DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-5

Sunday was supposed to be good squirrel-spotting weather. Clear and cold, but no wind to speak of (arboreal critters tend to hunker in their drays when the boughs get to whipping around.)

I put the Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm F3.5-5.6 Asph superzoom on the Olympus E-5 for my walk around the neighborhood but mostly came up empty handed.

I'm still looking for a lens hood for this thing, but they're unobtainium.

With an equivalent maximum focal length of 300mm on the Oly's Four Thirds sensor, I had plenty of reach for squirrel snapping, but I lacked for subjects.

At fifteen years old, the E-5 is starting to show its age, but if you keep the ISO at 400 or lower, it still does just fine.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X

It's an example of the weird time dilation of 2020 that I can't believe that the Olympus E-M1X is six years old. It was launched in January of 2019 as a dedicated pro body for the Oly Micro Four Thirds line that was heavily specialized for sports and wildlife, leveraging the greatest strength of the MFT format: Enormous focal length lenses in very small packages.

Lenses I Live By: The Superzoom

They're generally called "superzooms", sometimes "all-in-one" or "vacation" lenses. I call them "zoo lenses" because they cover a wide enough spread of focal lengths to cover any shooting situation at the zoo, whether the critter is big and right in front of you, or small and way off in the back of its enclosure.

They typically have a 7X to 10X focal length range... wait, let me explain something.

Most people see the number followed by an "X" and assume it refers to view magnification, since that's what it signifies with telescopes and microscopes and the like. With cameras, however, it refers to the range of focal lengths.

A 35-70mm zoom lens would be a 2X zoom, going from a wide-ish viewing angle to the very shortest edge of telephoto. A 70-210mm would be a 3X, while a 24-240mm would be a 10X, et cetera.

The 12-200mm on the Olympus E-M1X in the photo above, the equivalent of a 24-400mm lens on a full-frame camera, is at the extreme end of superzoom ranges. It's able to shoot from comfortably wide angles to a very credible long telephoto length suitable for urban wildlife.

One of the first really good superzooms was Nikon's 28-200mm AF-D, which was replaced by the even more compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G in 2003. Now discontinued, those lenses have gotten a little cult-y due to their small size and can fetch a premium on the used market.

Nikon D700, 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G

The superzoom I get the most use out of is for DX Nikons, though: the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II. I've used it on all my crop sensor Nikon DSLR bodies and the only one on which I don't like it is the D7100, as the 24MP sensor reveals its limitations. It's plenty sharp on the older D300S, though.

Nikon D300S, 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II

Basically, any time you're going someplace where you don't want to carry several lenses and have no idea what you're going to be shooting, the Superzoom is your Swiss Army knife lens. Vacation, the zoo, just walking around the neighborhood, it's your one-lens solution.

Quality ones tend to be moderately spendy, because there's a lot of optical jiggery-pokery happening in there to keep image quality reasonably decent, and they're not so hot for indoors or low light because of their fairly slow aperture range, but they're my go-to solution for a sunny day stroll around Broad Ripple if the squirrels are out and about.

DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Nikon D2X

One of the best deals in a high-quality long telephoto zoom for DSLRs is the AF Nikkor Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED VR. You can find them used at BezosMart for under $400, which is really pretty sweet when you consider that they stickered for close to two grand when they debuted back at the turn of the Millennium.

Why are they so inexpensive? Well, they are an older style autofocus Nikon lens, utilizing a focus motor in the camera body to turn a drive screw in the lens body. This means they won't work as an autofocus lens on any of the inexpensive D3xxx or D5xxx Nikon bodies, or with an FTZ adaptor on a newer Nikon mirrorless. This reduces their demand on the used market.

Plus, it's not a very fast-focusing lens, especially on a prosumer type Nikon body. The big single-digit pro bodies, though, have torquey enough focusing motors to spin this lens reasonably quickly.

This is where the Nikon D2X comes in. The D2 series was Nikon's last pro body to use an APS-C size sensor, what Nikon calls "DX format", with the D2X having a 12MP Sony-manufactured CMOS unit, rather than the proprietary Nikon LBCAST sensor used in the D2H. 

Because they're so old, you can find good deals on them used online. I spotted mine for a couple hundred bucks in the showcase at Roberts.

Because of the 1.5X crop factor of the DX sensor, the 80-200mm lens has an effective focal length bump to the equivalent of 120-600mm, letting you get right up in the grille of Mr. Squirrel.

The effective VR system comes in handy with a lens this big and heavy, allowing you to shoot hand-held at much slower shutter speeds than you'd be able to with a non-stabilized lens. (This is one of those lenses that's big and heavy enough to rate a tripod foot.)

Here's the 80-200 mounted on my old Nikon D1X.

This is a great combo for urban wildlife, if a bit slow for birds-in-flight or sports.

Galactic Domination

Probably the first computer strategy game to really eat chunks of my time was Empire. Of course, I also liked the building aspects of Sim City. So when I ran across Civilization for the first time, I was hooked.

Civ was the prototypical "4X" turn-based strategy game, where the X's stand for "EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate". Trying various strategies was endless entertainment for me.

The one that really got me hooked, though, was Master of Orion, which added the fun of designing the starships for your fleet for maximum micromanaging nerdalicious fun.

How tickled was I to get it loaded and up and running on my clamshell iBook last week?

Pretty darn tickled, let me tell you.

Let me conquer this galaxy and then I'll give you a retro book report!

Mirrorless Pics: Broad Ripple, Indianapolis with the Hasselblad Lunar

I know it's just a Sony NEX-7 re-skinned in a funky titanium and carbon fiber shell, but I like it. I mostly shoot it with the Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* 16-70mm f/4, although I also have one of the E-mount 16mm f/2.8 pancake wide angles with the Hassy branding on it.

The Lunar was the first camera I ever had with in-camera HDR and I played with that a bit. The menus on Sony mirrorless cameras back then were clunky and awkward and the light re-skinning they got for Hasselblad duty just made them prettier but no less counterintuitive. The controls and menus on the Sony NEX cameras always felt like they were done by someone who got transferred to Sony Camera Division from Clock Radios or Stereo Remotes two weeks ago.

DSLR Pics: Random shots with the Canon EOS 40D

A liter-sized glass beer mug from Half Liter BBQ in SoBro, Indianapolis.

A happy pooch on the patio of Twenty Tap in SoBro, Indianapolis.

Tulips in SoBro, Indianapolis.

 A Volkswagen New Beetle in the parking lot at the grocery store.