Olympus Zuiko Lenses on modern DSLRs (revisited)

 

I've spent the last year or so taking most of my photographs on an iPhone. 

It has been an interesting experiment and includes my holiday time in Florida, Sardinia and Iceland. 

The latest cameraphones are pretty good for blog-sized photos and the magnification isn't too bad either.

It is a trade-off between portability (iPhone) and heft (DSLR). I used to use a Trip 35 film camera and that was always reliable for most travel photography, so I guess I'm used to having to deal with the capabilities of the fixed focal lengths. 

The iPhone is wildly more flexible than the old Trip. The iPhone zoom goes from 0.5x to 10x, almost steplessly. I was inside a National Trust property recently and the iPhone could capture rooms better than my wide angle DSLR lens! 

But there's still some things I prefer about a proper camera. I still prefer to look through a viewfinder and when I'm taking any kind of 'show' pictures the DSLR is still usually better and I can manipulate the blurriness/bokeh of the picture instead of cheating afterwards(!)

Some years ago I posted a blog about using old SLR lenses with DSLRs and at the time I was using the lenses with a Canon 5D. The camera was massive and dwarfed the lenses. It worked pretty well, but I've updated recently and am now trying with a $25 Z adapter for Zuiko lenses on a full frame. 

This DSLR camera size is much more in keeping with the lenses, although some of those metal-barreled compact lenses are surprisingly heavy. So far it is interesting because with the Zuikos it is all about the manual settings. 

There's the handy aperture control on the lens (manual) and then the camera-based manual shutter speed and/or ASA settings to contend with. I know I can probably use a computerised zoom to a similar effect, but there's something interesting about working with prime lenses and especially with small primes like the one in the picture. 55mm and f1.2. Crazy. I don't know how much Nikon would sell something electronic for, but I'd guess here would be no change from £1,000. 

I progressively bought the fun lenses on eBay. I think I'm at eleven or more primes now and counting as well as three 35mm bodies by now (hint, the camera kits are often better bids than the individual lenses!) 

The reason I originally went for the Zuikos was that they were originally good lenses, suited for 35mm and nearly all of them were designed to be very compact and to fit a few in a jacket pocket. 

Check out the glass in the 50mm or 100mm and you'll see what I mean. I'll be experimenting some more over then next few days. Using the iPhone, I once more became used to jpeg editing, which isn't as clever as RAW for retaining detail in photos, but has still moved a long way since ye olden days. The jpegs are also consideably smaller. I notice a RAW nowadays can be around 40Mb for a single picture. Decisions, decisions!