Olympus 25mm Portrait Shoot

March 9, 2014

Olympus recently announced the availability of the M.ZUIKO 25mm, f/1.8 prime lens for their micro four thirds range of cameras.

On a recent visit to The Photography Show in Birmingham I was able to pick up one of these lenses at a bargain price just in time for a portrait shoot I had arranged so was eager to put it through its paces to see if it was as great as all the reviews said it was. For the micro four thirds standard 25mm equates to 50mm on the equivalent 35mm, so called full frame sensor, so is what used to be known as a ‘standard’ lens. There are lots of good reasons for using a standard lens, here are 20 if you are really interested.

It’s been a while since I’ve used a standard lens on a camera, although the equivalent focal length I will have used many times on zoom lenses of course. I have to say it’s quite refreshing to use this fixed focal length lens for a change. It forces you to think about framing the shot and also to move around more rather than just zoom in and out. As expected the images were all super sharp, even at the relatively large apertures I was shooting with. I didn’t get chance to really explore the depth of field of the lens as many of the backgrounds I was using were plain anyway. I have no doubt this won’t be a problem however and some of the non-studio images I have taken since certainly exhibit good bokeh at the larger aperture settings. Definitely a great lens and one I expect to leave on my camera most of the time.

Here are my photographs from the shoot. All images are taken on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 with the M.ZUIKO 25mm f/1.8 apart from the final one for which I used the M.ZUIKO 45mm f/1.8. The model is Clair Hennessy.