Old Glass (Digital)

One certain way to have a nice time out photographing is bring just one lens or a camera with a fixed lens. The restrictions are more than made up with the simplicity of shooting this way; where lens changes don’t interfere and choices are fewer. You learn to see the world through that one focal length and you learn how to find and compose subjects around this tight restriction. 

And so it was the other day when I went out with my Fuji GFX 50S ii with an adapted Olympus OM 135mm f2.8 lens. This light telephoto lens I have reviewed on the camera in a prior post. It had a great reputation in the day as a short telephoto lens often popular for portrait work. 

I found it exceptionally good for intimate and conventional landscape work as well and it really holds up to the Fuji 50 Mpix sensor. The fast optics means it is easy to get some nice depth of field for good subject separation while the sharp high contrast image makes manual focus pretty much error-free. 

The images I present below were made in at full resolution (8256x6192) as I had forgotten to set the camera in my custom ‘Olympus mode’. Normally I set the camera to crop to 35mm full frame (31 Mpix 6768 x 4512) so the lens is used in the area of the sensor it was designed for. As it is this lens exhibits the slightest fall-off in the corners so it is well suited for either frame. Indeed I wish that in addition to the focal length for adapted lenses I could specify the sensor resolution for each lens type. Also because of this the lens was mis-registered as 110mm instead of 135mm which means the image stabilization was probably not optimal. 

I am out in Northern Idaho visiting my father and establishing a residence here and I spent a few hours with this lens and here are some results with light cropping and editing on an iPad using the native photo editing tool.  

This is my first visit to these parts in late spring and the flowers are an unexpected benefit. These yellow flowers are abundant on slopes where I am staying. This first image I captured from the road.

This next one was again up the slope from the road and I cropped it to create a more pleasing composition. The 50Mpix image makes this quite reasonable. 

Cropped (23 Mpix)

Next some light on ferns. 

Ferns (Full frame)

A classic lake scene… Fantastically sharp texture on the pilings. 

Here is scene from the house. Handheld and manually focussed. There is a sailboat visible to the right of the tree top. 

Full frame image of the lake.

Next I crop this to 8 Mpix so about 1/6th of the original image. Everything is clear and sharp down to the resolution of the pixels. This really not an ‘artful’ shot but shows just how sharp this lens can be on this camera. 

Crop 3866 x 2173 of 8356 x 6192 original

A Japanese maple outside where I am staying offers some nice color.

The depth of field makes for some beautiful softness in the leaves.

This lens has been a joy to use in the field. It is relatively small and very light weight. I find it not trouble to focus and work with.