I took my recently-IR-converted OM-D E-M5 out for a spin last weekend during a visit to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch State Park. The sky was fantastic and the trees and flowers made for some really dramatic infra-red images.
The camera worked very nicely – focusing via the electronic viewfinder is no problem at all (on the Nikon I used to have to use Live View to get sharp focus) and the exposures looked great without too much mucking around in manual mode. I did, however, hit one major snag in the shape of a huge hotspot in the middle of most of the images. This wasn’t something I ever saw with the Nikon 14-24mm lens but, despite reviews suggesting otherwise, it was a huge problem with my Olympus 12-100mm. In the end, most of the images were useless since I was shooting at small apertures to maximize depth of field and, apparently, that also maximizes the intensity of the hotspot.
With this image, I managed to fix the problem in Lightroom even though it was taken at f/14. I’ll have to do some more experimentation to see what parameters affect the hotspot and how I can minimize or completely avoid it in future.
For the technically inclined...