This article shares a selection of photographs that I captured handheld before sunrise at LaSalle Park in Burlington, Ontario. I must admit that it felt a bit odd to head off during the wee hours of an early November morning to capture some landscape images without a tripod.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

Having some prior experience with the IBIS performance of my Olympus OM-D E-M1X, I was very confident that I would get some useable images. Even when shooting multiple second exposures handheld. My only real concern was if the weather conditions would remain calm.

I found that the dual grip design of the E-M1X made it feel very comfortable and natural to capture longer exposure handheld photographs using a portrait orientation.

My handheld shutter speeds ranged from 1 to 4 seconds for the photographs featured in this article. It is important to note that I wasn’t propped up against a tree, or a railing or a fence. These were all free standing shutter speeds.

Shooting with slow shutter speeds allowed me to use base ISO-200 for all of these photographs captured handheld before sunrise. Hmm… every time I type “handheld before sunrise” it feels a bit incredulous.

As I was composing these handheld low light images, I couldn’t help but harken back to my full frame DSLR camera days. Without a tripod, most of these images would have been impossible for me to capture successfully at ISO-200. Technology has certainly advanced, giving photographers a lot more handheld flexibility. This really suits my personal shooting style as I hate using tripods.

I arranged to meet a photographer friend of mine at LaSalle Park. He arrived when it was still “dark o’clock”. We wandered around the pier area for a while, capturing images along the way.

As you can see in the photograph above, I was able to include my friend in one of my handheld compositions. This image was captured using a shutter speed of 1 second with an equivalent field-of-view of 80mm.

In the past, I had captured a few low light landscape images with my E-M1X using slow handheld shutter speeds. This was the first time that I  really tried to put my camera’s IBIS capability to the test with this type of subject matter.

Suffice to say that I was completely satisfied with how my Olympus OM-D E-M1X performed. Unless I do some Live Composite imagery, use the Tripod Hi Res mode, or do some extremely long exposures (e.g. 8 seconds or longer) with my E-M1X, I can’t see why I’d ever need to bring a tripod with me.

During the eight months that I’ve owned my Olympus OM-D E-M1X and selection of M.Zuiko lenses, my M4/3 kit has kept on redefining what is possible. This produces an incredible feeling of creative freedom every time I’m out with my Olympus camera gear.

Technical Note:
Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. Photographs are presented as 100% captures without any cropping.

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