After my Olympus E-M1 died (PESO entry of 27 Dec 20), I was left with my second hand E-M5 Mk II backup camera. (It had been purchased as a second camera to do a wedding with; 12-40 lens on one camera, 40-150 on the other. Two bodies, no waiting. I did something similar when I went on a helicopter flight over Sydney; one to take the ground shots, one to take the aerial shots since we could take only one camera.) Make no mistake, I like the E-M5 II. And because the Mk II was released a year and a half after the E-M1 Mk I (February 2015 vs September 2013), they shared the same TruePic VII image processor. That doesn't mean that they were feature-identical - the E-M1 was a top tier camera, an E-M5 the second tier - but they were in the same ballpark in terms of a lot of important metrics.

Still, by the end of 2022 I was feeling a bit behind the curve. Coming up to 8 years behind the curve, to be precise. New features were continually being added, which I did not have. (Especially with regard to video which I want to do more with.) The OM-1 Mk I was out by then. I liked everything about it but the price, considering that it was a want rather than a need. But then the OM-5 came out. While I did have a desire to return to the top tier, the OM-5 would still almost feel like I had done so with 8 additional years of development behind it.

One feature of the OM-5 that I could see the potential of was virtual neutral density (ND), also known as Live ND. That is, virtual filters to reduce the amount of light on the sensor without changing its colour or other qualities, just like using a physical neutral density filter fitted to the front of the lens.

So why not just use regular ND filters? Because I can turn the virtual one on or off by just flipping a menu item, without needing to physically attach something to the front of the lens. I can change the level of the density in the same way.

"But can't you do that with a variable ND filter?", I hear you ask.

Kind of. But I always found variable ND filters a pain to work with on the E-M1. The electronic viewfinder would always tell you what it thought you should be seeing rather than what the camera really was seeing. (Unlike a DSLR, where what you see is what you get.) It made getting the exposure that you were aiming for tedious at best. The OM-5's virtual ND, though, will show you an approximation of what you're getting. The only real downside is that you're limited to ND16 (4 stops of light) on the O-M5 versus ND64 (6 stops) on the OM-1.

I've used it once or twice before this, but given that I live a shortish drive from the sea and its many beaches, there are a lot of opportunities to use the ND for water flow in particular.

On this occasion I was standing on the headland above Austinmer Beach with the 40-150 up front, looking down on the waves breaking over some rocks at the edge of the beach. I'd be lying if I said that the waves were particularly powerful, which probably worked to my advantage if I'm being honest. Sunrise was 10 minutes earlier, but the golden light was of course obscured by the cloudbank that seems to be magnetically attached to the horizon. This was one of the shots where I waited for the sun to rise above those clouds so that I would get at least some golden light on the rocks, but had I not told you it was there you'd be hard pressed to see it.