Mirrorless Pics: Around downtown Indy with the Olympus PEN E-P5

These were all snapped with an Olympus PEN E-P5 wearing Panasonic's little 20mm f/1.7 pancake standard prime lens.

Lenses I Live By: The Short Portrait

Portrait lenses tend to be longer than standard primes, since this allows taking photos without having to be all up in the subject’s grille, as well as exaggerating the effects of focal length compression to not cause the subject’s features to look distorted.

The “short” portrait focal length range, in my own personal lexicon, runs from about 75mm to 105mm, in full-frame terms. (I use “full-frame terms” because the 35mm format spent something like fifty years establishing itself as the lingua franca of normie photography jargon.) 

Most of the camera systems I use have a lens that falls into this category. For instance, the Nikon 1 system, with its little 1" CX-format sensor, has the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2, which has the equivalent focal length of 87mm.

Nikon 1 V2 & 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2

Moving up to Micro Four Thirds, there are some pretty slick choices. Panasonic goes with 42.5mm focal lengths, which is an 85mm equivalent, in an inexpensive f/1.7 version and a bucks-up Leica Nocticron-branded f/1.2. Olympus, on the other hand, favors the 90mm equivalent 45mm focal length. They, too, offer a spendy f/1.2 PRO lens, but the M. Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1.8 is so compact, light, and inexpensive that it's the one I choose.

Things are similar with the Fujifilm X-mount ecosystem. There's a honking big 56mm f/1.2 portrait lens, but again, the bargain is the XF 50mm R WR "Fujicron", for its compact size and value pricing.

Fujifilm X-T2 & XF 50mm f/2 R WR

For my full-frame Canon DSLRs, I count on the EF 85mm f/1.8 for this task.

Canon EOS 5DS & EF 85mm f/1.8

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.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-M1X

These were snapped with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X using the M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 superzoom. That lens is one of the great things about the Micro Four Thirds format, as it has an equivalent focal length range to a 24-400mm lens on a full frame camera yet is smaller than a soda can.

Mirrorless Pics: Motorcycles with the Olympus E-M1X...

Of all my cameras, the Olympus E-M1X is easily the least fossil-y. It was announced in January of 2019, meaning it's barely over five years old; a spring chicken among the stringy old hens and roosters in my camera coop. They're still available new-in-the-box, although used copies are only about a third the price.

Still, although it was announced in 2019, it uses the same Sony-manufactured 20MP LiveMOS Four Thirds sensor first introduced in the 2016-vintage OM-D E-M1 Mark II, albeit backed up with dual TruePic VIII image processors, which gets it close to at least honorary fossil status.

Small is Beautiful

An all-in-one "walking around" zoom lens is what's normally on my cameras. I like them because they're more versatile than a fixed focal length lens and have more reach than the typical 24-70mm pro zoom. They don't have as much reach as a superzoom. In non camera nerd speak, these are "5X" rather than "10X" zooms. 

The lack of focal length, however, is made up for by much better optics as well as larger available apertures over the most of the range of the lens. For instance, my favorite Nikon full-frame superzoom, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6, has a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 28mm, while the 24-120mm f/4 VR is a third of a stop slower. But by the time you've zoomed out to 50mm, the 28-200 can only manage f/4.5, while the 24-120 will hold f/4 all the way out to 120mm.

The bigger hole lets in more light, allowing you to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds indoors or in the shade.

These lenses tend to be compact, but still fairly chonky, and that's one reason that smaller sensor cameras still appeal to me.

Thanks to the magic of crop factor, these are the equivalent lenses for full-frame, APS-C, and Micro 4/3rds:

• Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR: 84x103.5mm, 710g
• Fuji 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR: 78x89mm, 440g
• Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4: 68-86mm, 320g

That Micro 4/3rds lens on the Olympus, seen in the photo above, is almost an inch shorter, about a half inch smaller in diameter, and less than half the weight of the full-frame Nikon, yet it covers the same effective field of view and is a full stop brighter on the wide end, to boot. 

That's just shy of a pound's weight difference between the Nikon and Panasonic glass, and you notice that when it's hanging around your neck during a long day.

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Give it up, Panasonic.

For years people bought cameras manufactured by Ernst Leitz GmbH, but everyone called Leitz camera "Leicas". In fact, that's the official name of the successor corporation.

Similarly, when one purchased a camera manufactured by the Asahi Optical Company in Japan, one referred to it by its trade name, "Pentax". The "Pentax" name was actually purchased from Zeiss, and is a portmanteau of "Pentaprism", for the viewfinder mechanism, and "Contax", itself a trade name for a line of Zeiss-manufactured cameras.

So when the Matsushita Electric Industrial Corporation got into the camera biz, they wanted a catchy little name for them, too. I mean, they should be pretty good at it, since all their consumer goods were sold under the "Panasonic" name, and Panasonic home hi-fi equipment went under the "Technics" brand, in a sort of Russian nesting doll of obfuscation.

So Panasonic hung the "Lumix" name on their cameras. Every Panasonic camera has "LUMIX" in big letters right on the front of it.

But I've never heard anyone call them that. Ask a Micro Four Thirds loyalist shooting his shiny new Lumix G9 II and ask him what kind of camera he's using and it's dollars to donuts he'll answer "Panasonic", despite the label blazoned in half-inch tall letters across the front of the viewfinder hump.

Just own the Panasonic brand, guys. After all, it's been the official company name since 2008.

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