BigBarney wrote:
rladd wrote:
I have a Panasonic G5 which is fabulous. I also love my Olympus 45mm 1.8 lens. I'm tempted to buy the Olympus 75mm lens after reading its great reviews, but I'm on the fence. I'm thinking that at that focal length I would miss the IS. I also do have the Lumix 45mm - 150mm which is pretty good (but not quite awesome) and fairly slow (4.0-5.6).
Just curious if other Lumix users have bought the 75mm Olympus lens and how you like it.
Like you I shoot with a Panasonic m43 camera (in my case a GH2 and occasionally a GF1), but to date I have not used any Olympus m43 lenses on the Panasonic bodies. The reason that I selected the Panasonic bodies was that they suited my rather large hands (even the GF1 with a leather case round it), I liked the flexibility of the vari-angle LCDs, and I found the Olympus default jpgs to be horribly oversaturated to my eyes. Nevertheless Olympus made their name and reputation primarily as designers and builders of outstanding optics, so if you can afford them Olympus lenses are well worth considering. My Olympus 35 RC film compact camera with its amazing Zuiko lens is still going strong after over 30 years of use.
In that last sentence I have revealed that I am no longer in the first flush of youth. As a young man growing up in the era of 35mm film photography I learned that to use a long focal length lens you had to do one or more of three things:
- put the camera on a tripod or other fixed support.
- always shoot at a shutter speed shorter than the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens.
- use a good handholding technique.
Fast forward to the era of digital interchangeable lens cameras, and there is no reason why the same things should not apply as well today as they did yesterday.
So yes, go ahead and buy that Olympus 75mm f1.8 lens if you are prepared to learn how to use it on a Panasonic body.
Alternatively do not buy it if you are unwilling or unable to learn how to use it to get sharp images.
Sorry if that sounds rather blunt but then this old man has more than a little Yorkshire ancestry. For those unfamiliar with regional variations in the UK, people from the county of Yorkshire have the well-earned reputation of saying things exactly as they see them, sometimes to the annoyance of those wallowing in seas of political correctness.
