I have to be honest: I generally prefer zooms. One of the things that attracted me to Olympus in 2007 when I bought my first dSLR, was the quality of the zoom lenses. Nevertheless, in more recent years I have acquired three mFT primes: 45mm F1.8, 60mm F2.8 and 75mm F1.8. These are all very fine lenses. It's just that I don't use them much, and, except for the 60mm macro, I occasionally wonder if I should sell them on eBay.
From what I've read (and I have no reason to disagree) the 75mm F1.8 is one of the sharpest lenses out there, from any system. As you would expect, along with its high image quality comes a very sharp price, about $900.
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75mm F1.8 Olympus lens shown without hood. A lens hood is not supplied as standard,
it must be bought separately for $75. I think this is a terrible marketing
plan for a lens that costs $1000 USD. (I bought an equivalent hood for $25 on eBay.) |
As nice a lens as this is, I haven't used it much. In fact, when I filter my metadata in Lightroom I see that since buying the 75mm in October 2012 I have kept only 600 images. With 5,000 images in my Lightroom catalog kept since that date, this means 12% of my pictures were taken with this lens. This calculation got me curious as to when and under what conditions I've used it.
My first outing with the 75mm was during the month of purchase, October 2012. I used it at a family wedding, and I recall buying the lens in anticipation of this event. I wanted to avoid a flash so the fast aperture was ideal. And the effective focal length of 150mm allowed me to be far enough away from the action to stay clear of the professional wedding photographer. Essentially all the images were taken at F1.8 or F2. To be truthful, for me, a fast zoom would have been more fun because at a wedding it is so hard to move forward/backward to frame your pictures. A zoom would have solved that problem. I'd like to try it again with the Panasonic 35-100mm F2.8. I would have lost a stop of light but would have gained flexibility in composing images. (On the other hand, the 35-100 lens had yet been available.)
Below are a few shots from the wedding and rehearsal dinner. The camera was the Olympus E-M5.
Depending on your monitor resolution, larger images are available for viewing here:
http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p1029845581
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| ISO 6400 |
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| ISO 6400 |
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| ISO 6400 |
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| ISO 6400 |
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| ISO 6400 |
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| ISO 5000 |
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| ISO 5000 |
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ISO 200 but opened nearly 2 stops in Lightroom as I didn't account
for the white clothing |
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| ISO 200 but opened two stops in Lightroom |
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| ISO 200 but opened one stop in Lightroom |
Camera Settings for the 75mm:
People Indoors:
I found with all of these situations that Aperture Priority and AutoISO work fine for me. With the indoor people shots, I would set the aperture at typically F2 and the camera would increase ISO as high as necessary to maintain a safe shutter speed of 1/160sec. This seemed like a reasonable shutter speed for me; however, if I were to have wanted a slower or faster speed I would have turned the mode dial to Manual Mode and set both speed and aperture, while still maintaining AutoISO.
