My Gear.

Olympus E-M1

This has been my main camera since August of 2024. It replaced my Olympus E-PL6, which I had bought in January as my first camera.

The E-M1 was released all the way back in 2013; but it was one of the most advanced cameras to release at the time, with features still holding up to some professional cameras today. I espesially like the fact that it packs everything it has in a very small and erginomic body, even smaller than it's successor(s).

Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f1.8

This lens I wanted for awhile, but I didn't really jump on it until one day at my local pawn shop, I saw this one sitting in the case... and the guy ONLY WANTED $65 FOR IT, so of course without any thinking I bought it. I mean c'mon, on eBay it goes for an average of $170 used! Now the true reason I wanted this lens, is because it praised as one of the best non-pro portrait lenses for M4/3; and that it is, the focal length is perfect, the skin tones are PERFECT, and it just has this (almost) magical effect when taking portraits that I just can't explain.

Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f1.7

This is my first autofocus prime lens, I used to have a TTartisan 25mm prime but it was fully manual and at the time I had the E-PL6 which didn't have focus peaking (and I was still getting used to the whole camera thing then). I ended up selling that and not long after I missed having a prime at that focal length as most of my photos are now around 22-28mm. It took some time to get used to this lens but now it's my everyday carry lens since it's light, reliable, and is a universally loved focal length.

Fujian TV 35mm f1.7

This lens is a rather strange addition to my kit... but I have a pretty good reasoning behind why I bought it. Before I really started looking into this lens I had seen in mentioned before in M4/3 forums as a fun cheap lens, but I mostly ignored those since I didn't really want to spend the money on something I'd probably only use a few times. Fast forward a year later and I'm now trying to look for a way to get the swirly bokeh effect without upgrading to a full frame camera, and I come across this lens once again, and turns out it's quite literally what I like to call "Helios 44 of M4/3", as it perfectly covers the full 4/3 sensor and has just about the same amount of swirl as the Helios has on Full Frame.

Previous Gear

Super-Takumar 50mm f1.4

This is a lens that took alot (and I mean alot) of research to finally buy. It all started when I was researching how the Helios 44-2 performed on my camera system, and to my disappointment it turns out it would be a pointless purchase since I wouldn't be able to see the the swirly bokeh from my camera. So I decided to look at some other options that would be a better fit for my system, and finally I concluded on this radioactive lens from the late 60s. It is honestly a great lens, the colors are surprisingly vibrant, the out of focus regions have a perfect soft texture, and I only have to stop down the lens to f1.8 to obtain a decent level of sharpness rather than f2.8 on the FD 50mm above. My only gripe about this lens is the yellow shade from the aging radioactive element, yes sure I can adjust the white balance to compensate, but even if I do the greens never are a natural color.

Olympus Zuiko 12-60mm (f2.8-4.0)

This is the lens I wanted ever since I bought the E-M1, and after Christmas of '24 I finally bought it. This lens is perfect for event and street photography and performs quite well optically. This is one again a Four Thirds lens, but it has the SWD focus motor so it's actually quite quick, almost as fast as native lenses. Now even though it's much more wide-open than the kit lens it's replacing, I find that it is still quite shallow which means that it's not really ideal for portraits, is also has really bad edge distortion at 12mm.

Olympus Zuiko 40-150mm (f3.5-4.5)

This is Olympus's Original 40-150mm lens, the one released for the four thirds DSLR line back in 2004. In my opinion this lens outperforms the modern M4/3 variants not for the autofocus, sharpness, or optic quality at all... but for the very look of the images I get out of it (oh, and the fact that's it's basically an f4 continuous rather than the usual f4-5.6). I will say though this lens is not practical at all as the autofocus is slow and loud, there is ALOT of purple/green fringing, and it's really just not that sharp.

Tamron 14-150mm Di III (f3.5-5.8)

Managed to buy this lens for about half the average market price and I was exited to replace my kit lenses with it, though that never really happened. Why is that? well, I used then lens maybe once or twice, and all of a sudden in the middle of an event I was shooting: the focus motor died; and even worse it's focus by wire, which means the focus motor is required for the lens to even initialize when the camera turns on... and not to mention obviously I wouldn't be able to focus the lens. All that aside though I liked the colors the lens produced and the build quality.

Olympus Zuiko 40-150mm R (f4.0-5.6)

Shortly after I bought my E-PL6 my parents bought me this lens for my birthday since I'd been talking about buying it (it wasn't more than $80 at the time). Given I was an absolute beginner at the time I quickly fell in love with the rendering and versatility of the lens. The build quality was quite cheap though and that really started to show as I used it more, the biggest example of this being the big circular cluster of scratches that developed in the center of the front glass... which was actually just cheap plastic like the rest of the lens. Both the focus ring and zoom barrel had gotten sand lodged in them that I couldn't get out which just added to the poor user experience I really started to realize after having the lens for some time.

Lumix G Vario 14-42mm (f3.5-5.6)

This was the lens I originally bought along with the E-PL6 back in January of '24, it's the one lens I kept for way more than I should have. It isn't very useful for really anything unless it's the only lens you have, which was my case back when I bought it. I will say though 2 of my best photos - the sunset and shop off the pier - were taken on this lens so it's not like it's completely unusable, just not very practical in my personal opinion.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse