ZD 50-200mm

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AFL Football Grand Final – candid portraits with the Olympus ZD 50-200mm

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

I didn’t manage to get tickets to watch my team Geelong play the Saints in today’s AFL football Grand Final, so I decided to go to Melbourne’s Federation Square to watch the game on the big screen on a very wet, cold Spring day which included a hail storm.

As an aside, the AFL Grand Final at Melbourne’s MCG stadium hosts one of the biggest stadium crowds in the world, 99,251 spectators attended today’s game creating a special ambience (however, the record for the MCG was 121,696 in the 1970 VFL Grand Final between Carlton and Collingwo0d).

I decided to leave my Canon 1DMIII at home and take my favorite combination: Olympus E510 + Olympus ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens and my Panasonic GH-1 with Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens for the night shots without flash.

The Olympus lens got very wet in the rain, although I managed to protect the E510 as well as I could, and the resulting candid portraits were worth it – even though they were mainly of Saints supporters.

Again, all were straight jpegs from the camera, AWB, no post-processing apart from resizing for the web. All were aperture priority exposure at wide open aperture although the night shots on the stage were manual exposure.

For example:

and this one amazes me how any camera could meter the skin tones perfectly when there is such backlight combined with a black umbrella to confuse the meter – maybe they just neutralised each other out, or maybe the metering is good?

Check the full photo story here and look at how nice the bokeh is with that lens …. delicious

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Tags: football, Four Thirds, Olympus, Panasonic, ZD 50-200mm

Melbourne’s tulip festival – why I love the Olympus ZD 50-200mm lens

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Last weekend I decided on a day trip in very poor weather to the nearby mountain ranges to check out Melbourne’s annual tulip festival in the Dandenong Ranges.

When I first arrived it was pouring rain, so I decided to go to nearby Olinda where one of my favorite pie shops “Pie in the sky” resides and indulged in a pie floater – a beautiful steak and mushroom pie sitting in a pea and ham soup – just the thing to warm you up on a cold Spring day!

The bad news… whilst eating my pie and soup, the rain stopped and this absolutely gorgeous light streamed through the clouds, but then disappeared by the time I was ready to leave

Now onto the tulip festival – this as I found out, reinforces how multicultural Melbourne really is – this is a Dutch festival but that Saturday was Turkish day complete with a belly dancer, but the tourists were dominated by Japanese and other Asian tourists including locals.

I decided I was going to only take one camera kit – my Olympus E510 Four Thirds camera with my much treasured Olympus ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 lens – you can see how useful this combination is, by checking out my photos taken with this here.

One aspect I do like about this lens is that it is weather resistant so a bit of rain is not going to hurt it (but I do have to protect the E510 although it has survived a wave at a beach washing over the top of it without any issues! For complete weather sealing you really need the Olympus E-3 or its successor which should be announced soon), and its big lens hood which helps to prevent rain drops hitting the front lens and ruining your images. I must admit I tend to often not use the lens hood on this when its not raining as it almost doubles the size of this already large lens and tends to intimidate people.

Now, onto a few candid pics of the day to show how nice this combo is (click on images for larger view):

Note that these are all straight jpegs from the camera, no post-processing apart from resizing for the web – Olympus cameras arguably have the best jpeg engine out there – if you don’t want to spend time processing raw image files, I would strongly advise you think carefully about buying Olympus – I would rarely use a jpeg straight from my Canon 1DMIII and I believe the general consensus is that applies to other cameras too!

A Japanese lady admiring the tulips (and taking a few pics herself):

Turkish sisters posing for a family portrait amongst the tulips whilst I was some 50m away:

Horses taking kids for carriage rides:

Some girls are not afraid of the mud, or perhaps are more fascinated by the row upon row of tulips:

and some lovely tulips:

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Tags: Four Thirds, Olympus, ZD 50-200mm

Victorian bushfire landscape at 12 weeks with Olympus E510 and ZD 50-200mm lens

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Following on from my previous photo essay blog on the Victorian bushfires at 6 weeks after the fires in Feb 2009, I took another trip yesterday and went bushwalking amongst the burnt rainforests of mountain ash.

It was great to see the forests gradually regenerating, particularly the gullies, although in vast areas of drier forests, there was little signs of new life.

But amongst the devastation, paradoxically, there was beauty to be found.

The following image was taken with the late afternoon sun highlighting the dead orange leaves of the Australian Eucalypts, and contrasting with stark dead trees on the hills behind.

This is a very unusual scene for Australia, as although it may look like a northern hemisphere fall scene, Australian Eucalypt trees are not deciduous and don’t turn orange in the Autumn as they appear to be doing here. All these trees were affected by the bush fires.

The farm pasture has become green – indeed they had returned to green by the 6 week stage, and the farmer has rebuilt his fences.

Please click on this image to view it at larger size.

This image was taken hand held with Olympus E510 and the brilliant Olympus ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens – I just love this lens except it is a bit big and heavy, but much less so than its Canon or Nikon counterparts.

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Tags: bush fires, E510, landscapes, Olympus, ZD 50-200mm

Sports using the Olympus ZD 50-200mm with 2x TC for 800mm reach from the boundary

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Much has been aired of concerns of the inevitably higher noise levels at high ISO of the Olympus 2x cropped when compared to the larger sensors.

BUT, if you can get by with ISO 800 and below, the 2x crop creates a unique opportunity by giving you unprecedented image stabilised telephoto reach of 800mm in a compact, relatively light (1.8kg), hand holdable package which you just can’t manage to achieve at all with a Nikon D700 or Canon 5DMII.

Yesterday, I played in our annual social cricket game, and brought along with me two camera kits:

Canon 1DMIII (1.3x crop) with EF 135mm f/2.0L + 1.4x teleconverter
Olympus E510 with ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD + EC-20 2x teleconverter

I like this combination as they are both about the same weight, and I can use the Canon to get in close while I am on the field risking my life getting hit by a cricket ball as I concentrate on getting the shot. While the Olympus I gave to a friend’s teenage son who had never used such a camera before, and I showed him how to AF by pressing the Fn button and all he had to do was take shots from the safety of the boundary line.

He absolutely loved clicking away and the extreme telephoto of 800mm reach in 35mm terms allowed him to capture the action on the centre of the pitch as if he was standing right there.

It was quite a cloudy day (great for avoiding highlights being blown out but not so good for super-telephotos hand held), so I had set the E510 to AWB, ISO 400, aperture priority at f/8 (f/4 x 2 for the teleconverter, although for some he must of accidentally moved it to f/10 ie. f/5 x 2).

So here are a few of what this 1st time, unsupervised photographer managed to achieve – these are straight jpegs from the camera – no crop, no sharpening, no PS other than resize and jpeg compression for the web.

Click on each to be taken to a larger view.

The first is a photo he took of his dad leg glancing for four runs:

And a batsman about to punish a bowler:

And he took one of his friend on the field not to far away, and it shows the lovely bokeh this lens has (this one I have cropped to about 25% of the whole image):

More of the day’s cricket shots can be seen here – yes that’s me in far camera right of the team photo

The close portrait shots using the Canon are very nice but it did require me to be within 3m of the subject to get them, not 100m as with the Olympus combo – distance changes everything!

More of my photos of the 50-200mm with 2xTC combo can be seen here.

The new E-620 and E-30 will be MUCH better than the E510 for sports as the extra AF points will allow more functional continuous AF, while the E-3 will allow you to keep shooting with this lens combo even if it starts raining.

Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses – as good as the Nikon D700 and Canon 5DMII are, I doubt they could achieve this telephoto reach without necessitating a tripod or monpod, and of course, the 5DMII may die if it starts getting a bit of a drizzle rain happening whereas the E-3 should be fine.

I have a web page outlining the comparative offerings available to Canon, Nikon and Olympus for telephoto lenses here – as can be seen, a hand holdable 800mm kit is not really possible on full frame dSLRs but could be achievable on the 1.5x or 1.6x cropped sensor dSLRs but on these, the noise at high ISO is not substantially different to that on Olympus.

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Tags: E510, Olympus, ZD 50-200mm, ZD EC20

The walk-around telephoto zoom kit – comparisons

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

My requirements here are:

focal length range ~100 to 400mm in 35mm equivalent terms
high image quality
reasonably light and compact – < 2kg for the camera and lens and preferably < 24cm long mounted so it fits in a medium size shoulder bag
image stabilised
aperture at least f/4.5 to allow reasonable background blurring
circular aperture blades for nice bokeh
preferably sharp enough and with minimal aberrations to allow reasonable use of teleconverters
close focus
ultrasonic motor or equivalent for fast AF
preferably weatherproofed so you don’t need to panic if it starts to rain
medium priced

NOTE: ONLY the Olympus ZD 50-200mm kits satisfy ALL the above options.

Nikon D700 full frame with Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR:

unfortunately the aperture is a bit slow negating use of teleconverters, etc and it is an expensive lens and is 1.36kg for the lens alone, while close focus is a poor 2.3m
a pro would probably go for the Nikkor 200-400mm f/4 VR but that is much more expensive and tips the scales at almost 3.3kg!
verdict – great high ISO and action performance but not for walkabout

Nikon D300 cropped sensor with Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR:

gives 105-450mm range but at a slow f/5.6
a nicer option would be the much more expensive and heavier Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR which gives 105-300mm and could be used with a TC

Canon 5DMII with EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS:

again a rather slow aperture and I suspect its resolution will not be adequate for the 21mp sensor, and I’m not a big fan of the push-pull zoom mechanism while at 1.36kg its still a touch heavy and close focus of 1.8m is still nothing to write home about.
I suspect it’s time for Canon to update this lens
an alternative is the more expensive but much lighter 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DO IS lens
verdict: not a great option for this focal range as a walkaround

Canon 50D with Tamron AF18-270mm F/3.5-6.3 VC lens:

an incredible 15x zoom range giving 28-419mm range but lots of compromises on image quality and AF speed
verdict: may be an option if image quality is not highest priority and don’t need it for action photography

Canon 50D with EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS:

112-480mm range but again, slow aperture and resolution will not match the 15mp sensor

Olympus E520/E510 with ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD:

the lightest (<1.8kg for camera and lens), and almost the cheapest option, and provides some great features which beat all the other options:

lens is weatherproofed (camera can be too if you buy the E-3)
nice wide aperture with circular diaphragm for nice blurred backgrounds
close focus to 1.2m giving 0.42x macro
ability to use with either 1.4x or 2x TC with AF functioning and good image quality, allowing an incredible 800mm f/7 capability which can be hand held at 1/250th sec

now if Olympus could make it a touch smaller and lighter, and work for Micro Four Thirds in contrast AF mode, it would be perfect
verdict: MY favourite telephoto zoom lens – if you need action use, then consider the E-30 or E-3 cameras which will give faster AF, more AF sensor points for continuous AF and 5fps burst rates

Olympus E510/520 with ZD 70-300mm f/4-5.6:

a cheaper, lighter alternative but at cost of image quality, slower AF and teleconverter use not recommended
gives an incredible 140-600mm range image stabilised and not as obtrusive as the other options

If you really want super compact but high quality and no need for fast AF for action, then consider:

Micro Four Thirds camera with forthcoming 45~200mm f/4-5.6 OIS lens which gives 90-400mm range in a very compact outfit, and I’m guessing there will be some continuous AF video-enabled camera bodies coming soon

It’s not just the camera to consider when buying a new camera but what lenses are available for it and how you want to use it.

I have a comparison table of lens features here, some example photos I have taken with this lens, and example photos taken with this lens with Olympus 2x teleconverter (EC-20).

Bob Atkins has a comparison of entry level dSLRs here – although he does not go into length on the relative benefits of the lenses available to each.

Brandon Eu has a nice blog demonstrating how useful this lens is.

In my opinion, for the amateur who can afford it, the Olympus ZD 50-200mm SWD, the excellent Olympus teleconverters and general high optical quality of their lenses are some of the main reasons to choose the Olympus system, the cameras are rather secondary.

Posted in lenses, photography | 2 Responses »
Tags: Canon, Four Thirds Micro, Nikon, Olympus, ZD 50-200mm

A celestial smiley face to bring cheer and good luck

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

It’s Dec 1st, 2008 and tonight we had the pleasure of a conjunction of the crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus making a smiley face in the evening sky.

This alignment of the crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus apparently will not occur again until 2052, although the next time Venus and Jupiter have a close conjunction is in May 2011 and March 2012 so for those that missed it, here is what it looked like from Melbourne, Australia.

I took the opportunity to play with my Canon 1DMIII with EF 24-105mm L lens from my letterbox.

For the tech heads, I removed the UV filter to minimise lens flare from the street light and the settings used were 24mm focal length, f/4, 3200ISO, 0.5sec exposure.

No post-processing, just resizing and compression for the web. Click on the image for a 1000 pixel wide view.

I also tried with an Olympus OM 21mm and 24mm lens but whilst both gave excellent results, they did have a more pronounced lens flare.

Of course, I could have moved over to the park and avoided the street light but I felt this added interest and lit up the foreground nicely.

And just for the Olympus guys… here is a shot with the Olympus E510 with ZD 50-200mm SWD lens at 50mm which I have cropped just a little and applied a blue monotone tint in PS but no other PS other than resize and compress for the web.

This image was taken at f/4.5, ISO 400 at 6 secs exposure with antishock set to 5 secs (mirror lockup). I purposely over-exposed the moon to bring out foreground detail.

The ZD 50-200mm at 200mm giving 400mm eq. focal length reach in 35mm terms actually took a very nicely cropped shot just of the moon, venus and jupiter, but lacked the contextual interest of the foreground.

Those in Europe should be lucky enough to see the moon occult Venus in a similar way to the following occultations I imaged of Jupiter and Mars a few years ago.

“The last time London was treated to such a favorably placed Venus occultation was back on October 7, 1961. And after 2008, there will not be another similarly favorable Venus occultation for the United Kingdom until January 10, 2032.”

I captured an uncommon event in 2005 when Jupiter was occulted by the moon:

and.. an even rarer event, a grazing occultation with Mars when Mars was almost at its closest to Earth in 2003 in tens of thousands of years – hence bigger and brighter than usual.

More of my astrophotography can be found here:

More information on this event can be found at space.com.

Other blogs to cover this event:

Ian Musgrave, Adelaide, Australia

And, if you are in America, the moon has moved to the other side of Venus and Jupiter resulting in a sad face, which I guess is representative of the state of affairs over there

see:

and compares with past events:

1998 conjunction

and don’t miss this image of a sequence of shots at the same time each day for a full month in New Delhi showing Jupiter marching towards Venus using an 18mm lens. Three days of photography are missing because of clouds and haze in the evening, 12th, 16th and 30 November. The crescent moon starts at the bottom on 1st November, goes just at the edge of (behind) the building, and upwards, and returns in the scene on 1st December to form the now famous Celestial Smiley!

The octagonal building in foreground has a bit of astronomical history, Humayun – a mughal emperor in India, was an astronomer, one evening he was trying to locate Venus in the evening dusk when he heard the muezzin’s call for evening prayers, he rushed and fell down the stairs to his death (a few days later). The octagonal building was the library of Humayun.
Several DSLR cameras were used, Canon 450D, Canon 1000D, Nikon D80, Nikon D70. The images were first scaled (in photoshop) bringing them equal to a Canon 450D, as most of the photos were taken with this camera. Alignment (Translate, Rotate, Scale) was done in Images Plus, and composite was constructed using Startrails software.

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Tags: astrophotography, Canon 1DMIII, EF24-105mmL IS, moon, night, Olympus, planets, ZD 50-200mm

The 800mm fashion shot

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

I was helping another photographer yesterday shooting a very quirky fashion style shoot in the middle of the busy streets of Melbourne’s tramways. Instead of me holding his strobes, I suggested I show him what my lowly Olympus E510 could do from 100m away at a 35mm equivalent focal length reach of 800mm hand held.

Even with this relatively compact outfit in the fading light, many passing by asked who the famous model was and did their best to distract me so I would get hit by a tram.

Despite my shakes, the image stabiliser on the E510 worked well enough at 1/200th second, f7, ISO 400 to take shots like this one.

800mm fashion shot

Now, the 60′s outfit, etc will not be to everyone’s taste, and the sharpness may not allow a poster size advertisement to be scrutinised closely without criticism, but the point of the shot is, that this shot with such a compact, carry anywhere outfit is currently only possible with the Four Thirds system and in this case with two great optics – ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD and the ZD EC-20 2x teleconverter.

For the tech heads, I have added some vignetting and contrast in Lightroom and some selective sharpening in PS.

Now, I had to also demonstrate to him how good the ZD 50-200mm lens is on its own at 200mm (ie. 400mm eq. focal length) for outdoor portraiture to blur and compress the background.

This time we are in a back alley in Melbourne’s CBD, and we decided to go for a non-traditional, emotive portrait with a bit of anguish, and a touch disturbed – I do like emotional expressive works when dealing with people as a canvas. perhaps the model read my mind!

anguish

Larger size images are available here and here.

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Tags: E510, fashion, Olympus, portrait, ZD 50-200mm, ZD EC20

Macro eyes again… this time with ZD 50-200mm lens

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

In an attempt to provide an alternative to prominent ring flash catch lights in the previous post when using a ZD 50mm macro lens with ring flash, I decided to try the ZD 50-200mm SWD which gives a much longer working distance and thus reduces the size of the catch lights significantly.

Whilst it is possible with the ZD 50-200mm alone, the magnification at its closest focus of 1.2m is about half that of the ZD 50mm macro and thus the diameter of the iris is only some 550 pixels on a 10mp camera.

ZD 50-200mm alone

Thus to get higher magnification (now we are back to about 1200 pixels for the iris diameter), I tried adding the EC-20 2x teleconverter to the ZD 50-200mm at f/11 and increasing the ISO to 400 given the greater working distance. The greater working distance means the flash is now illuminating the interior of the eye a bit causing a mild red eye appearance which I would personally prefer not to have in the images.

ZD 50-200mm with 2x TC

I could probably have got away with ISO 100 but at f/11 (f/5.6 x 2 for the TC) and 1.2m distance it is pushing the ring flash near its maximum output, and if I was serious about getting the best images, I would try ISO 100-200 and perhaps even try f/16 (f/8 x 2 for the TC).

My preference for obtaining a catch light smaller than the iris opening is to use the ZD 50mm macro lens with ZD EC-20 2x TC with lens focused at 0.3-0.4m instead of its closest focus depending on desired catchlight size:

smaller catchlight

For a complete comparison, see the rest of the images here

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Tags: macro, Olympus, Olympus Ring Flash, ZD 50-200mm

800mm hand held telephoto reach hand held

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

OK…you have probably guessed… I am so impressed with this unique combination:

Olympus E510 + ZD 50-200mm + ZD EC20 2x teleconverter to give a relatively light (~2kg), compact, easily carried and used hand held kit that can deliver great images hand held at 1/200th sec shutter speed allowing great photos in the shade at ISO 400, f/7.

Why would you want this?

Well sometimes you just can’t get in close such as with this image of a Sumatran tiger in our zoo here in Melbourne. It was a nice cloudy day and this guy was way up back of his enclosure resting in shade some 50-100m away from me.

Now I’m not that crazy to jump the fence or throw things at him to get him to come closer, nor am I that patient to wait all day for him to move and nor do I want to cart around a 4-6kg camera kit and tripod, and lastly I don’t want to stand out from the crowd that much – I might get mugged!

So here is a cropped version (cropped to 3.8 megapixel) to emphasise the tiger – remember this is at 800mm telephoto reach so you can get a reasonable idea of how far away he was if I still had to crop it by 60%:

tiger

But when viewed at 100% crop, you can see how sharp this combo is even hand held at 1/200th sec – this just should not be possible!

tiger

see here to see the first image resized to a nice computer screen resolution.

The great thing is that even with the entry level E510, the AF worked very nicely indeed, and before you take this for granted, remember that on nearly all other brand cameras, AF will not work when the lens aperture + teleconverter combination becomes f/8 or smaller.

So even if you are happy to lug a much bigger and heavier lens around with a Canon or Nikon, you may find that you cannot use AF and you may not have image stabilisation available.

A case in point is if I bought the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 lens and used it with my EF 1.4x teleconverter on my Canon 1DMIII, the result would be 728mm telephoto reach at f/8 and according to Canon’s website, AF is not possible and of course there is no image stabiliser, and it now weighs almost 3kg and is a very conspicuous long, white lens which has a close focus of 3.5m and not 1.2m as with the Olympus combo.

So you would miss out on photo opportunities such as these flowers at the zoo (no crop, just resized):

flowers

Now I am not criticising Canon or Nikon here, as they have their own advantages, but for handholdable, super telephoto reach with macro capabilities, you can’t beat the Olympus system.

Posted in lenses, photography | 4 Responses »
Tags: Olympus, telephoto, ZD 50-200mm, ZD EC20

Olympus ZD 50-200mm SWD + EC-20: moon revisited

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Well I had a chance to capture a crescent moon tonight between the clouds so I thought it was worth comparing the 50-200mm with 2x teleconverter (ie. 800mm telephoto reach) with hand held vs tripod with mirror up.

These are 100% crops of original jpegs (ie. you are pixel peeping at 100% here, more than you would if you printed this), and no PS processing, no sharpening.

First, at 200mm+2xTC f/3.5 (ie. 800mm eq. f/7), 1/200th sec, ISO 400 hand held with IS ON:

moon with IS on, hand held 800mm

and, at ISO 100, 1/25thsec, f/5 (ie. 800mm eq. f/10) on tripod with mirror up (antishock = 5sec):

moon via tripod 800mm

Well, I don’t think there is a lot of difference, so using this lens combo at 800mm hand held with IS on and 1/200th sec gives pretty impressive results and such results at this telephoto reach with autofocus hand held are unlikely to be had with any other system.

Of course, with manual focus mirror lenses you could get the reach on other cropped sensors but unless they have IS in the body, you would not get away with 1/200th sec and these lenses have less contrast and resolution compared to this lens combination.

These were taken with the Olympus E510 and look even better with a bit of sharpening such as with unsharp mask in PS.

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Tags: E510, Four Thirds, moon, Olympus, telephoto, ZD 50-200mm, ZD EC20