15 Pictures of the Alps taken with the OM-D E-M5

Two weeks ago, we went to the Gran Paradiso National Park here in Italy and embarked on a wonderful 7 hour walk up into the mountains. It was just us, and the silence of nature surrounding us like a warm blanket. Of course, we brought our cameras along for the ride, and took a lot of pictures. I used my Olympus OM-D E-M5 with the M.Zuiko 12mm f/2 the entire time, while Heather had the Sony Nex-3N by her side (read the full review here).

The 12mm (24mm equivalent on 45mm format) is a great lens and I use it all the time, though sometimes for this kind of landscape photography, it is not quite wide enough. A 21mm or 17mm equivalent would have been more pleasant for some shots I took. Moreover, I always used to use my D700 in combination with the Nikkor 17-35mm, so sometimes I miss an extreme wide angle lens on my OM-D. I guess I’m going to have to consider the 9-18mm… or the Lumix 7-14mm…. (No G.A.S.!! Stay away from me!)

I shot in RAW, used the bracketing mode several times to capture 5 shots at different exposures by 1ev step, and then merged them into HDR with Photoshop. All post-processing has been done with Lightroom 5 as well as Color Efex Pro 4 for some shots. I’m always surprised by how much dynamic range the MFT RAW files hide. The only drawback is that sometimes there is more purple fringing than we might like, especially on the tree branches. But it’s nothing you can’t correct quickly with Lightroom.