Zoom, Zoom - (apologies to Mazda)
The old saying is that pictures don’t lie, but that is often, well, a lie - pictures quite commonly lie. In fact to be a great picture it usually, in some way, must. Those Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues that of course no adult males drool over? Often the models/celebrities in the pictures are freezing their very visible tushes off. That lovely family shot at the wedding might be minutes after a major battle about who stands where. That idyllic scenic shot might have a freeway running behind it. Pictures, a bit like music, capture a feeling; that is their power. But the hard truth is that a lot of the time that feeling isn’t actually there in real life.
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1200mm. ISO400, f6.7, 1/1000sec
Two areas of photography excel at lying - they show us things quite differently than we might see them ourselves; the world of macro photography (very small things) and the world of telephoto photography (very far away things).
I’ve been wanting to try out the world of photography at the long telephoto end for a long time mostly because I like the idea of shooting birds; and to get what feels like a close up of birds you usually need a very long lens. Birds and I have always kind of had a thing. Between the ages of about nine to twelve I would regularly come home with a bird in hand. I have no idea why that happened but I would be walking along and notice a bird hopping along on the ground. It would be very young or wounded and I would pick it up and take it home with me. It has certainly never happened since. Then there are the videos taken by me (and now impossible to deny) when our three boys were still young and fun and very video-able. I’m shooting birds at the bird feeder and telling the boys to be quiet.
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1200mm. ISO400, f6.7, 1/1000sec
So, the idea of taking good pictures of birds has a lot of appeal to me. However, it is a very challenging area for photographers. Like sports, far away and moving is a tricky combination. If you’ve ever seen the professional photographers at baseball games with those 3’ long lenses on their cameras, you get the idea. Unfortunately, those three foot long lenses cost some C$20,000. and the cameras they go on cost some C$7000.
And this I discovered is the great drawback facing enthusiast photographers like you and me; we can’t afford to take really good super telephoto zoom pictures. Or can we?
You can shoot up to 1200mm with a Panasonic Lumix DC FZ80 ‘bridge’ camera. It costs about $500. The reason it can do the superzoom is that it uses a much smaller sensor, 1/1.233. And the shots it takes at the far end are almost unusable because of two things; excessive noise, and uncertain stabilization. The noise appears as early as ISO100 and reviewers say you need a tripod in the 800-1200mm range. And few are going to use a tripod with this camera as it’s completely contrary to why they bought it. The much more expensive Sony RX10 (over C$2000) uses a 1” sensor and goes to 660mm equivalent. Better quality pictures, yes, but half the range and four times the price.
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1200mm. ISO400, f6.7, 1/1000sec
This is really the crux of it - it is one thing to zoom, it is an entirely different thing to zoom on a camera with a sensor that pros use to make high-end pictures with. And then another world away again to do it in any way that is affordable.
So I am really jacked up about being able to say I’ve done it. Just to be clear, this has been a two-year journey for me. The lens I am using now, to my absolute delight, is the very same one I first bought with my Olympus OMD EM-1 camera and returned because the results were too ‘soft’. This becomes a great life lesson; don’t believe what everyone tells you, and give yourself, you and only you, a chance to work things through.
The lens is the 75-300mm Olympus lens (version 11). It came out around 2013 and from that day to the present has had mixed reviews; some rave about its picture quality and some say the results were disappointing and ‘soft’. Who to believe? Well, I returned mine so we know what camp I was in. But recently the lens started to appeal to me again - let me tell you why.
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1200mm. ISO400, f6.7, 1/1000sec
Those three foot long ten pound beasts at the ball games that cost $20,000? The Nikon one is 800mm (about the same as 16 x zoom on a pair of binoculars) and shoots at a maximum aperture of f5.6. The appealing thing about the Olympus set up is that at 300mm it is shooting what a 600mm lens does on a full frame camera like the Nikon. The Olympus weighs ½ pound and costs $699. But the next part is what got me really intrigued. Inside most Olympus micro 4/3 cameras is a thing called a 2x ‘digital tele-converter’. Most of us, serious enthusiasts and pros alike, stay away from digital zooms like the plague because we all know that the quality degrades rapidly when you use them. But the Olympus one, which I have tried out extensively, is different. It doubles the magnification and keeps the same quality. A bit of a miracle really.
It isn’t perfect, but it is remarkably good. Just so you understand - if I take a picture with a 600mm lens and crop it in my computer screen to half that size, I have what looks like a picture taken with a 1200mm lens. But because I cropped the picture, the image quality is half of what it was originally. However, if I use the 2x digital tele-converter instead, I have what looks like a 1200mm shot but the image quality is the very same as the original shot. I have tested this thoroughly in Lightroom. How does Olympus do it? I don’t know but I can tell you that it works. You can decide for yourself when you look at the pictures with this blog. Alien Skin’s Blow Up is a wonderful way to make photos bigger and maintain quality: it does complicated stuff like convert pixels to vectors and back again. The quality of these blow-ups is a tiny almost unseeable hair better than what the Olympus tele-converter produces.
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1000mm. ISO400, f6.5, 1/1000sec
All this got me thinking about whether I should try the 75-300 lens again. I mean jeeze, to be shooting high-quality pictures at 1200mm for $700 is a very tempting thing. If only the results were sharp instead of soft. And then the last coin dropped. I read a comment below a review of the lens (a comment by an enthusiast, wouldn’t you know) who said that he almost returned his 75-300 lens until he decided to try using the electronic shutter instead of the mechanical shutter. With the Olympus and many other cameras these days, you can choose. The electronic shutter is both silent and shockproof. And all of a sudden his pics were sharp as a tack. Bingo.
That did it. I was in. All in. I located a used one in excellent condition at KEH, and with taxes, shipping and import duties it came to C$550. And it has absolutely blown my mind. One last thing to remember as you look at the shots - they were all handheld. 1200mm! Handheld!*
Crazy stuff.
P.S. I save my pics as both raw and JPEG. The raw pics don’t show the 2x digital tele-converter - the JPEG’s do. So one is a raw 600mm (equivalent) and the other is a JPEG 1200mm. It’s great because it allows me to choose which I like best. You have to change preferences in Lightroom (under the Edit menu) to show your JPEGs as separate files.
*I would love one more stop of stability. My keeper rate with the EM-1 is very good, probably about 6 or 7 out of 10. At 1200mm and 1/1000 shutter speed I can usually see the stability ‘set’ before I shoot. However, the Em1-Mark11 has one more stop of stability above the EM-1 and the upcoming (and to die for) EM1-X has one more stop above that again. Another day :)
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 12-100mm lens. Full frame equivalent of 48mm. ISO400, f6.3, 1/1250sec
Olympus OMD Em-1 with 75-300 lens and 2x digital tele-converter. Full frame equivalent of 1200mm. ISO400, f6.7, 1/1250sec