I love watching bison forage for food when the ground is covered with snow. They use their head as a shovel to push the snow away to get to the grass below. This was photographed yesterday during a late April snowfall here in Montana.
It was photographed with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X camera and M.Zuiko 300mm f4 IS Pro lens that Olympus has loaned me for a couple months. It was shot hand-held at 1/160s, f8, at ISO 200. To get the same lens reach using a full-frame camera I’d be using a 600mm f4 lens and there is no way I’d be hand holding that monster of a lens at 1/160th of a second for any amount of time!
One concern I’ve had with MFT is that the camera is only 20MP (my current Sony a7R3 has more than double the megapixels) and I specialize in large prints. The more megapixels, the larger you can print, right? If I can’t get great looking prints out of the Olympus there’d be no reason for me to switch from Sony.
So I did a test with this image. I upsized it to print 5 feet tall using both Topaz Gigapixel AI and ON1. Honestly I couldn’t tell the difference – both programs did great at enlarging the image.
I then printed a small 12”x18” section of the photo on my Epson P800 to see how it would look printed that large. And wow I was impressed. When looking at the print from the proper viewing distance (and even closer) for a 5 foot photo, that small section looked fantastic. I could probably print this image a little bit larger than 5 feet in fact. This Olympus gear is continuing to impress me!
Any Olympus shooters out there print large? If so, what’s the largest you have printed and how were the results?