Road Trip! Only Took M4/3 Gear To Find Out If It Could Meet All Challenges I May Encounter

Sharing the beach; Jacksonville Beach, Florida (click to enlarge)
Olympus E-M1 Mark II, 12-100mm f/4 PRO @ 100mm; 1/1000th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200; cropped to about 1/3 of the image.

NEW! As of January 1st, I've started an Instagram feed. I'll be posting photos daily so please follow at dennisamook. Thank you. 

My wife and I decided to take a road trip to Florida and other destinations south of Virginia for a few reasons.  First and foremost, we wanted to visit family and friends.  Also, we wanted a short break from the dreary winter weather.  Sunshine and a bit more heat sounded like the perfect prescription for those winter doldrums.  Lastly, I wanted to explore some places to which I've never been and photograph in different environments from my usual places.  We left a couple of weeks ago and returned over this past weekend.  One of the decisions I had to make was what gear to take?

As I've written in the recent past, I'm currently conducting an experiment to find out if M4/3 gear can "fully" meet my photographic needs now and in the future.  You can read more about this experiment in this post.  Recently, my needs have changed as I have retired from submitting images to my stock agency and my photography now and in the future will primarily be for myself as well as to share here, on my website and on my newly found social media platform, Instagram.  I no longer need large, high resolution image files.  That is not to say that I would never jump back into full frame digital imaging as there is a certain "WOW" factor in looking at 36mp or 45mp image files at 100%.  But no changes are planned for now. 

For this trip, I decided to only take my Olympus E-M1 Mark II.  No backup camera!  The Fujifilm X-T2 gear stays at home—not even taking it in a backup capacity.  Am I crazy?  No.  I feel the reliability of Olympus cameras is as good as any on the market.  Olympus camera reliability may be better than others, but I don't know.  I have never had a camera, let alone an Olympus camera (both film and digital), fail.  I felt confident in only taking the one camera and it proved itself once again as a reliable workhorse.  No problems at all!   

As far as glass, I took the lens that is almost always on the Mark II, the Olympus 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens.  I cannot say enough about the excellence of this lens' image quality.  Additionally, this lens is about as versatile as one lens can be. It is sharp at all apertures (to almost f/11) and all focal lengths, it focuses extremely close (close enough that I didn't need to take a macro lens) and the image stabilization, coupled with that of the Mark II's, is industry leading.  What is not to love about this lens?

I also took the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens (low light/indoors), the Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO lens and the Panasonic 8-18mm f/2.8-4 lens.  I packed a 72mm polarizing filter as well as 6x and 10x neutral density filters that go with me on road trips.  In order to use those filters on the lenses that have smaller than 72mm filter threads, I took step-up rings.

Along with the above, I packed 3 batteries, two chargers (one aftermarket in case of failure; what good are extra batteries if you can't charge them?), several lens cleaning cloths, a bulb blower, a lens brush, some lens cleaning fluid, my Gitzo carbon fiber travel tripod and a tabletop tripod.  Also, I always carry my X-Rite Colorchecker Passport as you never know when the lighting is really strange or off and you want to later achieve correct white balance during editing.  

Finally, I took plenty of memory cards.  I didn't plan on reformatting any memory cards on this trip as I am conducting another experiment, which I will more completely write about In the next two weeks.  This experiment is to ascertain if I can forego taking a laptop with two small external USB 3.0 hard drives and all of the paraphernalia that goes along with uploading images each night into Lightroom on the laptop as well as conducting a nightly backup routine.  Its all about smaller, lighter, easier, less bulk....  I think you will find my observations interesting. 

In lieu of a laptop, I took my 12.9" iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil into which I loaded my images each evening and, in turn, moved them into Lightroom CC (used to be called Lightroom Mobile and its a free app). Moving them to Lightroom CC (Mobile) caused my images to automatically sync with my desktop computer at home through Adobe's Cloud.  LRCC moves the full resolution RAW images, not a reduced sized version.  The result was, each evening, I ended up with four copies of my images:  both cards from the camera, on my iPad and on my home computer.  I will write about this experience and let you know if I believe it is a viable alternative to taking a laptop as described above. 

All of this gear was packed in two bags: a LowePro Flipside 300 AW II backpack which carried most of the stuff and which remained in my vehicle a well as a "grab and go" bag which I loaded each day according to where I was going and what I was going out to photograph. This "grab and go" bag is a very old olive green Domke F-803 Messenger bag that I bought many years ago to carry my Leica rangefinder gear.  It is small, very lightweight, unobtrusive and carries just enough gear for a day outing.  I find the two bag system works very well for me.

That is about it.  Due to some family misfortune, my wife and I haven't been able to travel for over a year.  We both love to travel and we are really looking forward to getting out of the house more often and back onto the road now that family matters are back to normal.  

This trip was a good start as we drove to the warm, sunny south!

Check back over the next several posts and I will describe how well the Olympus gear fared for a photo walk, street photography, bird photography and landscape photography.  Did M4/3 serve my needs?  Could I live with only M4/3 in the future?  Check back, look at the images I will post and read what my opinions I formed.  I think you will find them interesting.
  
Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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