Sample Image Gallery: Olympus E-PL3 at the US Open

Technical editor Philip Ryan spent some time last week photographing a day’s worth of matches at the US Open using Olympus’s new Pen E-PL3 and a handful of Micro Four Thirds lenses. He shot Federer vs Sela, Monfils vs Ferrero, Fish vs Jaziri, Stephens vs Peer, and also managed to catch Serena Williams as she signed tennis balls for fans after beating Michaelle Krajicek in only 49 minutes.

Despite the lenses Ryan shot with having relatively slow maximum apertures, he was still able to capture a surprising number of solid shots. The extra depth of field actually came in handy considering that the PL3’s continuous AF had a hard time keeping up with the extremely fast pace of professional tennis. For the most part Ryan says that he prefocused whenever possible, or tried to anticipate the moment and figured in the focusing time when pressing the shutter button. To its credit, the PL3 is among the faster focusing ILCs we’ve seen and that certainly helped in capturing some of the images seen here. Click the gallery to the right to see full-res versions and exposure info for all of the images Ryan shot. Note: All of the images are unprocessed/unedited jpg’s.