Last year whilst in beautiful San Antonio, Texas I went on a cave tour with a few buddies. The Natural Bridge Caverns, to be exact. It was my first (I've got pics of my second tour from Chattanooga, Tennessee coming), and of course I wanted better pictures than what my then-crappy iPhone 5 could take. So I brought along my trusty Olympus OMD-EM5 with the Panasonic Lumix 12-35mm/2.8 lens, and the Panasonic GH4 + Panasonic-Leica 42.5mm/1.2 Nocticron lens. Unfortunately, it seems the photos from the GH4/Nocticron have died with one of my hard drives. :( So what you see will be photos from the EM5/12-35mm.

"The Bear Pit."  1/15 second, f/4, ISO 1600 — "The Bear Pit." 1/15 second, f/4, ISO 1600

These photos are not award-winning photos by far; they are merely snapshots. But I wanted to share them for 2 reasons: 1) to show those who have never been on a cavern tour what it looks like, and 2) to show the capabilities of the crazy, world-class 5-axis image stabilization of the "old" EM5. If you look at the EXIF for each photo, you'll see that the shutter speeds were very slow and handheld (1/6-1/15 second) with very high ISO (2000-4000). The photos were still acceptably sharp! Without the EM5's image stabilization (which gains me a good extra 2-4 stops reliably), my ISO and/or my shutter speed would have to be higher, no doubt about it. Image quality is already far from great at this point as I already had to push RAW files (the caverns were very, very dark, almost black in some areas), so it's like comparing poop to worse poop (diarrhea?) if there was no 5-axis image stabilization. As a bonus, the weathersealing of the EM5 + 12-35mm/2.8 made no worries for me in the wet (some areas dripping) and humid environment underground. Here are the rest of the photos:

And here is a before/after of tweaking one of the above pictures, only to show a little more that can be squeezed out of the raw file (as opposed to shooting straight jpegs):

No results found