When you use a tool or group of tools for your living, winning combinations tend to be golden.

My go to lately for low light, flash based (or not), candid shooting in a fluid environment, is the 17mm f1.8 (at f1.8-2.8), paired sometimes with a bounced Godox 860V flash on an EM1 mk2, used in touch screen shooting mode.

This gives me a fast, accurate, adaptable and powerful weapon to grab movement, fight poor light and tricky environments.

I first noticed this at the last wedding I shot, especially on the dance floor and it gets reinforced time and again in similar circumstances

Touch focus is a massive benefit when the action may occur anywhere in the screen area. It almost never misses and is effectively instant (on any current Olympus anyway). This is the only focussing system that comes close to manual focus for freedom of composition, but is so very fast. The other advantage is shooting from the screen when flipped out tends to get me down to a child’s eye level and even when they look at me, they are not looking at the camera.

The 17mm (34mm eq) is wide enough so you never feel cramped, but tight and well corrected enough to be easy to use without fear of distortions and other oddness.

The lens is sharp wide open, better stopped down a little, but it is the long transition Bokeh that really makes this setup work. It is genuinely tough to see where the transition from in to out of focus is, so at f1-8 to 2.8, you have an un-naturally deep seeming area of good focus acceptance.

The Godox, bounced off an uneven 30’ ceiling (!) at the school hall, can pop and pop and pop, especially with the wide aperture and a very usable ISO 800-1600 (thanks C1 and ON1 if needed). I used it today at 1/16 to 1/8th power bounced off said ceiling with a black foamy thing. This gave me a slightly over exposed file full of brightness and devoid of noise. It fired 600 times today in about 60 minutes without even warming up (literally) or running the battery down to half. At the wedding it went for longer.

The EM1 is good, but I have had similar success with an EM10 mk2 and even an EM5 mk1, so it seems the camera is the least important element.