Over the Christmas period I have had the opportunity to borrow my brother David’s Oly 45mm f1.8. Up until now the only primes I had around this focal length were 2 old manual lenses that I got on eBay. More about these another time but whilst I love using them for the tactile nature of going manual (there’s no doubt that I feel more connected with the whole shooting process when using these), I find I do miss a lot of candid opportunities because despite some very good focus aids built into the OM-D E-M1 I simply miss focus, a lot.
Image Quality
Ok, let’s get the most important point out of the way. This lens, in my humble opinion, is stunning in terms of image quality. It is the best portrait lens I have ever used, and that includes the 70-200 MkII Canon. It is very sharp wide open (which let’s face it is where a lens like this will spend most of its time) and produces lovely out of focus backgrounds separating the subject from its surroundings beautifully.
Handling
This is a small lens which I personally like. The drawback is that it has a very unusual filter size which means you either need to get new filters or a step-down ring. That aside it looks fairly good on the camera and in auto focus mode it is lovely to use with extremely fast focusing. For manual use you have to jump into the menu and turn on manual focus as it doesn’t have the snap back ring that the pro Oly lenses sport. Personally I don’t much like using it for manual focus, it is just too small and simply doesn’t have a nice feel to it, but with such fast accurate auto focus I can’t see this ever being an issue.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that this is a lovely lens and with Amazon currently selling it at £179 it is an absolute bargain. I have had it in my basket several times as I know that I am going to lose this one as soon as David heads back off to the other side of the world. But the bottom line is, as much as I love it, I am not sure it is for me. If I were someone who shot a lot of portraits or did a lot of street I would have this lens for sure, but as a landscape photographer it is a luxury. For now I will continue to use my old manual 50mm for those sorts of shots but who knows, in the future I may just change my mind.
