Telephoto

I had been looking to get a telephoto lens (something longer than 50mm) to learn some portraiture, but then I realized I could just use a smaller sensor.  A friend of mine was good enough to lend me his old Olympus E-P1, which has a micro 4/3 sensor, a crop factor of 2.  Basically, if you stick a 50mm lens on it, you get an equivalent field of view to a 100mm lens because the sensor is half the size of a full frame sensor.  Today I bought an adapter (that thing labeled "LA-MFT-LM" in the picture) that adapted my M mount lenses to the camera.

The Zeiss Planar 50mm f/2 held up pretty well.  No surprise there.  What caught me off guard was how tough it would be to focus manually.  The E-P1 doesn't have any kind of focus peaking, so I had to eyeball it, which isn't all that easy on a little LCD screen.  Also, most of the focus throw on the Zeiss is spent on objects less than 10 feet away, and it really tightens up where I need it most, which is past 10 feet, in order to get them in frame now that I have a 100mm equivalent.  After a while, I gave up on trying to shoot moving targets.

Another thing was, since I only ever shot it on film, I never realized how much color the Zeiss sucked in.

Next I stepped into Essex Market to grab some groceries.  Groceries tend to hold nice and still.  

Here, I realized how thin the depth of field was wide open on a 100mm equivalent.  Even with the crop sensor, there was only one pineapple in focus at about 10 feet.

Then I took the ferry home.

Shooting a long lens was definitely interesting.  It feels like a lot more footwork because when you're so far away from things, you have to walk farther along an arc to rearrange them in your frame.  When you're in closer, moving a few inches to the side makes a big difference.  I think I'll stick to using this setup for posed portraits, which I'm looking to figure out.  I'm just having too much trouble trying to make it work out on the street.