…why am I not using it myself? Regarding the four thirds setup from the last article, where I recommended it to beginners who want to learn photography.

I could do a short or long form answer to this.

The long form is, I did use four thirds sensor cameras for quite a while, and I’m very much used to both the aspect ratio and the way the sensor works, depth of field and all. It’s not that I don’t like it, or that I can’t produce good pictures with it. However, it’s not doing everything I want. For instance, I tried photographing a night sky with stars, and the picture would fall apart from noise. Or I would try to take pictures of deep dark tones in something, and they would turn brown from noise contamination, instead of the deep black tones. Or I would try to control the depth of field, and I would have too many constraints put on it – you need to come super close, you need greater focal length, you need more aperture, and so on. With 35mm, I can blur things out at f/4 with a wide focal length if I want to, and with 4/3 I’d need a f/2 lens for that, and when you get a f/2 lens, it’s both expensive and heavy and you look at that and think, wasn’t this supposed to be a small and light camera system?

Also, with 35mm it’s easy for me to blur out the background, and it’s still easy to get everything sharp for a large landscape print. It’s easy to get both resolution and dynamic range and reasonably low noise. With four thirds, it’s “pick one”, but then you lose the other. With 35mm, I can have 24 to 61 megapixels of resolution while retaining deep, voluminous tonality in the dark. I can have extremely shallow or very deep depth of field. I can occasionally be forced to crop something quite strongly, and still retain enough resolution to make a big print. Sure, it has its own technical nonsense – for instance, the Olympus four thirds lenses are of such technical quality, that I got quite a surprise when I switched to 35mm Canon and it turned out that even the high quality lenses display all sorts of CA, corner softness etc., that I wasn’t seeing on four thirds. However, the overall image quality on Canon was still better and more to my liking.

The excellent image quality of the Olympus “kit” zooms means that for very little money you can get the general image quality – colours, clarity, lack of optical defects – that is otherwise typical of very expensive glass on the 35mm. The sensor on the camera, however, has a much narrower sweet spot than the 35mm. With the Canon 5d, I could get a very “juicy” ISO 3200 shot, while on the four thirds cameras of the time ISO 800 was already a mess. Sure, the modern micro four thirds cameras have much better sensors, but still, you really need to push technology there, and 24MP on a four thirds sensor is pushing it about as much as a 100MP sensor would be pushing 35mm.

So, although it’s a great system for getting into serious photography for the price of the memory card for my A7RV, and you can print a very nice exhibition on B2 to B1 sizes with the modern four thirds cameras and lenses, I like how I can take a casual shot of a cup on my desk with the 35mm, and it becomes a study of light and shade. It makes things easy for me. I understand that might not be the case universally; some people actually struggle with 35mm, exactly because of the depth of field that makes it difficult to nail the exact focus and contain the subject within the DoF, and four thirds can make this simpler.

Also, as one learns photography, they will make so many mistakes that it almost doesn’t matter what equipment they use, as long as it is minimally competent. A beginner will struggle to get things in focus, they will struggle to hold the camera steady, they will struggle with composition, they will shoot into the sun and make a mess of it, they will shoot the wrong things at the wrong times of the day, they will forget to take the tripod and then try to shoot blurred-out water and get everything blurry instead. They will try to take pictures of waterfalls during the day and then understand that they have 1/1000s exposure, then try to stop it down to f/22, still not have long enough exposure but come home with a card full of shots completely soft from diffraction. I made all those mistakes in my time, and my landscape shots were so technically flawed that I couldn’t even get fully sharp 5MP on the E-1. So, whether a beginner gets a 24MP body or a 5MP one, they will struggle with composition so much that almost everything they make will end up in the trash, and the rest will be misfocused, motion-blurred, or have some other technical flaw that will render it useless. In case they actually nail the composition on something, the technical deficiencies will either limit the actual resolution or make it irrelevant altogether. So, better not dump too much money into that phase of the learning process; you need something that makes it easy to learn, not something that aims at technical perfection in the hands of a master.

You can learn just fine on a 200 EUR system. As you improve, you’ll know what you want and what to get, but one has to start somewhere. If you have a smartphone with a good camera, you can practice composition with that. What can a smartphone do?

Many nice things. It’s a one-trick pony, though, which is why I recommended the used four thirds set instead, but you can start learning urban or landscape composition with a smartphone just fine. I obviously used a smartphone on occasion, because that’s something I always have with me, even when I don’t take a proper camera.

So, it’s much like playing music. A beginner can take a Stradivari and still make sounds like a strangled cat. A master violinist can take a beginner’s instrument and sound amazing. This doesn’t mean a beginner couldn’t benefit from a well-made instrument that makes it easy for him to learn. The fortunate thing with photography is that the digital cameras were already quite good 20 years ago, and you can now get them for the price of a good memory card. It was much worse before, when the technology was progressing quickly, and even the newest stuff wasn’t all that great, while the older stuff was completely useless. You couldn’t get an older, used digicam and have it be any good. It’s different today. You can get a used Canon 5d mk II with 21MP resolution for 250 EUR or so. I didn’t recommend it in the previous article because the lenses would make the whole system more expensive, but in any case, photography is now quite accessible.

I know what some people are thinking – nice pictures and all, I’d like to learn how to do something similar, but I don’t have the money for equipment that costs this much; is there a cheaper option, and by cheaper I mean almost free?

In fact, yes. There is. However, what you need to do is completely ignore everything a professional photographer would get, and buy something on the complete sidelines, because where there’s interest there’s demand, and where there’s demand, the prices are high. So, let’s say you have a really tight budget, 200 EUR or so. Let’s say your target image quality is a 4K wallpaper or an A3/B3 print. Let’s say you want a starter kit and you don’t care about infinite upgradability in the future, because you can always sell this for as much as you paid for it, and get something more expensive if you run into money.

In this case, I recommend the Olympus Four Thirds kit, a camera with two lenses:

In this specific case, it’s the 8MP E-300 body with 40-150mm and 14-45mm lenses, which are excellent. What can you do with that? How about this:

Or this sample I took with the same lens (ZD 14-45mm) when I had it for review:

The camera I used was E-500, but E-300 has the same sensor, so the colours and clarity would be identical. So, that’s what you get for 200 EUR, plus the budget for fresh batteries and a tripod. What are the limitations? You don’t get the super shallow depth of field unless you focus very close at the maximum aperture and focal length, and even then you can’t blur everything out. However, blurring everything out isn’t necessarily all of photography, and learning the composition is more important. If you want to blur everything out with Four Thirds, you will need the ZD 50mm f/2 macro, and that one is actually cheap for what it is:

What it is, is one of my personal all-time favourite lenses; it renders images as beautifully as the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro for Sony. It’s an absolutely stellar lens, and you can get it used for 140 EUR. What can it do? Everything my ZD 14-54mm could do at maximal magnification, but more and better, crisper and brighter:

If you want wider angle, there’s the ZD 9-18mm f/4-5.6 but it’s not quite inexpensive; around 270 EUR:

That’s 18-36mm equivalent, so not extreme, but very good. ZD 7-14mm f/4 is the best, but that one is 600 EUR, so probably not something you would consider as a budget option. However, 200 for the body and two lens kit, 140 EUR for the macro/portrait lens and 270 EUR for the ultrawide equals 610 EUR for the four lens kit, in excellent optical quality, where the main limitation is the camera body, and you can later get an adapter for the micro four thirds, get an OM-D body with 20MP and there you go; but of course that is additional money; the MMF-1 adapter is 144 EUR, Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV with 20.3MP is 500 EUR. The entire set in the ultimate upgrade path will set you back 1254 EUR. That’s four lenses, two bodies and the adapter, and with those 20.3MP files you can print B2/B1 sizes, which means up to meter wide. Sure, 1254 EUR is a lot, but you can start with 200 and upgrade over time; I’m just saying you’re not boxed in.

So yes, it can be done on a budget. You can get two very nice lenses and an obsolete body that still creates beautiful colours, and as you learn, you can see what you want, and what you don’t. Most important of all, if your images suck, you can blame the equipment. 🙂

I received the 7artisans Canon EF -> Sony FE adapter, which is to replace the old Viltrox Mk III which caused scary electrical freezes of the A7RV body, so I ordered a replacement.

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, 7artisans adapter, Sony A7II

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8, 7artisans adapter, Sony A7II

The new adapter works, I tested it on both A7RV and A7II, with EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, EF 85mm f/1.8 and EF 50mm f/1.8 STM. The samples are shot with EF 85mm f/1.8 wide open on A7II. Autofocus works, even on the 85mm, which is surprising since AF on that one failed to work at all on the earlier adapters. It’s glitchy, so “exit and enter again” is a thing, but even continuous AF works on the A7RV, which is unexpected but welcome. Yeah, CA on the 85mm Canon, when shooting into the light, are nasty, but otherwise the lens is creamy and sharp. The 15mm fisheye is sharp enough on the 61MP body at f/8, and the files would produce very nice B1 prints; however, even at f/5.6 and f/11 there is a visible loss of sharpness, and outside those apertures the result is not of prime quality, to put it mildly.

I took pictures with it for two days. That lens is candy, I love it.