Hi Fons.

I wonder what difficulty the camera had with this picture, because the colours seems very unreal. The red/ purple is not how it should be. But I am also experiencing some difficulty with all the white-scales of the E300. Hard to catch the right colours.

Cause of the lower exposure time there is some movement and in result imm. loss of depht of field (scherpte diepte).
Specially when butterflies sit with their wings 45 degrees folded a large aperture number is necesary.

Greetings Fillip

Fillip,

I am not sure if the exposure time has anything to do with the colors. The problem is that red happens to be on the very left of the RGB histogram and, therefore, is the most difficult color to reproduce when either the light is too bright or the dynamic range of the scenery is too wide. You need basically to either heavily post-process it (lower the red highlights and then pump color a bit up) or have a higher end camera to begin with. From my observation both Kodak (on E-300) and Sony (in C series) sensors have this same problem. When the lights get clipped the reds come out with washed, almost bleached out tones. Few weeks ago I compared my C-8080 against Canon 350D and the results were more than obvious. With exactly the same auto settings on both cameras I tried to take a macro shot of a brightly lit red flower. As expected, Olympus produced somewhat unnatural bleached out reds, while Canon?s results were more natural and with realistically pleasing colors and shades. In fact I would say it was almost as exact as I saw it. I have not tried Canon?s CMOS on higher ISO?s, but I take it the results would be as good as in auto (especially with the higher models).

This comment is not to criticize or downgrade any of the Olympus enthusiasts and their equipment, but only as observation that would, hopefully, help us all to learn and become better at what we like to do, i.e. taking good pictures.

- Sergey

Fillip ter Haar wrote:
> Hi Fons.
>
> I wonder what difficulty the camera had with this picture, because the colours seems very
> unreal. The red/ purple is not how it should be. But I am also experiencing some difficulty
> with all the white-scales of the E300. Hard to catch the right colours.
>
> Cause of the lower exposure time there is some movement and in result imm. loss of depht of
> field (scherpte diepte).
> Specially when butterflies sit with their wings 45 degrees folded a large aperture number
> is necesary.
>
> Greetings Fillip
>

Thanks Sergey :

I made several pictures from this butterfly all with the same out come.
It is like you described the red colors are very difficult to handle for the E-300.
Your explanation is excellent thanks for that.
I was making a comment on what Fillip wrote but all is being said already by you...;-)

Best regards,

I must say... with or withou realistic red... it is still fantastic!



Fons van Swaal wrote:
> Thanks Sergey :
>
> I made several pictures from this butterfly all with the same out come.
> It is like you described the red colors are very difficult to handle for the E-300.
> Your explanation is excellent thanks for that.
> I was making a comment on what Fillip wrote but all is being said already by you...;-)
>
> Best regards,
>

Alice Lemos wrote:
> I must say... with or withou realistic red... it is still fantastic!


Thanks you very much for the comment Alice.
I see you are going thru my old pictures, I am honoured ....

Regards,