I’ll soon be making a trip which involves a fair amount of trekking, some of which will be in mountain areas. But as well as trekking, I’ll be shooting regular travel photography and need to be confident in the quality of the photos. Most of the images will be used on the internet, but some will be printed at up to 40 inches on the long edge.

What I’m struggling with, is deciding which camera to use.

I could take the Fuji XT5 but my recent concerns over diffraction make me nervous. At least without doing more field testing. The zoom lenses that I have for the Fuji are quite bulky, as are the filters. I do have a great range of prime lenses that I could use, but that would involve a lot of lens swapping, possibly in harsh environments.

My original plan was to take the Panasonic G9 but problems with that, especially when using filters would risk a lot of shots. And whilst the lenses are small, the G9 body is bulky and larger than the XT5.

This leaves me with the new Olympus EM5 that I recently purchased. This is a much smaller body than the G9 and would be ideal for trekking. Also, the lenses I have are good quality and small, as are the filters. I’m impressed by this camera other than its high-resolution mode. Compared to the high-resolution mode of the Panasonic G9, it’s quite second rate.

Whilst I’m currently favouring taking the Olympus EM5, I need to do more testing to give me confidence. I also want to experiment with the RAW files to check I can make a quality 40-inch print. The native image size from a single frame is 5,184 x 3,888 pixels. I’ll need to enlarge this to 12,000 x 9,000 pixels to produce a 40 x 30-inch print at 300dpi. Of course, this would be irrelevant if I could improve the performance of the high-resolution mode.

I’m sure that a print of this size won’t be a problem. I just find myself with a nagging doubt about all my equipment after my spate of recent problems.

Does anyone else have similar issues?

Putting all of this to one side, here are a couple more images that I shot recently using the EM5 Mark III. This first one is a stitch panorama created from three frames and then cropped.

I shot this on Derwent Edge in the Peak District, and it shows the heather at what was probably it’s best this year. I was using the EM5 handheld with the Leica 12-60 lens at 60mm. The exposure was 1/200 second at f/8.0 and ISO200.

This second shot was taken near to the one above. In fact, this is the pile of rocks that you can see on the left of the frame.

This is another 3-image stitch, taken with the same equipment but at 40mm. The three frames are also shot handheld at 1/160 second, f/8.0 and ISO200.

In other news, DxO has released the Nik Collection 6.3. If you would like to see what’s new, you will find my review video on YouTube.

I hope you like the images and have a great weekend.