My wife and I decided to take an early break and flew down to Spain for a week. This is the first real outing I've had with the E-M1 and I decided to take a wide angle lens with me this time. Weather was great at 28°C, the food was great and I got a chance for some photography (at my pace). One conclusion I came to after about the second day using this lens was that my lens wasn't wide enough. I really have to get something wider because the 9-18 is an 18-36 in 35mm terms. There is of course the Panasonic 7-14 but do I really need another mFT lens. Actually no, and I was thinking about an APS-C lens for my Fuji system, namely the 10-24 f4.

The reason for this is two fold.

1. I don't have anything wider at present than the 18-55 kit lens for this system.

2. In 35mm terms it's a 15mm lens at the wide end, it's a constant f4 and has OIS incorporated.

Both the Panasonic 7-14 and the Fuji 10-24 are about the same price but the Fuji is slightly larger I believe. Only time will tell which one I'll go for but I think it will be the Fuji.

There's been a lot of talk about the different kit lenses from Olympus and Panasonic. In the end I just got tired of it and decided to make a small test of my own to see the difference between the kit lens for the E-M5 and E-M1. Now, these two lenses are so far apart I shouldn'r really be doing this. One is realy expensive and very well built and the other is, well, it's a flimsy kit lens and a slow one at that with f6.3 at the tele end.

If you read around the forums you'll notice some using the 12-50 all the time while others just don't touch it after the first test shots have been made. This tells me there's a lot of variation with the 12-50 and it's like buying a lottery ticket if you get a good one or not. If you look at the image at the top of this post you will see there isn't a lot of difference between these two lenses so it looks like I got a pretty good one. From my other outings with this lens, I can actually confirm that it is a good one and I would not hesitate to go out with this lens mounted. Except that well, f6.3 is f6.3 which is kind of slow so good light is required when shooting with this lens.

Looking at the other kit lens, the 12-40 f2.8 which comes with the new E-M1 you can tell the quality just by looking at it. Very sturdy, excellent build quality and image quality matches that too. Several reviewers have stated that this lens will replace everything they have in primes for this focal length and I can quite agree with that statement. It simply is a very good lens. It is however, rather big and this is where the primes come in. All the Olympus primes are small and light producing excellent image quality. Whether you take one lens with you or 3 small primes is of course a personal thing and I'm not going to start agruing for or against primes and/or zooms.

If you came here looking for images that would sway you one way or the other, I have to disappoint you because personally, I simply couldn't tell the difference without reverting to the exif data.

The second test I made was with the A7r and the Nikon 135 f3.5 lens. Probably at this resolution you won't be able to tell the difference between yesterdays image and this one but looking at them side by side at a higher resolution, the A7r image contains more detail. Depending on your media choice, i.e. what you do with your images, depends on whether the A7r is really necessary. Certainly you would benefit from the higher resolution of the A7r if large prints are to be made but for web use, no need to purchase the A7r.

Still testing my 135mm lenses on different cameras. These legacy 135mm lenses are nice to use on FF cameras like the Sony Alpha A7 and A7r cameras. The Minolta was attached to the A7 for this shot. It was on a tripod and a remote release used to take the shot. Can't see anything wrong with sharpness in this shot.

In this last image taken with this combination I felt that a dull, cold, gray, rainy winters day deserved the same dort of image (note the lack of contrast within the image). This is the sort of image I'm not to keen on. For me a B&W image must have contrast and real blacks to it. Monochrome images must be dynamic, have lots of contrast with shadows and form defining what the image is about.

But on the day I took this above image, I felt exactly like the image looks...flat!

The image above shows one of those scenes that produce some strange, twirly "I'm not sure I like that" sort of bokeh. Sure I nailed focus on the sign but the bokeh doesn't really appeal to me one little bit. I find this happens a lot with Voigtländer lenses and I try and avoid busy backgrounds when using them I'm not aying all Voigtländer lenses do this, but....

I thought I would post the monochrome image from yesterday alone and at a larger resolution so you can see the bokeh produced by this lens. Yes there are better lenses out there but for the price it's an ok lens. Note the specular hightlights within the trees. They're not really round and the background has a twisting effect to it. I have a couple of other Voigtländer lenses that do this which spoils the image somewhat; for me anyway.

A nice enough lens to use but the very long throw of the lens does slow you down a lot. To get to one ned of the manual focus end to the other I'm very nearly turning that ring about 360 degrees. It's the one caveat of this lens, otherwise it's nice enough. Can I recomend it? Well yes, but there are a few better 50mm lenses out there, the Zeiss Planar 50 f2 for one which performs exceptionally well on the Sony A7. It is dearer however so if money is a problem, go for this one.

Although the branch with it's berries is quite sharp and, for me, quite pleasing to look at the problem with the f3.5 lenses is obvious to see. I thought I has enough background separation here to render is smooth. Well I didn't although it was quite aways away. I'm certain an f2.8 or f2.5 lens would have rendered this much better than the f3.5 lens. But those lenses are a bit larger and heavier than these little f3.5 lenses. For some people the above image would not make the grade and a faster lens would have to come into play. For me however, it's good enough. Notice I'm getting better at this manual focus stuff.

This is one situation where the bokeh is aceptable although the backbround isn't all that busy. Again taken wide open and close to MFD I still managed to achieve what I was after. Practice really does make perfect and I shall continue to practice as often as I can.