{"id":2360,"date":"2009-11-01T21:35:05","date_gmt":"2009-11-01T11:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2009-11-01T22:53:17","modified_gmt":"2009-11-01T12:53:17","slug":"olympus-om-135mm-on-the-panasonic-gh-1-micro-four-thirds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2360","title":{"rendered":"Olympus OM 135mm on the Panasonic GH-1 Micro Four Thirds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Panasonic GH-1 Micro Four Thirds camera<\/a> comes with a very expensive, unique HD video optimised, 14-140mm OIS lens, so why would I even bother putting a cheap $100 2nd hand Ebay Olympus OM 135mm f\/2.8 lens on it?<\/p>\n

As nice as the 14-140mm lens is, there is one major problem for me – its aperture at 140mm is f\/5.6 which means I am not able to blur the background as much as I would like.<\/p>\n

Now I could use the Olympus ZD 50-200mm f\/2.8-3.5 SWD which I love, or the brilliant Canon EF 135mm f\/2.0L lens, but these are both big and heavy, not to mention expensive.<\/p>\n

When I go hiking, I prefer to take a few lens options but still travel light, here is where the Olympus OM 135mm f\/2.8 comes in.<\/p>\n

The beauty of the Olympus OM lenses are that they are so compact and light – much more so than Nikon F, Canon FD, Canon EF or any other 35mm SLR lens.<\/p>\n

Of course, I would not use this for sports or action shots unless I could pre-focus – accurate manual focus even with the very nice MF assist of the Panasonic GH-1 still takes me 1 sec or so.<\/p>\n

But would this lens perform wide open?<\/p>\n

On Friday, I decided to test it out on one of my bush walks in a mallee tree forest and although the image below is not going to win any prizes, it does show how nice even a busy distracting background can become. There has been no PS sharpening but some toning\/contrast applied.<\/p>\n

The background would have appeared even smoother had I not applied a bit of contrast, but the image needed a bit of contrast given the overcast day. Also, note that these were taken in the GH-1’s uncropped 16:9 aspect ratio – another great feature of the GH-1, just wish it had an in-built image stabiliser too like the Olympus cameras.<\/p>\n

\"f\/2.8\" <\/p>\n

Compare the background with that taken at f\/5.6 which would be similar had I used the Panasonic 14-140mm lens wide open:<\/p>\n

\"f\/5.6\" <\/p>\n

I was very pleased with the performance of the lens wide open, although it will perform better at f\/4.<\/p>\n

Remember though, using this lens is giving you telephoto reach of a 270mm lens<\/strong> on a 35mm camera, while its f\/2.8 aperture is allowing a fast shutter speed<\/strong> – even in overcast conditions as with the above, shutter speed was 1\/2500th sec at f\/2.8, ISO 400.<\/p>\n

More photos by lens used here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Panasonic GH-1 Micro Four Thirds camera comes with a very expensive, unique HD video optimised, 14-140mm OIS lens, so why would I even bother putting a cheap $100 2nd hand Ebay Olympus OM 135mm f\/2.8 lens on it? As nice as the 14-140mm lens is, there is one major problem for me – its […]<\/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":[18,42,123],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lenses","tag-four-thirds-micro","tag-om-lens","tag-panasonic-gh1"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\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