Hi everyone,

Still very early days but my experiences with just taking my E-M1 MFT camera and Lumix 20mm lens. Firstly of course it’s lightweight and it doesn’t cause anywhere near the fatigue to my neck and shoulders as a heavier lens like my 12-40mm PRO zoom for example. Then as I’m not carrying any other lenses, when the camera’s hanging from my neck my camera bag/pouch is as light as air on my shoulder as it only contains a filter, spare camera battery, spare SD card, bag rain cover and one of those small puffer brushes, minimalist in the extreme huh?!. I’m not on any sort of crusade here but these are merely my observations to date.

The most interesting thing is that I’ve found that with this focal length is kind of hard to explain as it’s non-technical, non scientific, it’s really just a feeling but I’ll try. I feel more involved, more a part of my surroundings, closer in a connected sense to what I’m photographing. Less detached than shooting a landscape with a wider focal length for example and even more so with regards to a telephoto lens, it just feel very natural to me. I’m happy to say that It’s rekindled a feel good factor about taking photographs which I think that, at least in part, I lost somewhere down the line.

A common comment regarding this lens is it’s relatively slow auto focusing speed as I think that it moves all of its lens elements as one. Yes it is slower than many of my other lenses but not distressingly so and yes it can sometimes hunt in poor light but of course one can manually focus it. These don’t bother me as the majority of my shots are taken in reasonably good light with the lens focused to infinity or near infinity. The camera has a function which is on by default to park the lens at infinity every time one switches it off so, until one focuses on a closer object, it will need to do very little if any refocussing and then of course the autofocus is pretty darned instantaneous. When I first fitted it to the camera and switched it on I wondered why it seemed even slower to focus and soon realised that I’d last used the camera at a fixed distance to the subject with a macro lens and I had turned this feature off so that I could leave the camera on a tripod above the subject and it’d be focussed at the same set distance every time I turned it on and off 🙂 .The lens is very small and light being a pancake design and also very fast and sharp so it ticks all of these boxes for me. In my opinion it thoroughly deserves it’s reputation as one of the all time must have lenses for the Micro Four Thirds system, it’s a joy to use.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, early days but so far so good. 🙂

Kind regards

Leigh