{"id":2085,"date":"2009-09-21T21:41:29","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T11:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2085"},"modified":"2009-09-21T21:41:29","modified_gmt":"2009-09-21T11:41:29","slug":"panasonic-gh-1-with-canon-ef-85mm-f18-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2085","title":{"rendered":"Panasonic GH-1 with Canon EF 85mm f\/1.8 lens"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Panasonic GH-1 is designed for Micro Four Thirds<\/a> lenses but can also use all the Four Thirds<\/a> lenses – although many of these latter are manual focus.
\n
\nOne of the main reasons for buying into the Micro Four Thirds system instead of using a more compact point and shoot camera is the combination of image quality and versatility, in particular, the ability to achieve shallow depth of field with a range of wide aperture lenses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of my favorite wide aperture lenses for nice medium telephoto shallow depth of field effect are the Four Thirds lenses such as the Olympus ZD 50mm f\/2.0 macro and 50-200mm f\/2.8-3.5 SWD lenses.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, both of these will only manual focus on the GH-1, and the 50-200mm is a bit too big for it.<\/p>\n

I thus thought I would try out my Canon EF 85mm f\/1.8 lens<\/strong>. Whilst this lens designed for Canon<\/a> EOS dSLRs, it must be used at a fixed aperture on the MFT cameras via an adapter<\/strong> (although you can change this aperture by setting it on a Canon body then holding in DOF preview button as you remove it).<\/p>\n

In reality this is not such a big problem as my main reason for using it is to get the wide aperture in a relatively compact lens. To get this sort of focal length\/aperture in Four Thirds, you would have to resort to the very expensive, 1.8kg ZD 35-100mm f\/2.0 lens – not really a nice size for the GH-1!<\/p>\n

Of course, if you have a Nikon or Carl Zeiss 85mm f\/1.4 or f\/1.8 lenses and you would have full aperture control, but alas I do not have them.<\/p>\n

The Canon EF 85mm f\/1.8 is quite a nice size for the GH-1 given that it gives you 170mm focal length reach at f\/1.8<\/strong> and it is quite a sharp lens even wide open but it does have one big problem – purple fringing at wide aperture – this is a common problem on legacy film lenses in particular when used on digital cameras at apertures wider than f\/2.8, but it is correctable in post-processing.<\/p>\n

Here are a few quick shots on a recent trip into the city to show what you can do with this combo at f\/1.8 with no post processing (click on image to enlarge):<\/p>\n

\"bokeh<\/a><\/p>\n

\"street<\/a><\/p>\n

and now to demonstrate the purple fringing that occurs in high contrast junctions (click to see full image resized for web):<\/p>\n

\"purple<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a great lens if used carefully wide open. You can reduce purple fringing by using f\/2.8 instead of f\/1.8 but you also lose a bit of your nice shallow depth of field.<\/p>\n

It is not as good a lens optically as a Canon 135mm f\/2.0L lens or an Olympus ZD 50-200mm lens, but it is much more compact, and very usable.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t go out and buy it just to use on Micro Four Thirds cameras, but given that there are many Canon users buying into MFT for a more compact solution with true AF video capability, this does become a very useful option for them as long as manual focus and fixed aperture will fit their needs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Panasonic GH-1 is designed for Micro Four Thirds lenses but can also use all the Four Thirds lenses – although many of these latter are manual focus. One of the main reasons for buying into the Micro Four Thirds system instead of using a more compact point and shoot camera is the combination of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[44,18,123],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lenses","tag-canon","tag-four-thirds-micro","tag-panasonic-gh1"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t