Hi folks,

I didn’t think that a camera could ever be this much fun to use. When it was announced a few years back I remember thinking to myself “that’s a beautiful looking camera” but there was no way on earth that I could afford to buy one. Well, not that long ago, I found a mint condition one secondhand for a fraction of the original selling price and I decided to take the plunge.

I’m delighted that I did, apart from its retro 1960’s rangefinder styling, which of course I love, under the hood lies a very modern 21st century, fully-featured, 20MP camera which has every feature that I’m ever likely to require. But the point is that it goes much further than that, this camera makes me feel good using it. I don’t really know how to describe it but it gives me a feeling which I can only acquaint with the feeling that I used to have when using my first Olympus 35mm film cameras. When fitted with a small fast lightweight lens it’s a joy to use, the combination feels very well-balanced and natural in one’s hand with all the frequently-used controls at one’s finger tips. It’s the antithesis of a mobile phone camera. 🙂

The creative dial on the front which allows one to quickly switch between various, default or user-customisable colour and monochrome profiles as well as easily accessible highlight/mid tone/shadow control dial are fabulous creative features. It’s a bit like having a film camera with say Tri-X and Kodachrome or suchlike both readily accessible at the flick of a switch. If one shoots in super-fine JPEG and RAW then one has the best of both worlds, colour RAW and whichever profile that one has selected applied to the JPEG, it’s a win-win scenario. It’s nice to be able to create, save and upload one’s own profiles, something that I’m definitely going to be looking into more.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy using my OM-D cameras which have and will continue to serve me faithfully, they’re excellent cameras, but the PEN-F is something special. Using it is extra-specially enjoyable and when I’m having fun I’m much more likely to feel creative. I guess, maybe, at the end of the day, it’s just as simple as that.

Kind regards

Leigh

Hi folks,

I was running through the menu on my Olympus PEN-F and reassigning some function buttons and I remembered the 2x digital tele-converter function so I assigned it to a button to try out, not expecting much in the way of image quality. I already knew of it but I’ve never tried it, as it turned out I was previously much too hasty in  assuming that it wasn’t going to be of any good.

To my surprise I was very impressed with the results. I did a few test shots indoors with my Lumix 12-32mm at maximum focal length (32mm) with the tele-converter function enabled giving me a focal length of 64mm/(128 mm full-frame equivalent. As it uses the center of the frame which one might expect to be the sharpest and assuming that one has a lens that is sharp in the center then it should be good. In the many videos that I’ve watched and articles that I’ve read I only remember one that mentioned it in passing.  This could be very handy when one either doesn’t have a longer lens in one’s bag or the time to change lenses. It really does extend the usefulness of this fabulous tiny  lens even more and it fits in squarely with my travel light ethos. It’s not a true alternative to a longer lens of course but, in practical terms you’ve got to look quite hard to notice the difference assuming that you don’t have your shots blown up to very large sizes. I’ve never been a “pixel-peeper” I’ve got a lot more creative things to do with my time when working with my images. 🙂

A test shot taken at f/5.6, 1/6th sec. @ ISO 800 cropped down to 640×480 for the blog which really doesn’t do it full justice, higher res. shot in the link. If your camera has such a function and you choose to try it I’d be very interested to hear about your findings.

https://leighkempphotoblog.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/12-32mm-at-32mm-f5.6-iso-800-with-2xdigital-teleconverter.jpg

Kind regards

Leigh