It all came together on Saturday afternoon. Beyond lens lust.

Okay.  So it's a couple of branches.  So what?  Well it's also a wide open shot done with a 60mm Pen (film version) f1.5 lens from the late 1960's.  On a Pen EP2.


Let's get this out of the way up front:  I love the new micro Four Thirds cameras.  I think they are great and for the kind of contemplative photography a lot of people do I think they are better than traditional DSLR cameras.  There.  I said it.  Better.

Here's why:  You get to look through an electronic finder and watch as the exposure, DOF and color are shown to you in a real time preview.  Like what you see?  Go ahead and push the shutter button and you'll most likely get an image that's exactly what you saw.  It's so different than an optical finder that you have to try it out to understand how much different it is in real life.  I can hardly wait until the bigger cameras like the Olympus e30 types (and the Nikons and Canons) lose their mirrors and go all EVF.  And I predict it will happen sooner rather than later.

But there's a second reason I like the little Pens.  I can put just about any lens on them.  But what lenses work best?

Here's the same shot at around f 5.6 and a half.  The background is coming in....

You can't just put any lens on the front of these cameras and be absolutely happy because most older lenses for bigger format weren't really designed to be high enough resolution to put enough detail into the dense and condensed area of pixels wedged into these 12 megapixel 2X crop cameras.   I've tried older Nikon lenses and they work okay but they really didn't do anything that the meager collection of dedicated m4:3rd lenses couldn't do.  I have used the Nikon 50mm 1.1.2 lens but wide open the sharpness suffers.  And the bulk of the lens makes the whole camera package unwieldy.  In fact, using big lenses cancels the whole system out.  If you put a two or three pound lens in front of the tiny camera you might as well just use a big camera to begin with......

The dream for many micro EVIL users is to have a handful of small, super fast primes that were computed for the smaller frame size and can be mounted without issue on the front of a Panny or Pen.

Well, I'm here to tell you that they exist and they are superb.  Something new from Korea?  No.  How about something quite old from Japan.  I'm talking about the jewel-like interchangeable lenses originally made for the Pen F film cameras from the 1960's and the 1970's.  They are out there on the used market and they are gorgeous.  Computed to cover a half frame of film with high contrast and resolution these Olympus optics have been in my equipment drawer since the mid 1980's just waiting for the right opportunity to shine.

A street shot of my friend Emily.  Shot today on Sixth St. in downtown.  f2.8.  No lighting.

The first lens I'm testing is one of my favorites from yesteryear.  The 60mm 1.5 is small, relatively light. The manual-only focus ring is like butter.  You can set infinite intermediate aperture values and watch the exposure subtly change through the finder.  The lens is a bit less contrasty than modern lenses but seems to have greater resolution.  I'd read a technical paper about lens design in the late 1970's which basically said that you can either have very high resolution or you  can have very high contrast or some compromise between the two but not both.  I think, given the high contrast of films back when this lens was designed, coupled with the small frame target that the Olympus engineers gave the nod to resolution.  Happily we live in an age of Photoshop (tm) wherein we can change the mix between the two parameters to meet our own tastes on every shot.  I added about 5% contrast to the image above before converting it to a web sized version.

Here we're at f8 and I'm seeing incredible detail and a tenacious grasp of shadow detail. (Sounding like a wine critic today......)  Look at the detail in his hair and shirt.

Here's the other thing I like about shooting with manual focus primes,  once you focus you can recompose till the cows come home without worrying about "locking" focus.  Small, light, sharp, detailed, lack of flare,  single focal length lenses blow zooms and Rube Goldberg/big fat lenses with adapters clean away.

Do I need a caption for this?  It's the same building I seem to shoot for all my lens tests.  But every lens is different.

I learned an interesting thing about fine focusing today.  I had been setting up the display setting so that when I shot with non-dedicated and purely manual lenses I would get the screen with the green square in the middle of it.  (This is with the EP2).  If I pushed the "OK" button in the middle of the four way controller it would magnify the image up to 10x and allow me to fine focus on small details.  Excellent way to manual focus by the way.  But today I noticed that when I achieved sharp focus (without the magnification) I would see an interference pattern of the details of the image.  It would shimmer in and out as I changed focus.  If I shot on the shimmer everything was incredibly sharp.  It was a cool phenomenon and I tried the high magnification focus to check what I was seeing.  Yep.  It works.  Look for the shimmering interference pattern in the fine details and you are fine focused.

Every lens has it's own look unless it's been homogenized by its maker.  I think the combination of color and contrast from this lens references the popular look of lenses from the 1960's.  It's so "NASA".

In order to make all of this work you'll need to order a Pen F to Pen adapter.  This will fit between the lens and the body and will give you a lens that focuses perfectly, to infinity and beyond.  It will also operate seamlessly in the "A" (aperture) mode.  The only place I've found them is from a supplier on e-bay.  They run around $65.  I think they ship them from China because it takes about ten days to deliver.

Mine is all black and fits perfectly.  Not too snug, not too loose.

One of the coolest things about a lens of this speed and ths focal length is the ability to drop backgrounds out of focus.  This is the 85mm 1.2 of the micro four thirds world.  And, amazingly for a 1960's optic, it seems to be very, very sharp even when shot wide open.  I picked mine up in 1985 for the whopping big sum of $65.  I think they've gone up since then but they are still less than a quarter the price of the Canon 85mm 1.2 and, if you have nimble fingers, I bet it focuses faster too.

Thumb your nose at this new format to your own peril.  I think this is a fun view of the future.  And, in light of the desperately depressing article about the state of the commercial photo industry that ran last week in the NYT, why the heck would you want to spend more for photo equipment anyway.  The consensus is that most things are going to the web.  Do you really thing we'll see the difference there between 24 megapixels and 12 megapixels?  I think we're much more likely to see the difference between about $1200 bucks for the above described rig versus a cool $10,000 for a Canon 1ds3 and the 85mm lens............

The snarky ones out there are always dissing the limited ability m4:3rds users have to limit depth of field.  You wouldn't know it from some of my samples today.  Seems pretty convincing to me.

I whole heartedly endorse the use of the 60mm 1.5 on the EP-2 (and by extension, all the other small crop cameras in the family).  The next lens to go under the microscope will be the 38mm 1.8.  But I may need to talk about inspiration before we get back into the nuts and bolts.  I'm still feeling the reverberations of my trip to the west.

One more thing:  I heard the UPS truck roll up on Fri.  I was hoping it was free camera equipment.... but that never happens....instead it was a box full of my new book on Lighting Equipment.  If I got 12 books I'm sure Amazon will get theirs soon.  It's a pretty darn good book if you want to delve into lighting equipment.  And what red-blooded photographer doesn't?  I put a link below.  Check it out.  If you pre-order it now you won't be disappointed when it sells out and you don't have one.......(smiles...).

Hope you have a great Easter.  Or just a nice Sunday.  All the best, Kirk

Breaking secret news about new Olympus Cameras!!!!!

I can't show you a photo because I've already sent the box full of beta test gear back but I talked to my legal counsel and we decided, "What the hell.  Let's scoop all the rest of the people on the web and be the first to make some announcements."  I'm a bit nervous but here goes:

The e3 replacement:  I was amazed when I opened the discreet, cardboard box with no markings.  If you've done beta testing before you know that you get the camera long before the manuals are written etc.  I did get a thumbdrive with some engineers notes and that really helped.  The e1000 will seem familiar to anyone who has worked with the e1 camera in the past but this time the battery grip is a non removeable, integrated part of the body design.   The finder.....get ready for this.....is a 2.2 million pixel EVF with zero noise to EV 1.  That's right.  EV 1.  It's a cleaner images, with auto ramp up gain, than the view through my close friend's Sony a900 finder, the previous champ of great optical finders.  You heard it here:  The optical finder is dead.

The reason the Olympus people built the battery casing as an integral part of the camera has less to do with rapid frame rate (the camera doesn't have a moving mirror so there's not much to slow down the recharge sequence of the beryllium bladed shutter...... 12 fps!!!) it's so they could add a discreetly covered interface that has two XLR microphone inputs.  Oly, according the the marketing people I talked to in Lubbock, Texas, have decided, based on the Canon success with video, to provide video.  But in true Oly fashion they took it to the next step.  Instead of 1080i or 1080p they've matched the RedOne camera and gone with 4k video.  They are actually positioning this system as competition for the Red by giving it all the professional video controls you'd need to be able to make a feature film.

This, of course, called for a brand new Sensor, and here's where the surprise comes in.  They switched to a proprietary sensor created by the NSA for high altitude surveillance and brought onto the market by a new and very secretive company in Israel.  Olympus is one of the first companies to take advantage of the new technology which uses photon enhancement and lossless amplification of nano band interference patterns to yield clean ISO into the 64,000 range.  In a white paper that is still proprietary the chip company said they choose Olympus as the first company to roll out the new consumer sensors because no other company could make lenses that would take advantage of the characteristics of the new 22 megapixel imager.

The battery grip also houses a treasure trove of ultra fast ARM chips that pull off video signals across 16 channels and write it to proprietary SQUAM memory.  I don't have all the details on that other than the transfer rate is somewhere in the terabytes per second range.  Thankfully, for all of us who don't routinely make feature films, the camera also has dual slots for both CF and SD memory cards.

Interestingly enough the camera is aimed squarely at professionals with only two mode settings on the top mounted dial:  Aperture and Manual.  Seems that those are the go to settings for 90% of the real professionals.  They mentioned that they could add a "P" setting via firmware if the market of whining babies insists.  (Their words, not mine....).

Moving on from the video attributes of the camera it's interesting to note that there have been some changes to the actual sensor geometry.  The sensor is now circular and is a precise match for the optical circle cast by the lens.  Powerful algorithms take the peripheral information and remap it over whatever aspect ratio you choose actually giving the images about 27.5% more surface area than the APS-C chips.

The camera should be out in time for Photokina and a similar camera which I haven't had time to play with is being readied for the m4:3rds market.  When I first printed a few of the files from the m4:3rds (called the Pen Screaming Eagle) on an Epson 10800 printer at 40 by 60 inches the files at ISO 200 blew away files of similar subjects taken with the new Phase One back.  Seems 22 great mega pixels beat 60 okay megapixels any day of the week.

Olympus has a great ad campaign getting ready for the new cameras.  They already have DXO certified tests that show they have achieved the first sensor and support electronics to test over 100%.  The measured dynamic range exceeds 18.5 stops and can't be printed on any conventional device.

New Lenses:  Look.  I know the camera announcement is almost unbelievable but I was even more shocked by the new lens announcements. Without further ado:

The new Ultra High Grade lenses are all f1.  But get this, at f1 they out test similar focal length lenses from Leica used at f5.6 and f8.  Most of the new f1 UHG lenses are made for the traditional e camera (the 1000) and consist of the following focal lengths.  10mm, 12mm,  15mm, 20mm, 25mm, 44mm and 50mm.  They have also introduced a legendary 29 mm lens with an f stop of .5.  Yes that's (point) five!!!! and they are calling it the Noctozilla.  Apparently it is sharper wide open at 0.5 than the previous 50 macro lens was at f4.

The delightful thing about all the lenses is the AI (or artificial intelligence) enhancement for rapid focus (AIERF).  Which uses a complex matrix of camera movement, topological readings and even barometric readings to accelerate focus.  From infinity to close focus is now measured in nano seconds.  In fact, many times the camera and lens combination focused on things I was thinking about photographing several minutes or even hours in the future.

It's a brave new world.  Happy 1st of April..............