A shot from antiquity. A disquieting feeling that your best days as a photographer were your last days as an amateur....

How simple were the tools? A Yashica Mat 124G. A small flash in an umbrella. A piece of string to measure the flash to subject distance. Pretested. Panatomic X film. ASA 32.

Kirk Tuck's Very Colorful, One Day Review of the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.7 Lens For Micro Four Thirds.

Painting team at the Graffiti Wall. Austin, Texas.

This will be a short and sweet review of the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.7 Lumix lens. Why? Because it's all good and no bad. I've owned the Olympus 45mm f1.8 lens twice. Each time I was enthralled with it at the outset and then gradually used it less and less. The barrel was too small to hang fingers on when shooting and when you really, really pushed the image size you could see that it was a little less than perfect wide open. I didn't really care because with the tiniest bit of post processing you could snap up the whole image pretty well and there were other lenses in the kit. If I wanted something right in that ballpark (especially since getting the EM-5.2...) I generally grabbed for the solid, little 40mm f1.4 Pen FT manual focus lens and used the focus peaking or I attached the 60mm Sigma lens and stepped back a bit. For whatever reason I used the Olympus lens less than any other M4:3 lens in the drawer except for the 17mm f1.8. But that wider one is an awkward focal length for me...

But like a guy who isn't really delighted with his girlfriend I kept my eyes open for a suitable (better) replacement. At one point a friend let me shoot with his Panasonic 42.5mm f1.2 Leica Supreme Platinum Deluxe Lens and it really caught my attention in two ways. First, the image in the finder was perfect and second, the price was insanely stratospheric for a user with multiple systems. Somewhere in the file cabinet just past the temporal lobe of my brain my subconscious filed the message: Panasonic Lens ---- Good. Revisit.

I had a bit of time on my hands one day so I played with the Panasonic Leice Supreme Platinum Deluxe lens's little brother; the lens under test, and came away thinking I liked the look, the feel, the finder image and (just in case I buy another Panasonic camera body) the in lens image stabilization. The lens had me at "finder image."

The Panasonic 42.5/1.7 is svelte and well constructed. It comes with a good lens hood. In the box. Included in the price. The lens focuses quickly and very accurately on the EM5.2 body. I like everything about it. I would talk about the color rendering and the sharpness, etc.; I might even prattle on about the micro-contrast or the mini-contrast or the third order harmonics of the system but I thought it would be more in keeping with a photographic tradition to just shoot with the damn thing and show you some photographs. Let you make up your own mind about what you might be seeing.

I bought my copy at Precision Camera. Same price as the one listed at Amazon and B&H.

Here are some images I took at the wall. Almost everything is shot at f4. It works well at all the other apertures too. ..

Yay! Action Figure poses.

This is Nikki. She sells spray paint, Red Bull and other necessities at the Graffiti Wall. 

Woman on Rock. Discovering America.

The climb to the top is steep and treacherous. Except for those with m4:3 cameras...

America's favorite post climb pass time. (love the rhyme).

Multi-planar sharpness test. 

The Panasonic lens handles the selfie subject matter with ease. 

Is it possible that the girl with the selfie stick is contemplating using said stick to prod her 

companion over the steep edge? Sinister selfie stick behavior afoot. And the perpetrator could simultaneously document her own crime....

The painter's emergency step ladder. Details below.

It's been a wet Spring in Austin. You can see the results in the foliage...

Jeremy Green, put up two really nice photographs at my local Starbucks.

I was having coffee yesterday with my friend, Frank, when I looked over his shoulder and saw these two pieces up on the wall of Starbucks. They are large, very well done images on a nice, matte paper stock. A little digging turned up the information that they were the works of Jeremy Green. Jeremy is a friend, a photographer and an instructor in the Austin Community College Art Dept. It's fun to walk into a regular haunt and see work that is head and shoulders above the usual stuff on the walls!

I was carrying a camera (duh!) and snapped a quick picture of the photos. The camera was an Olympus EM5.2 with a Panasonic 42.5mm lens.

Here again is the link to his website: http://www.jeremygreen.com/#!/index

Take a visit and see what he's all about. He adds nice energy to the Austin photographic art scene.

The results of yesterday's quiz....

I took the photo down from yesterday because there were so many embarrassing glitches and gotcha's in it. The rookie mistake I made was not having someone with expertise to supervise the whole set up and look for mistakes that I couldn't see because I lack that professional training...

Gloves, watches, flat lines on monitors, all added up to a photo that might work at a quick glance for an uneducated audience but not for most people and certainly not for the highly educated and trained audiences here at VSL.

My lesson? If you aren't an expert in the field then make sure you bring along someone who is. Otherwise, as soon as your clients see the shot you'll be back in re-shooting --0-- and that's never pleasant.

Thanks to all who chimed in.