The brilliantly designed Olympus mZD 300mm f/4 IS PRO lens for Micro Four Thirds is an amazing lens in terms of compact 600mm super telephoto capabilities with near diffraction-limited optical superb resolution and almost zero aberrations.
A 600mm super telephoto lens though usually has very limited utility – usually to shooting wildlife or sports at a distance.
Not so this lens, it is light enough and compact enough to walk around with and with its close focus of only 1.4m, it doubles up as a close up almost macro lens to allow taking shots of small things from a distance without scaring them.
It could even be used for people photography where a busy background can be compressed as well as rendered out of focus with a nice bokeh.
So here are a couple of examples of the bokeh with this lens:
residual oak leaves in mid-winter.
Not sure what this plant is – a winter flowering plant I found on my walk yesterday through the Victorian goldfields, dodging incredibly deep and steep mine shafts littered all around – without any hazard protections – so one had to tread carefully indeed!
As you can tell – I love these Olympus lenses because they are sharp edge-to-edge and this has freed me from having to have my subject in the centre as with most dSLR lenses – the above were shot hand held in very overcast conditions.
Interestingly, 43rumors.com has posted that Olympus has applied for patents for a couple more fascinating super-telephoto lenses around the same size as this 300mm f/4 lens:
- 200-300mm f/2.8-4 lens 228cm long
- 300-500mm f/2.8-4 lens 338cm long
It will be very interesting indeed to see if these lenses eventuate as they also had applied for a patent for a 500mm f/4 lens measuring 338cm long.
See my list of Micro Four Thirds lenses.
