I was teasing Olympus on the podcast that I was one of the first to see the OM-D E-M1, and one of the last to actually get to test it. But I have it now.

I've used the flagship Micro Four Thirds camera for two shoots so far. The first one was an outdoor family portrait assignment and the second was a model shoot in the studio.

For the family portrait, I tried the Four Thirds mount 12-60mm f/2.8-f/4 zoom. I loved this lens when I first started testing Olympus DSLRs, and I've wanted to try it on the Micro Four Thirds cameras.

It worked fairly well. The images looked good, but the focusing was still slower than I like. Plus the lens is much heavier than the native glass designed for the camera. So it's nice to have the option to use these optics from my lens collection, but I don't think that I'll be tapping them on a regular basis. Here's a picture of Joey that I shot with the 12-60mm.

For the second shoot, I used the Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 zoom designed specifically for Micro Four Thirds. It was a joy to use on the E-M1. It focused quickly and yielded beautiful results. Here's a portrait of Kathleen that I captured with this set up.

There's lots more to talk about, of course, but my first impression is that the E-M1 feels like a professional camera when it has native Micro Four Thirds lenses on it. It's nice to have the option of non-native glass - but not for important assignments.

-Derrick