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

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.

DSLR Pics: Urban wildlife with the Olympus E-5

Pairing the ultimate Four Thirds DSLR, Olympus's E-5 from 2010, with the only real quality superzoom in the Four Thirds ecosystem, the Panasonic Leica Vario-Elmar 14-150mm f/3.5-5.6, gives a pretty handy package for snapping pics of urban wildlife.

Mourning Dove

Chipmunk

Squirrel!

Moar Squirrel!

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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Digicam Pics: Around SoBro with the Panasonic DMC-TZ3

Playing around with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 from 2007.

From about the early Aughties until the early Twenty-Teens, digicams actually came in a variety of types as manufacturers tried to slice the market ever finer. The TZ3 came out in 2007, a year when Panasonic alone launched over a dozen different models that could loosely be termed "pocket digicams", not counting larger bridge cameras or DSLRs.

The TZ3 was one of two "travel zooms", hence the nomenclature. Panasonic's travel zooms were pocket-size cameras with long zoom lenses ("10X" in consumer-speak, "28-280mm equivalent" if you're a shutterbug) that should allow you to do it all when you were on a trip. You could take landscapes, closeups of architectural details, or bring that scenic castle across the river closer without having to "zoom with your feet".

The TZ3 differed from its stablemate, the TZ2, in having a 7MP sensor to the 6MP one on the lesser model, as well as a 3" LCD screen versus the TZ2's 2.5" screen. They both sported the same 4.6-46mm f/3.3-4.9 MEGA O.I.S. lens, with the TZ3 having a higher MSRP at $330.

Here's a wide-ish shot of the SoBrosaurus, a frequent test subject of mine...

It was heavily overcast, and even with O.I.S. or "Optical Image Stabilization", which is Panasonic's trade name for their lens-based image stabilization, the little camera had difficulty returning a sharp image at the long end of its zoom range in that light, fighting both camera shake and Panasonic's own heavy-handed noise reduction. In retrospect, I should have set maximum ISO at 400 and taken my chances.

Colors on the little 1/2.35" CCD sensor are somewhat muted under the dim lighting...

...but pop nicely when the sun comes out.