurate metering.

No you're right - the first thing to do is to drop the ISO. But even after that, there's a substantial difference between exposing to the right and not.

I won't say blown highlights are a non-issue on the E-M5, but on the whole it does a pretty good job, and with Lightroom you can actually recover a decent amount.

DH

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E-M5 | E-PM2 | mZD 12-50 | ZD 12-60 | P 14-42 X | mZD 40-150 R | PL 25 | mZD 45

There are a lot of examples of ETTR which pull the exposure of an over-exposed, higher ISO image to demonstrate the theory, but that isn't how ETTR should be used in practice. The general theory is to over-expose where you have headroom available that won't blow colour data that you want to keep and don't need to raise ISO to do it. Pulling an over-exposed image back to an average exposure level should result in slightly less noise than a correctly exposed image, and also less noise than an under-exposed image that has been pushed (assuming that all were shot at the same ISO). ETTR is not about choosing a higher ISO than you absolutely need to.

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Nic
E-M5, GH1
Flickr Photostream
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Though I have seen one recommendation (can't remember where) that suggested that the best way to expose to the right if you were going to do it, was to increase your ISO setting by the amount you were going to increase the exposure while maintaining the same shutter speed and aperture on the basis that this gave better results.

Example:

You're shooting at ISO 200, the recommended exposure is 1/200 @ F/4 and you have room to overexpose by 1 stop, either by going to 1/100 or to F/2.8

What this view was saying was that you should go to ISO 400 instead and keep the 1/200 @ F/4 rather than staying at ISO 200 and reducing your shutter speed or opening the aperture.

I haven't tried it and I don't know whether it works any better than staying at the same ISO and changing aperture or shutter speed.

In my experience I find that I usually tend not to have the leeway to expose to the right, the drawback of living in a location with way too much light if you're outdoors during the day. And that's why I've discovered that simply relying on the histogram doesn't work particularly well for me. Before I got the E-M5, my E-P3 would rarely indicate that I didn't have clipping somewhere if I was shooting outside. If I relied on the histogram and reduced the exposure to reduce or eliminate the clipping, I ended up underexposing the things I wanted to capture, basically because most of what was clipping was the sky, and often large parts of it. Then I'd end up having to correct the underexposure in processing and got the blown skies back so I gained nothing except noise in shadow areas that wouldn't have been as noisy had I simply ignored the clipping in the sky.

That's why I much prefer to use the highlights and shadow indication and decide what I'm going to do on the basis of just what is clipping rather than relying on the histogram.

My assumption was that ideally you wouldn't adjust ISO upwards since it is basically adding noise for the sake of reducing noise. However, sensor characteristics may be that going from ISO 200 to ISO 400 results in very little increase in noise, whereas at some point the sensor may fall off a cliff, maybe going from ISO 800 to ISO 1600 for example. I guess there must be some benefit to this since both Fuji and Canon use ISO manipulation to provide enhanced DR modes. I don't know if you can simulate this manually.

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Nic
E-M5, GH1
Flickr Photostream
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