Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 Mini Review

 

My iPad is back, hurrah, now I can use the brilliant Blogsy app and post more frequently. It's a silver iPad Air with the handsome looking iOS 7 (although some apps still look old fashioned, and uses the old keyboard, hmm, like Blogsy for example).

 

Today I will show you a few of my favorite pictures taken with the Olympus 45 1.8, one of the best lenses you could ever get for your MFT camera. Hit the jump for the full post.

David & Goliath

 

When I first bought into the MFT system, I bought two primes, the Panaleica 25 1.4 as my all-round 50mm equivalent lens, and the Olympus 45 1.8 as my portrait lens, and to have some background blur when needed. I love longer lenses because of the compression they do, add a fast aperture for some background blur and you get some nice portraits. The lens cost me $399 new, while the famous 75 1.8 cost $900. I decided to get the cheaper one.

 

From left: 12-50, 40-150, 25 1.4, 45 1.8

 

P.S. Excuse the mediocre quality of the product shots, I took them a very long time ago and I am too lazy to go take better ones. Here's one last product picture.

Compared to the RX100

 

As you can see, the lens is extremely tiny, one of the many reasons I like it. It has a 37mm filter thread, that's the same size as a large coin. It is made of high quality plastic, and has a metal mount, it feels solid enough. The focusing of this lens is blistering quick, it never hesitates or hunts, ever.

 

Now let us talk about images, the lens is very sharp wide open with almost no chromatic aberrations except in the most extreme situations. It doesn't ship with a lens hood, and it can lose some contrast when shooting directly into the sun, but what lens doesn't. The most impressive factor about this lens is it's background rendition, it has some of the nicest background blurs I've ever seen, in any situation. It reminds me of my Canon 100L f/2.8 Macro, just smooth pleasing backgrounds.

 

Wide open, background was less than one meter behind the subject

 

I don't know what to say else about the lens other than that it is an exceptional lens, sold for an exceptional price, and it is a must for any MFT user shooting such a focal length.

 

Now I will leave you with some images, I apologize for the lack of different subjects, but 80% of the images shot with this lens are of my family, and most of them are personal and can't be posted here. I hope these will do.

 

Street portrait, f1.8, 1/15 sec, ISO 5000, hand held

 

Drinking juice, wide open

 

Cold, wide open

 

Party, wide open, bounce flash

 

Polish plant, wide open

 

Cinematic, wide open

 

Swing, wide open

 

Wondering look

 

Nail polish

 

Fountain portrait

 

Trip computer

 

I hope you enjoyed the images, and I hope I will be posting more, now that I have an iPad once more.

 

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Yongnuo RF-603 + Olympus OM-D: Reloaded

Do you remember my RF-603 modification post? In that post I was able to modify my Canon version of the Yongnuou RF-603 trigger to make it work with my Olympus camera to trigger external flashes.

Now thanks to member Earlack and his post in this dpreview thread, I was able to further modify the camera cable of the triggers so that they can also wirelessly trigger my camera. Full details after the jump.

Below is a typical YN RF-603 kit, except that there is another transceiver. I have bought two kits, so I have four transceivers in total. With these, I can trigger up to three external flashes, and I can even trigger the camera (from one of the other triggers) using the supplied cable, however, this cable has only a Canon connector, and Yongnuo doesn't sell cables with the Olympus USB connector.

This brings us to the modification, thanks to dpreview member mentioned above, I did exactly what he did, and instead of buying a USB connector and connecting it, I bought the cheapest wired trigger for Olympus I could find, the one shown in the opening picture.

Here's the Olympus USB connector, this is what I bought the intervalometer for, to salvage the USB connector (don't feel sad for the intervalometer, I have a much better one, with an on-off switch, not fully-on-until-the-battery-runs-out like this one).

Operation begins by cutting the two ends of the RF-603 cable, and the intervalometer. Thankfully, they both have the same color code.

I connected both whites together, red with yellow and yellow with red, the picture below is not the final one, just roughly made for demonstration.

 

 

 Once done and tested, I insulated each of the wires separately.

 

And because I didn't have a good black sealing tape, I used Gaffer's tape to hold both ends of the cable together. I will be removing the ugly looking tape and using a more elegant solution.

And it works, however not fully as expected, the half-press doesn't do anything, and only a full press initiates the focus and triggers the shutter, but I don't mind since most probably, when remotely triggering the camera as such, I will use fixed focus. In case you're wondering, it doesn't matter if the RF-603 is mounted to the camera hot-shoe or not, and I also tried connecting the reds and yellows together, but when I tested it, the camera had the shutter "half-pressed" all the time.

This modification will give me two important uses:

1. I can trigger the camera wirelessly, useful for group photos, self photos, camera positioned far away (on a pole for example with a fisheye for a unique perspective).
2. I can trigger both the camera and flash together, for example if I'm light painting a large area with flash, I can leave the camera on the tripod, and take the flash with me and point it at different areas of the photo, and every time I trigger the flash, the camera will snap a picture. How cool is that?

Finally, all these pictures were shot handheld with the OM-D and the 12-50 lens in macro mode, ISO 3200, shutter speeds ~ 1/10 to 1/20 seconds, ACR standard noise reduction.


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Abstracts With The Olympus 40-150R

Tilted Lamp Post

Have you ever seen any of Gavin Hoey's 15 Minute Photo Challenges? Theses videos usually inspire me to just grab a camera with one lens and shoot the heck out of wherever I am at the moment.

Can you describe this place in one word?

 
This happened to me one month ago. I was stuck at the place you see above for the most of the morning with very little to do (and eat), and instead of going crazy, I took out my OMD with the Olympus 40-150R, which is my least used lens. I got this lens along with my OMD kit for just $100, which is a crazy price for a quite sharp 80-300mm telephoto lens. I have only used it twice before, and I saw it as a chance to get familiar with the lens. I mostly shot the lens at 150mm (300mm equivalent) and at f/5.6 or f/8 for a little more bite. It focuses as quickly as my other lenses, and can focus quite close at the long end. When I returned back to my computer, I was extremely impressed with the sharpness and the colors of the lens.

Now I will leave you with the pictures, they don't follow a certain theme other than being random, and I like all of them. I really enjoy the background compression a telephoto lens creates.

Day Light

To Infinity ... Aand Beyoond

Rusty Coke

Still Chained

Bulb Spiral

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Macro Fun At Home

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OM-D, Bits & Pieces

 
Today I will talk for a bit about my recent experiences with my OMD, and I would like to start with the image you see above, this was taken during an auto-cross event that I attended last Saturday, it is a wheel of a Mitsubishi Evo wearing a slick tire as you can see, the car was stationary for a moment before starting the race.
 
I captured the image you see above @ 300mm equivalent with my Olympus 40-150mm f/4-5.6 lens wide-open, I like the lighting, the grooves on the brake disc and the worn out slick tire. That lens is quite sharp and incredible considering the $100 price when purchased as a kit.

 
I am hardly using zoom lenses anymore, I find pleasure when using a fast prime, it gives me fast shutter speeds, shallow DOF and one less thing to think about when shooting (focal length, obviously). However, I wanted to get to know my zoom lenses more, currently the Olympus 12-50mm f3.5-6.3 lens and the 40-150 tele-zoom I mentioned above, the first lens I hardly used other than for macro shots and video, and I still have to get used to it, maybe when I go to desert next time.
 
The 40-150 I have tried a couple of times, and I am impressed with the sharpness and contrast so far, it's no secret that I love portraits with long focal lengths, I love that background compression effect and the shallow DOF that results from the extra background magnification, so I was apprehensive I wouldn't get that with the small m4/3 sensor, but looking at the portrait shown above, I say nice, not as nice as my 200 f/2.8 on the 5D of course, but quite good, and that was 105mm (205mm eq.) @ f/5.6.
 

 
I gave it another try as you can see above, this one was taken at 62mm (124mm eq.), great colors, contrast and sharpness, so good so far except for the lousy zoom ring, which is too stiff right now, but I bet will get smoother with more mileage.
 
One thing to mention when shooting portraits, I almost forgot how to focus on the eye, the OMD's auto near-eye detection and focusing is simply the best invention in all of the recent cameras in my opinion, I leave it on all of the time, and I just compose and shoot, never worrying about the whereabouts of my focusing point, it immediately snaps to the nearest eye and gets it in focus no matter how shallow the DOF is, I'd say the hit rate is 85% with another 5% lost for focusing on the wrong eye.
 
I was using my friend's 60D with the 200mm f/2.8 the other day, and I immediately remembered how hard it was to get sharp eyes with such a combo, 320mm equivalent, no image stabilization; so the finder is wobbly, and I have to put one of the nine tiny dots on my subjects eye while I hit the shutter button, if Sony's A99 has that feature, I would consider it next time I am going back to FF, it makes life much easier.
 

 
And here's one last shot from that auto-cross event, a dandy-green handsome looking VW Beetle, I have special love for this car having owned a 1972 VW Beetle 1300.
 
One thing I am learning about with the OMD and the RX100, those Sony sensors doesn't give as much highlight recovery headroom as I am used to from my Canon sensors, while on the other hand they are extremely tolerant for extreme shadow pushing without showing banding or noise blotches, and in the worst cases noise shows up as fine grain that I can easily cleanup, this caused me to start under-exposing the images with very bright highlights like this shiny VW Beetle, and push the shadows later on post. That's exactly the opposite of what I was to do with Canon, where I usually exposed for the right instead, interesting, and will see how it works, Mic tells me that he's used to the same behavior from Nikon sensors.
 

 
On a different note, we went to a burger restaurant called Fuddruckers, I believe it is American, it was a lot of fun for the kids and for me, since it presented me with a new environment to take pictures of my kids in, the shot you see above is taken there, and this gave me a pleasant surprise regarding the OMD's AWB for the second time.
 
The first time (if you read my posts carefully) was when I used it under incandescent light at my home, for some reason the correct WB under my home lighting is around 2500 kelvin, and none of the cameras I have ever used was able to get the correct WB except for the OMD, this list includes several P&S and mobile phone cameras, the Canon G11, 550D, 60D, 5D2, 5D3, Sony RX100, Nikon D3100 and D7000. Back to the restaurant, there were lots of light sources, incandescent, CFL, flourescent and deeply colored walls, we had a deep yellow wall to the camera left, and you can see the red wall in the background, and the OMD got the WB perfectly, the image you see above is the RAW output with some blacks added and highlights reduced.
 

 
As usual, I was shooting with the Panasonic 25 f/1.4 lens, which my favorite focal length, I don't find much reason to stop-down this lens at all (unless I need more DOF, obviously), it is quite sharp at f/1.4, add that to the OMD's auto near-eye focusing, and you always get sharp eyes, the obvious benefit (which is one of the main reasons that got me thinking about MFT in the first place) is that I get a fast shutter speed and enough DOF at the same time to get the eyes in sharp focus, and a comprehensible background which is still convincingly out of focus. I was shooting wide-open @ ISO 1600 and was getting 1/125 shutter speeds that enabled me to get sharp shots of my girls.
 

 
TTL flash, finally!
 
I received my Olympus FL-600R finally after a long waiting period, first impressions are:
 

• It's tiny, incredibly tiny, I will show it in a separate article beside Canon's 600EX behemoth.
• It features a quite powerful continuous LED light (with variable power).
• Head rotates 180 degrees both sides, though it is quite stiff.
• Plastic foot with the new quick locking mechanism, not an issue if the head wasn't so stiff.
• Touch button for power, it powers on with the camera, and turns off when I turn it off.
• Not as powerful as a 580EX, obviously, but I was used to pushing the 580EX hard by bouncing indoors at sync speed and ISO 400.
• Accurate TTL metering, more so than the Canon.
• When I press the shutter, the camera hesitates for a split second before firing the shutter, TTL measurement?
• It can act as a full featured master or a salve, and can be triggered with the OMD’s accessory flash.

The above shot was taken with the 25 f/1.4 lens (wide-open as usual) and bounce flash to camera right and a bit behind my shoulder, who said MFT can't get shallow DOF?
 
More to come soon.

 

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Macro Fun @ Home

 

I have been sick for a few days now, and I had to spend the weekend at home, so yesterday I decided to have some quick macro fun, I didn't expect to get great pictures, but the purpose was to have fun and to experiment with some of my less used equipment.

 

I didn't want to spend time setting up complicated lighting setups, so I went with available light, a white piece of cardboard for the background, the GorillaPod SLR Zoom with the Joby Ball Head as my tripod and finally the OMD with the 12-50 kit lens, now the kit lens has an interesting macro mode where you push a dedicated macro button on the side of the lens and move the zoom ring to a dedicated macro position, and all of a sudden, you have a 0.72x 86mm eq. macro lens with a reasonable working distance.

 

GorillPod SLR Zoom + Joby Ball Head

 

Back to the GorillaPod for a second, I bought one a while ago when I had the 5D Mark III to be able to get interesting low angles, besides, I could use it's flexible legs to mount my flashes in creative positions. I bought the baddest, heaviest SLR Zoom version (without the ball head) that could hold my 5D3, which it only can in very limited positions, not what I expected. And mounting it to the camera is done via a screw, something you can't just do by hand, you have to use a coin to screw it to your camera, and even then, the angles I could get were very limited because I was cheap and skipped on the ball head. The tripod was never used except to hold my Zoom H1 mic in unnatural positions.

 

So with the 5D3 sold and a new smaller camera took its place, I decided to invest in the ball head because it will make it more flexible, so here I decided to give it a try with this macro project, it works really well with the smaller and lighter OMD in all positions, and the ball head is very good and smooth, provided you get past attaching the quick release plate to the camera via a similar screw and a coin.

 

Now that I had my camera and background ready, what do I shoot? I went hunting around the house for tiny stuff to shoot, and here's what I found:

 

Macro Subjects

 

I didn't bother with a remote shutter release and I used the 12 second timer on the OMD, I used aperture priority mode set at ISO 200 and f/11 to get as much DOF as I can, but any smaller aperture and I started losing sharpness because of diffraction, good thing the OMD has a smaller sensor with more DOF than a full frame sensor (my 5D2 gave me a real hard time when I was shooting water drops), the other settings involved a custom white balance and turning off the image stabilization. I was using the rear screen for composition and exposure adjustment, I had a live histogram which enabled me to adjust the exposure compensation for each picture on the fly, I did it by adding positive exposure compensation until the histogram almost reached the right side since I knew the background is white and should appear so in the final image. Finally, for focusing I used manual focus and 14x magnification. Here's how the final setup looked like.

 

The Setup

 

Here is the resulting image from the setup you see above:

 

Alan Keys, this is a Serfas branded kit that I use to fix my Orbea bike

 

Just before I continue with the rest of the images and the post processing, I want to discuss another gadget, I received a couple of weird lens adapters with my OMD kit (Amazon included a zillion things for free), one promised to give a 0.45x wide angle conversion (and can double work as macro) and the other one promised 2.5x telephoto conversion, I tried both and they sucked, I was wary of adding 3rd party unbranded glass in front of my lens, the wide angle converter caused a huge loss of sharpness and caused lots of flare, the telephoto converter didn't even work, but I never tried the macro bit before. Below are some photos of the adapter itself, it uses a 58mm filter thread, and I have step-down rings with all the possible combinations, down to 37mm:

 

Wide angle adapter with the covers on

 

Covers removed

 

Macro piece un-screwed

 

It comes with a carrying case

 

As you have seen, it comes in one piece which when un-screwed, you get a small macro adapter, having tested the wide angle and telephoto adapters before, I seriously doubted the macro bit, but to my surprise it worked really well and really sharp, and I believe I was able to get slightly more than 1x magnification, below are two pictures of a pencil sharpener, the first one is taken with the 12-50 alone at maximum magnification, then the second one with the macro adapter:

 

12-50 @ maximum magnification (0.72x)

 

With the macro adapter, probably past 1x magnification

 

100% Crop

 

And this is how the camera looked like, by the way all the pictures including the OMD were taken with the Sony RX100 hand held.

 

 

I decided to go for black and white pictures (except for a couple) and a 16:9 aspect ratio for this shoot, all pictures taken at f/11, here's what I came up with:

 

Sphinx Coin

 

Medal

 

Alan Key Family

 

German Sharpener

 

Shrapnel

 

Quarter Pound

 

RX100 Aperture Priority

 

The Stiff Ring

 

Fiber Cleaning Cloth

 

Unthreaded Necklace

 

As you can see, I didn't spend any effort in lighting or using a remote shutter, I picked a few elements found around the house and enjoyed myself. I used focus stacking for the last picture, I have always wanted to try it and I had the chance, I used 5 images starting by focus on the near violet pebble to the top green one.

 

For processing I had to increase the blacks a lot, sometimes up to -100, I didn't worry about the whites since I already made sure the histogram was already near the right side, then I clicked the B&W button and used the targeted adjustment tool to adjust the shades of the different elements, and finally added a little bit of clarity and contrast, that's it.

 

I hope you've enjoyed the post, my next post will be soon, and will be about post-processing, I will pick a certain image every couple of weeks and show you the steps I use for processing this image.

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