National Iced Tea Day

Today is National Iced Tea Day. Not that I knew about it. I stumbled on up the occasion quite accidentally.

This afternoon I decided to go to Dundas Square for some shooting, as it's a busy place and there is usually events going on. Sure enough, the occasion was free iced tea tasting, along with live music. This actually was a great opportunity to test the Olympus 100-200mm f5 zoom lens. I wanted to see how it performs on the Sony A7.

Surprisingly, the lens works very well on the A7. No visible vignetting even wide open (f5) and completely acceptable even wide open. The second pictures shows a 100% crop at f5. I think that's pretty good, no? Seems to perform better on the A7 than on NEX-6 or OM E-M5.  Sometimes very cheap lenses can produce very good results.

Live Music - Sony A7 & Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 @ f5. Click for larger.

Crop from picture above. Click on it to see 100% crop. For some reason, Blogger reprocesses the pictures as I upload them and make them brighter than the original. This is very annoying and sometimes very bad, like this time, and sometimes it's tolerable.

Lining up for free iced tea sample - Sony A7 & OM 100-200mm f5. Click for larger.

Enjoying the free music and iced tea - Sony A7 & OM 100-200mm f5 @ f5. Click for larger.

Videographer - Sony A7 & OM 100-200mm f5 @ f5. Click for larger.

Lead Singer - Sony A7 & OM 100-200mm f5 @ f5.

Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 Photo Set

The day after the snow storm we had on Wednesday, I took the OM 100-200mm f5 again, to make sure it was still OK. But of course it was. That's the beauty of manual focus lenses; there is no electronics to fail you when it gets a bit wet. The OM 100-200mm f5 lens is not the greatest lens by any means, as it was built and sold as a budget lens. Sharpness is so so, and my version suffers from a very severe case of zoom creep. Actually, the zoom just slides like there is no friction at all. The good thing about the lens is that it's quite compact and light for the range it provides.

All pictures below were taken with the Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 & Olympus E-M5

Olympus E-M5 in Adverse Weather

After a few days of normal weather, Old Man Winter is back with a vengeance. This afternoon we had a blizzard of snow with 40 KM/h wind, but I saw this as a good opportunity to test the E-M5 under this kind of environment. So I ventured out into the snow.

I took along the little used Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 cheap zoom, because I don't want to ruin any lenses that I would want to use in the future. Naturally, the lens/adapter combo is not weather sealed. There is a good chance snow/water could get into the camera through the adapter, as the heat from the camera could melt the snow on the body and the water could sip through the mount. Thankfully, this didn't happen, though when I removed the lens, there was a bit of water inside the mount but nothing got inside the camera body.

The E-M5 held up extremely well. It was covered in snow in matter of seconds. The annoying part is having to keep cleaning the snow off the viewfinder, as well as the front of the lens.  I suspect the temperature was somewhere around -15 Celsius with the wind chill factor, which isn't that cold, considering the kind of weather we have been having. Another issue is the front element of the lens started to ice up after the snow blew into the hood. Combined that with the thick snow, precise focusing was impossible. So all the pictures were focused without the aid of the magnify feature.

After about 40 minutes, the lens/camera combo continued to work, but I had had enough. My hair was frozen into ice, and I suspect my face was starting to go that way too, so I headed back. It was an interesting experience. There was a few crazy people just like me who were out and about in this kind of weather, including one fellow photographer, who retreated after reaching the lake.  The blowing snow definitely adds an interesting element to the pictures. To some extend, I quite enjoy taking pictures this way.

All pictures below were taken with Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 manual focus lens & E-M5

Olympus OM 100-200mm f5 - Sample

This lens came with the OM-1 camera I bought many years ago, and today is the first time I actually used it. My particular copy has a severe case of zoom creep. Actually, it doesn't creep, it just slides. There is no friction on the zoom action at all. Not sure if this is copy variant, or designed like this. Add to this the very slow maximum aperture of f5, you know why I haven't shown much interest using it.

It is quite compact, and perhaps that was the primary goal of the design of this lens. The 49mm filter thread goes with many of the OM lenses with the same filter size in that era. The built-in hood is very short and not sufficient to shade the stray lights. It's better than nothing, but not much more.

Optically it's decent, but not earth shattering. I would rank it slightly better than average of the zooms from its days. One thing I dislike of this lens, is that it clips highlights abruptly, as you can see in the picture below, which kind of ruins the feel of the picture.

Is it worth buying one? I probably won't buy one, as I am not really a zoom lens fan, but if you can get it for $20 or so, it's probably good for the occasional day time use when a telephoto lens is needed.

Bokeh - Sony NEX-6 & OM 100-200mm f5 @ f5