Shooting the Olympus E-1MX at Cars & Coffee

by Joe Farace | Oct 14, 2021

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

You can read my in-depth review of the Olympus E-1MX on the Shutterbug website that features some of images of cars and motorcycles that I shot while I was in Florida (disclosure) courtesy of Olympus. I wrote about my first impressions of Oly’s ED 17mm f/1.2 PRO lens on my how-to photography blog. But now it can be told: Because of an NDA, I wasn’t able to say that the image of the O’Brien Park gazebo that appears on that post was made with the E-1MX WITH an exposure of 4 sec at f/8 and ISO 200—handheld. Yes, handheld at four seconds.

So I took an E-M1X with ED 17mm f/1.2 PRO lens to Cars and Coffee and…where are all the cars? This post could have been subtitled “Suppose they had a Cars & Coffee and Nobody Came,” but what the show lacked in quantity it made up by the enthusiasm from mostly young people who brought mostly Japanese cars. Interestingly most of the cars continue a trend that you see everyday on the road: Many of the cars where black, while or some shade of grey.

One of the upsides of shooting at sparsely attended shows is that hardly anybody walks in front of you when you’re shooting a car. So there’s always a silver lining. And since I love Mitsubishi Evo’s and Nissan Skylines, including a mostly stock 25-year old model that was painted my favorite shade of grey, I shot the images you see below.

How I Made these Photos: I shot this Mitsubishi Evo (is it pink?) with the E-M1X’s flippy screen flipped out so I could get this low angle. Lens was Oly’s ED 17mm f/1.2 PRO which will let you focus as close as 7.87-inches. Photograph was captured with a Program mode exposure of 1/800 sec at f/4 and ISP 320.

I photographed this Nissan Skyline that one of three Skylines at the show with the E-M1X’s flippy screen flipped out too. Lens was the ED 17mm f/1.2 PRO with a Program mode exposure of 1/1000 sec at f/5 and ISP 320. Boy, Oly’s Program is really weighted toward high shutter speeds, which is funny considering how amazingly capable their IBIS is.