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: Sports Cars with the Olympus E-510

The 10MP Olympus E-510 was the immediate successor to the E-500 as Olympus's midrange Four Thirds DSLR. It replaced the eight megapixel Kodak CCD sensor of the earlier model with a ten megapixel Panasonic Live MOS sensor, and was the first Oly DSLR to offer Live View as well as in-body image stabilization.

It's a compact little camera, roughly comparable to a Canon Rebel XTi; a little wider, a little shorter, and an ounce lighter. The difference comes in the lenses, since even a high performance zoom like the Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 is about the same size as an 18-135mm EF-S travel zoom for the crop sensor canons.

First pics with the Leica Digilux Zoom...

So, I've got a Fuji-branded 32MB SmartMedia card in the Digilux Zoom. With image quality set to "Fine", which is 1280x1024 pixels, that gives me 46 images worth of capacity.

While that resolution is comically low by today's standards (your typical 24MP camera is more like 6000x4000), remember that in 1999 most folks were still looking at images on 1024x768 pixel CRT monitors and those photos were being transmitted via dialup modems as often as not. A 760k image file was big.

I have white balance set to auto. 

The Leica's ISO is fixed at the native 125; even in Manual mode you can't change it. Indoors shots obviously require flash.

The screen washes out in sunlight. Fortunately it also has a tunnel-type optic viewfinder.

Badge Engineering

Leica's first attempt at entering the consumer digital market happened in 1998 with the Digilux, a 1.5MP camera that was a re-badged Fuji.

In late 1999 it was replaced with the Digilux Zoom, a similarly reskinned Fujifilm MX-1700 (also known as the Fujifilm FinePix 1700 in the U.S. market.)

The Digilux Zoom boasted a Fujinon 6.6-19.8mm f/3.2-5.0 zoom lens, which combined with the crop factor of the 1/2.3" CCD sensor to give an equivalent focal length range of 38-114mm on a 35mm camera, which is a useful all-in-one zoom length.

While the body was a solid-feeling construct of aluminum and magnesium, the control layout was haphazard and the opposite of ergonomic. 

The camera used SmartMedia cards to store images and had no USB ports, so you'll need a SmartMedia-compatible card reader if you want to download images.

I'll play with this thing a bit and write an actual review.