Lessons

Lesson Info

Lenses

All right let's talk a little bit about lenses for this camera I'm not going to talk about every lands but I'll talk about the better lens and a few of my favorite lenses all right they have recently come out with some very fast or at least reasonably fast zoom lenses that cover very popular zoom ranges these first two lenses that twelve to thirty five and the thirty five to one hundred our weather sealed lenses and this is a weather sealed camera and so they match up perfectly together and there are very few other lenses that our weather sealed and this is part of their ex siri's which is their high end siri's now they also have a wide angle this has been around for a couple of years now the seven to fourteen f four constant which is a really nice wide angle lens for the landscape and architectural photographers out there. One of my favorite lens the lens that I've been having it on here in this class is the twenty five millimeter like a designed one point four lands and let me try to...

explain what this like a thing is because I know many of you most of you probably already know that like is a company in germany which is a very different company than panasonic which is a japanese company and they have worked together in panasonic wanted to have like a lens is on they're panasonic camera and I don't know exactly what happened in the back room but I assume it was something about like a saying well we're not going to make lenses in our factory for you but if you want to make lenses that meet our standards we'll let you put our name on it for a fee I'm sure and so what happens is that the lenses are designed by panasonic and then they go through a quality check in control system that has been established by likea so they're just meeting ah higher standard and so there's a good chance and I don't know there's a good chance that there is nobody who works for like a that's in the factory when these air getting made it's just simply that they have higher standards and for instance when the lens comes off the line no lens is ever perfect but it rates in a certain place on a scale and for many cameras they say ok, we're going to take these and we're not going to take that bottom ten percent with the case of these lenses they might be saying we're not going to take the bottom fifty percent because they just don't meet the quality standards for that brand and so these are really nice lenses and I like this lands because it's very fast good general purpose lands and I love the way the focusing fields the focusing feels the way it's supposed to and that is like butta, absolutely smooth. This is this is this is what manual focusing is supposed to feel like I wish nikon and cannon had lenses that felt that there is not one cannon or nikon lands that feels this move, and I really like a nice, tactile feel on a lands and that one has it in plenty. Now you'll notice there is a whole bunch of letters and little names that go along with these lenses and so here's a little guide to what all these things mean. The loo mix g is the micro for third system. So you want to get in general the g lenses for this type of camera exes, their premium brand of lenses it's, kind of. If you're familiar with cannon there l lenses though they use the letter x vario is simply the fact that it's a zoom the like. We talked about that as spherical elements, or sometimes necessary to get the most out of a lens to get the best image sharpness. Extra low dispersion is another little element that they put in there to help get the best quality. The lenses also have a couple different optical image stabilization systems and so there's a mega os and then there's a power os, which basically do the same thing. They're just slightly different versions of it. So a couple of other lenses that I would just kind of put into a favorites category you'll see a lot of people are big fans of these little lenses here they're pancake lenses personally I think they should be called cookie lenses because they're just the size of a nice cookie nice thick cookie the fourteen to twenty five and the twenty one point seven and I can show you one of them here said this little guy right here and I'm gonna mounted on the camera is so small this is the fourteen this is my little wide angle and I thought it was a cannon there for a second and so you can see how tiny that camera is with that little lens on there and so if you want to be discreet for travel photography or street shooting that is just a really really nice small lands and so that's kind of a fun one a lot of people like the twenty four street shooting if you want kind of that one travel ends that does everything the fourteen to one forty has thie optical image stabilization is a pretty good image quality it's not real fast in the aperture but that's kind of the compromise you make with lenses and if you're going to africa on safari I said this cameras a pretty good wildlife camera that one hundred to three hundred is the biggest longest lens that panasonic makes and so that of course if you remember the fact that this has a smaller image sensor and there's a two times crop factor that is the equivalent of a two hundred to six hundred millimeter lands so if you're a bird fanatic or you like wildlife that's definitely a great lands for that now one of the beauties of before third system is that you can use the olympus lenses and olympus came out with a whole series of prime fixed lenses they're absolutely beautiful they have some but focusing on them that's really nice they have their twelve millimeters up to seventeen one point eight one of the best deals in all of photography I think is this the lens right here it's the forty five one point eight I'll go ahead and mount this one up here if you want a portrait lance the forty five one point eight translates up into a ninety millimeter lands which is just right for portrait photography f one point is a nice fast aperture which gives you a very shallow depth of field and has that cool retro silver look on it and it's a very nice lands as you can see the size of it is just really tiny so it's easy to bring a handful of lenses along with the micro for third system now the seventy five one eight I haven't had a chance to really shoot with that one properly yet I just kind of shot a few test pictures in the store with it and from the reports out on the internet from other people, there are some people who think it is the best lens on the market anywhere for anything. It has absolutely stellar reviews and so for a longer lands it's an amazingly good lens it's also pretty fast. And olympus recently introduced another kind of competitors toe one of panasonic's lenses and this looks to be a very good leads. This has some very nice feel on the controls. It's a twelve to forty millimeter, which translates twenty four to eighty so, in my opinion, that's about perfect, you got twenty four on the wide side, great for travel photography eighty two point eight on the telephone aside, which is going to be pretty good for portrait photography and I think that's going to be a good general purpose lands we do have some questions about the quality of that one, jack. See, have you tried it yourself? Do you have any opinions on the how the image quality compares to the panasonic version on the on the twelve to four, twelve to forty, I have only just hand held it and shuttered around a little bit I haven't had a chance to really tested in the field yet, I think the first test reports are coming out on it and I'm not really into the testing I'm not the guy that reviews all the equipment there's other people there if you're looking for somebody to review equipment there's more than enough on the internet, but I haven't seen that one yet, but I will tell you I am planning on buying it because I would have what I've seen of it. What I felt it it's the go to leads, I think it's better than the panasonic from what I've seen so far and could you explain one more time force arrest? Why does a twelve to forty translate to a twenty four to eighty on a micro four thirds right? It's basically because this camera has a smaller size sensor and were only seen the smaller a portion of that sensor, and so I kind of had a lot more visuals to explain that back at the beginning of the class, but it's, because that smaller size sensor in this camera, everything kind of relates, he has to go through an equivalency to talk about it in relationship to everything else. Fantastic! And then maybe one more final question for damien reds with the clarification on the like lenses is the glass itself? Does that come from like, or is it in the same it's just made to that quality level it's just made to those quality standards that, like a has established now exactly what happens in the factory? We won't know I've heard of other panasonic like a situations where they make point shoots that are the same, and I have been told and I don't know how true it is that the panasonic crew would leave the factory the like a crew would come in and make cameras for one shift, and they have certain quality standards. You know, different workers have different you'll skill levels, and then they would make the like a version of the camera with all the same parts, and then they would leave and the panasonic people would come in and they would make their version of it now with the glass, as far as I know it's, panasonic glass and like a doesn't have a corner on making good glass, they're not the only company that can make glass there's anyone can make great glass, any company can make class that competes with, like a if they want to spend the time money and haven't meet all the quality standards and that's kind of why they don't is they're trying to make cheaper lenses and that's why these lenses tend to sell for a little bit more this one's not really that expensive it's in the four hundred dollars range. Which in its and I don't fool myself thinking I own a like a lands now, it's a panasonic lands it meets like a standards for what they've established this land should be doesn't meet the like a standards that they have for their own cameras. That's not really clear, I don't know love that thank you for the clarification on it. All right, I think we're gonna move on, okay, a couple of other lenses that might be kind of interesting to some people who are looking for lenses that are very good under low light or have very shallow depth of field. Voight lander makes a siri's of point nine five lenses that means that they're faster than one point oh, by just a little bit, so they have a moderate wide, a normal and a nice portrait focal length. Now these lenses are manual focus, and I haven't had a chance to use these, but they should have very smooth manual focusing, which would be quite nice for many situations. But in any case, these are fast lenses, allowing you to get very shallow depth of field price of these lenses are going to be north of a thousand dollars, so they're relatively pricy lenses, but it's just one of the great things about this ecosystem of lenses is that there's lots of choices to choose from