EOS M Gets Ready to Travel

My EOS M body and EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens will be taking a trip to Ireland (without me) in a few weeks. It took a three week trip to Portugal with my daughter in January but didn't see a lot of use.

For the Portugal trip, I have set it up for saving JPG files and auto ISO. My daughter used the green box mode so absolutely everything except focal length was chosen by the camera. I noticed, looking at her files, that the camera chose really high ISO settings a lot - even when it wasn't really necessary. I figured there had to be a better way.

I set the camera up in Program mode, where the camera chooses aperture and shutter speed, and auto ISO, but set the maximum ISO at 400. I then set out on a morning walk and used the camera like I would on a trip. I wanted to see what decisions the camera made and what the results looked like.

Here are the results with only minimal adjustments to the JPG files. These are 1500 x 1000 files down sized from the original 5184 x 3456 files.

55mm, f/8, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

18mm, f/8, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

55mm, f/5.6, 1/90 sec., ISO 125

55mm, f/6.7, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

18mm, f/9.5, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

55mm, f/9.5, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

24mm, f/8, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

55mm, f/8, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

18mm, f/6.7, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

18mm, f/9.5, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

24mm, f/11, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

30mm, f/9.5, 1/180 sec., ISO 100

18mm, f/9.5, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

55mm, f/6.7, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

Good results can be had by bracketing even JPG files and then processing them in HDR software. Here is an example from one of the scenes above. Because the EOS M will only bracket three files rather than the five I usually use with my 5DIII, I bracket +/- 1 1/2 EV rather than 1 EV.