Yearly Archives: 2013

Olympus 45mm F/1.8 MFT Zuiko – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

An outstanding short telephoto lens.

So enamored was I of the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens that I decided to add the 45mm f/1.8 optic. I paid $350.


The 45mm on the GX7, next to the 17mm.

This makes for a superb, light and compact outfit with the two classical film era focal lengths of 35mm and 90mm, FFE. For a street snapper, that little outfit is good for 99% of daily needs.

Rather than build an exposed bayonet for the lens hood (extra), Olympus decided to hide the bayonet under a weakly attached plastic, chromed ring:


Bayonet exposed.

This is so weakly held in place and the lens so ugly were it lost, that I immediately attached a piece of chrome flue tape to make sure it does not fall off, This is especially recommended if, like me, you do not use a lens hood. If the lens hood fits as poorly it will soon be lost. It seems Oly simply cannot resist adding some asinine feature to most of its products – take the collapsible barrel on the 9-18mm MFT zoom and the retractable focus collar on the 17mm/1.8. But the optics of all three are so good that these eccentricities are but minor annoyances.


Flue tape in place.

How light is the lens? At 4.1oz it’s a featherweight, almost identical in weight to the 4.2oz of the 17mm. The 45mm appears to use more plastic in its construction, but who cares when the optics are so good? Length is 2.3″ against 2.2″ for the 17mm – it’s tiny.

Focus is almost as fast as the instant focus in the 17mm. It’s as near silent as it gets. There is a slight ‘bounce’ around the sharpest focus point, missing from the 17mm and much more pronounced in the 9-18mm, but nothing that gets in the way of rapid execution.

Much as it makes sense to compare the 17mm with the Leica 35mm Asph Summicron, the 45mm is the equivalent of the 90mm f/2 Apo Summicron, one of the finest lenses I have owned. (I bought mine years ago for $900 and sold it for some $2,000 when the Leica Ms moved on. Today it remains available, now for $4,000, which is plain daft. All 18 ounces of it. I owned mine for some 5 years, which computes to a compound annual return of 17.3% for those into such things, confirming Leicas are for China cabinets, not for real world use.) What both Leica lenses lack is AF, of course, and both will leave a mighty hole in your savings, one dug deeper still once you add an M body to use these with. Definition-wise it’s tough to comment as my catalog only contains film snaps from the Leica optic, a medium far inferior for capturing detail than modern digital sensors. However, purely subjectively, the 90mm Apo Summicron is the better lens wide open, though add a touch of sharpening at f/1.8 for the Oly in Lightroom and there’s nothing in it. Well, OK, there is something in it – the $3,650 burning a hole in your pocket if you are an Oly man.

The Olympus lens shows very minor vignetting which disappears by f/4, and mild pincushion distortion at all apertures. Accordingly, I created a lens correction profile for use on Panasonic bodies with RAW files and you can download it here. Install the profile as I explain and its application becomes automatic when images are loaded into Lightroom (3, 4 or 5), so it’s a ‘set and forget’ thing. Definition at f/1.8 and f/2 benefits from a little sharpening in LR (I use ’80’) otherwise the default setting of ’40’ for the GX7 body is fine, until you get to f/22, at which point diffraction takes the edge off sharpness. Setting sharpness to ’80’ at f/22 once again does the trick.

In practical terms there’s absolutely no need to stop the lens down unless you need depth of field, and one of the signal appeals of the wide apertures this optic offers is the very absence of depth of field, with backgrounds rendered pleasantly out of focus.

I constantly read about how MFT camera X or compact camera Y is not pocketable. This, I confess, leaves me confused. What, pray, is the utility value of a camera when it is in your pocket? What is important in a light traveling kit is that a spare lens is pocketable. One on the body, one in your pocket. The two Olympus f/1.8 lenses, the 17mm and the 45mm, are so small that they will fit even in the pocket of a jeans wearer, unless he is a hipster opting for skin tight fit. That is pocketability.

In Part II I will publish some snaps taken with this lens using the Panasonic GX7.

Goodbye, dear friend – 1999-2013

Bio

A dear friend moves on.

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

These biographical columns run annually, in no particular order, on December 16, and you can see the lot by clicking here.

The one constant of my years in New York (1980-87) was Mayor Ed Koch. Outspoken, candid, always a blast, a real Noo Yawk kind of guy. Most memorably he once had Manhattan paint white lines down its main thoroughfares, intended to designate bike lanes. This costly effort proved totally useless, New York cabbies not being about to respect the rules of the road any more than New York’s famously scofflaw, homicidal bicyclists.

Koch, true to form, came clean, endearing all to him in the process. “When I make a mistake” he candidly admitted “It’s a real Dusie”, the reference being to the gigantic, luxury Dusenberg car of the Roaring Twenties.

And looking back on 1999 when, for some reason still hard to comprehend, I decided to move to Charlotte, North Carolina from California, to work for a big dumbass bank, I made a Dusie every bit as big. Indeed, the quickest way to summarize North Carolina is to say that there is nothing to choose between its climate, its people and its food. All truly awful. No, wait. On reflection, it would have to be said that the local cooking is worse even than its cretinous people and miserable weather. Cretinous? A tad harsh you say? Sure, there are nice North Carolinians. Doubtless there are nice North Koreans too. It’s just that I have yet to encounter either.

But one really good thing came of that awful 11 months.

Flashing back to San Diego a year earlier, I had attended the Del Mar dog show, ever interested in the four-legged set. My previous dog had been a Scottish Terrier, a terrorist among dogs who revelled in attacking anything larger, which was just about everything. A dour Scot of seemingly permanently disgruntled mien, he left me questioning my love of things Scottish and very much wondering if any terrier would darken my porch again or could, for that matter, ever be gruntled.

The Del Mar Dog Show changed all that.

I had been wandering around and generally steering away from areas of loud barking, mostly occupied by Dachshunds, Alsatians, Dobermans, Weimaraners and Rottweilers. You get the idea. Killers all. Needless to add, all Germans.

So I meandered to a quiet area in the back and there they were. Some seven small yet tall British terriers, not an ill word spoken between them, faces replete with dignity and charm and generally a subset of the canine species you could see spending a lot of time with. It’s not that these Border Terriers did not bark. Rather they chose not to. You don’t argue with a rabid Kraut, you do the only reasonable thing and avoid him. Hence I resolved that a Border Terrier was de rigeur. Border? Yes, they hail from the south side of the border with Scotland, and there’s no questoning their judgment in things geographical.


Bertie as a puppy. Borders are born mostly black, then the coat lightens with age.

And if there was one good thing about North Carolina which makes me excuse the otherwise miserable 11 months I spent in that culturally arid desert, it was that Bertie the Border Terrier came into our family from a local breeder who specialized in Mastiffs (all 180 lbs of them!) …. and Borders. Borders typically come in litters of two and Bertie, unusually, was one of four.


Morning greeting.

Naming him was hardly difficult. As a gentleman of leisure it was obvious that he could only be named after that well-to-do man about town Bertram Wooster, the hero of many a novel from that greatest of English humorists, P. G. Wodehouse. The same Wooster who looked to his manservant Jeeves to get him out of the all too frequent sticky situations which seemed to seek him out, not a few involving various terriers. The nastiest of these involved one Bartholomew who yes, you guessed it, was a Scottish Terrier.

When a well-meaning friend in San Francisco called me one day, knowing of my misery in Charlotte and offering the opportunity to run a hedge fund in the City on the Bay, I was on the next flight out, one way ticket in hand and Bert the Border in a carry-on bag tucked next to me sharing the seat. Before we departed, reflecting the man’s good taste and judgment, he took one last leak on Charlotte’s airport baggage carousel as we left, never to see that blighted city again. It was actually with considerable joy that I signed the check repaying the unvested portion of my joining bonus to the uncouth people in the land of grits. The Border and I were free.

I was glad to be back in California and Bertie every bit as happy to move to a civilized climate and a no less civilized population. From grits and muscle cars to white wine and Porsches in one year.


On guard in Burlingame.


The Border Terrier in his prime, with Elenia.
Beauty and the beast. No problem, I divorced the bitch.

A dear friend, a fine painter of animals, did my image justice a few years later:

For the next fourteen and a half years, Bertie would seldom be far from me. He would come to work (small businesses are nice, that way), frolic on the beach during vacation times and keep me warm at night from his favorite vantage point at the foot of the bed. Mornings would commence with a cold nose in the face and a polite reminder that maybe breakfast was called for.

Three walks a day saw him charm the neighborhood, be it in Burlingame or later in Atherton, where one of his favorite things was to charge after Lisa in the UPS truck, hop in the cab and refuse to leave until rewarded from the bag of cookies she always had with her.

Gone was the debilitating heat and humidity of the Charlotte summer and the awful cold and snow of the winter, replaced with the balmy climate of the Peninsula and strolls down the lanes of that most calming of cities, Atherton. This was happiness for both pup and master.


Watchful in Atherton.

When we later moved to Templeton and a vineyard home, Bert immediately took control of the situation, hopping merrily through the irrigation hoses lining the rows of vines en route to his daily discussion with Jack the Jack Russell which invariably culminated in a race to and fro along the dividing fence. Yes, Jack did all the barking. Those of a quiet disposition should definitely steer well clear of Jack Russell terriers, a breed seemingly constantly ingesting amphetamines. That much was clear when an exhausted Bert would stumble through the doggie door, en route to his water bowl.

An earlier piece captures well the relationship between man and beast at the vineyard estate. Recommended reading as it’s the first and last time I ruminated on the existence of God in this journal and, no, you will not be offended, even if you are from North Carolina.


Sprightly at the Templeton vineyard home.

When our son Winston came on the scene in 2002, no one was happier than Bert. With guaranteed daily provisions of extra food from Winston’s high chair Bert was in doggie heaven, and the two took to one another immediately, forming a life long friendship. A delight to watch.

Then, one day, Bertie was gone.


A last picture with Winnie, just days before Bertie moved on
in October. Bert was three when Winnie was born.

Winnie was traumatized, true. Me? Devastated. All I can remember is the selfless love, the sheer joie de vivre, the generosity of spirit, the endless enthusiasm for life. The man’s sheer decency is not something to which my vocabulary can do justice. And when I think of his spirit, W. H. Auden’s words come to mind:

Goodbye, dear friend.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.