Miles of Marketing: Experimenting to learn - getting to grips with a manual lens

SLR Magic is a company that sells some interesting camera gear through their E-Bay listing and one of those products is a lens that has been modified to work on the micro-four third mount cameras. The lens, featured in this post is their 35mm f/1.7 lens (which on the Olympus and Panasonic M43 camera's is equivalent to 70mm) and it comes with the lens, a sun shade, metal cap and rear cap for about £85. Although the lens was subject to import duty (about £20 -- which was an unwelcome surprise).

So it's a cheap, fixed (no zoom), manual (no auto-focus) fast (wide aperture) lens but what's it for? Well having first read about it over at http://www.stevehuff.com and looking at a few some samples from a few people online and I got the distinct impression it is for FUN!

Having had it for just a couple of days here's what it and i have captured:

The Kit (Olympus Pen EP-2 with SLR Magic 35mm f1.7 manual lens

Incredible control over depth of field.

This shot is noisy and not pin sharp; this was, however, before I figured out how to use 'manual assist' (a 10x zoom feature).

The natural characteristic of the lens create a soft 'dreamy' feel towards the edges; helps to direct the eye to the centre of busy scenes.

At F1.7 you can throw the background way out of focus and get some cool creative backdrops.

Using the lens with the Olympus' built in art filters (such as pin hole) has the making for some great shots

This was shot through a train window; this looks almost 'toy-like'

@dereckjohnson shot this on the way into London Euston (Dereck is now thinking of buying an Olympus Pen :-)

A quick snap; with a bit more work (changing the letters) this might make a good stock-shot

In the pub; this was shot in pretty low-light.

The table looks like it's the sharpest point of focus; where as the mayo bottle was the intended point of focus - hmmm maybe i need a tilt-shift (or more practice)