So, I took a trip...
I don't take long trips away often. So when I do, I have to seize the opportunity. I was heading to Canada on a cruise. My travel budget (both $$ and lbs) lent a generous portion of itself to photography. The then, is "What lens to take?".
And I took some lenses...
I have a decent collection of micro four-thirds glass, and a fair number of adapted lenses too. My breakdown for what I took:
- Panasonic 12-60mm F3.5-5.6: Solid general zoom lens. Great in bright light. Quite wide for a kit zoom.
- Olympus 75-300mm F4.8-6.7: My long zoom. Possibility of birds, whales, and other wildlife - this definitely gets in my bag. The lens also provides certain background compression opportunities. e.g. Taking a picture of someone with a far-off object in the background, taking up most of the picture.
- Sigma 16mm F1.4: I've been loving this lens a lot lately. It's a 32mm equivalent, which is sort of a "wide-normal" focal length. It's bright - so it's great for indoors.
- Samyang 50mm F1.4 + Metabones Focal Reducer: As a 35mm F1.0 lens, this is still my favorite portrait combo on M43. I wasn't expecting to use this much - but just in case.
- 7Artisians 7.5mm F2.8 Fisheye: Another manual lens. this fisheye gave me some of the best pictures of the last holiday. When you cannot get a wide enough view, this works wonders.
- Panasonic 20mm F1.7: Both my wife and daughter carried their Olympus E-M10 I and III cameras with version I and II of this lens. It's a nice pancake with excellent sharpness.
Analyze photos with exiftool and WSL:
I used exiftool to check image information. Windows Subsystem for Linux is one of the few things that keeps me with a Windows box still.
Install exiftool (WSL/debian/ubuntu):
sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl
Usage:
exiftool yourimage
I wanted output I could parse easier, so
exiftool -json yourimage
e.g.
So... many... fields!!!
I really just want the lens and focal length fields.
$ exiftool -json PRJC5662.JPG | jq -c "{Lens:.[].LensID,FL:.[].FocalLength}"
{"Lens":"LUMIX G VARIO 12-60mm F3.5-5.6","FL":"15.0 mm"}
Next step - dump just the specifics on each file - lens and focal length.
#!/bin/bash
origdir="/mnt/d/library/htdocs/Pics/2023" #Parent folder of image folders
#iterate across all subfolders needed
for folder in "08/24" "08/25" "08/26" "08/27" "08/28" "08/29" "08/30" "08/31" "09/01" "09/02"; do
cd $origdir
cd $folder
alljpegs=`find . | grep -i "jpg$"`
for afile in $alljpegs; do
bfile=`basename $afile`
ffile="${origdir}/${folder}/${bfile}"
exifdt=`exiftool -json $afile | jq -c "{File:\"$ffile\",Lens:.[].LensID,FL:.[].FocalLength}"`
echo "$exifdt"
done
done | tee ./lensinfo.json
This produces leninfo.txt, where I can just grep the information, and pipe the output to wc to count matching lines.
The output looks like this:
{"File":"/mnt/d/library/htdocs/Pics/2023/08/24/08/24/LLC10011.JPG","Lens":"Lumix G 20mm F1.7 Asph.","FL":"20.0 mm"}
{"File":"/mnt/d/library/htdocs/Pics/2023/08/24/08/24/PRJC4306.JPG","Lens":"SIGMA 16mm F1.4 DC DN | C 017","FL":"16.0 mm"}
{"File":"/mnt/d/library/htdocs/Pics/2023/08/24/08/24/PRJC4308.JPG","Lens":null,"FL":"0.0 mm"}
For example - If I want to know how many pictures were taken with the Sigma 16mm lens:
$ ∙ cat lensinfo.txt | grep "SIGMA 16" | wc -l
311
Manual lenses are the reduced 50mm F1.4 (35mm F1.0) and fisheye.
I need to visually determine these.
A quick loop is all that's needed - I copied photos with manual glass to a temp folder, and just dragged photos that looked like non-fisheye to another.
mf_fh="${HOME}/scripts/photag/mf/fh/"
while read -r line; do
if [[ "$line" == *"Lens\":null"* ]]; then
fname=`echo "$line" | jq -r ".File"`
cp "$fname" "$mf_fh" &&echo "copied $line"
fi;
done <<< `cat ./lensinfo.json`
That dropped maybe 200 files into the fisheye folder. I barely used my 50mm so should be quick.
Out of ~200 photos, 15 were shot with the 50mm and 179 with the fisheye.
Lens use tally:
But.... This was just an initial check - how many of these are keepers? Some may not be great. Burst shooting was used for a few. These pics are informal for my family, so I'm being less stringent on what I remove. What does the final tally look like?
How often I used a particular lens:
Shooting patterns:
Well right off the bat I can see that if there's any lens I leave behind on a scenic trip, it's the 50mm F1.4 + MB reducer. It's a great lens. A favorite. It just obliterates the background. If the objective of the photo is to capture the subject (people) with the surroundings, it's not the right lens for the job. Nice render though 😁
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| I love the way this lens renders bokeh. I can stop down for the background, but at that point, I'll just use the regular zoom. |
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| A spiraling staircase led from the 3rd floor to the 5th. Keep subjects near the center of the frame and step back. This keeps them from getting too distorted. |
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| the fisheye also fares well in the ship's main dining room. |
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| Sometimes you just want pictures with tall buildings, statues, and monuments - and it feels impossible with most lenses. Without being able to step back a lot, the 7Artisians Fisheye was able to capture the top of the lighthouse. |
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| When you want all the sky... |
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| Sometimes you just want more width and a consistent hyperfocal distance that puts everything in focus. |
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| Being close to the ship wasn't a problem. I did slightly defish the image. |
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| Photography on a ship can be tough with unforgiving lighting conditions. Lights come at bad angles casting shadows on faces. Lights from different areas have different colors making white balance tough. A fisheye captures so much, that it's even tougher to balance exposure and color. |
Next up, is the 12-60mm lens. I went into this not realizing how much I'd use it. I barely used this lens when on the ship. Out in the sun during the day, however, it was really effective.
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| Arcadia National Park, Jordon Pond |
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| Cape Elizabeth, Portland Head Light |
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| Nova Scotia,Peggy's Cove Lighthouse |
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| Strength of a zoom, is in composition and framing. I took this from a bridge in Concord. I saw the boathouse through a gap in the trees. The kayakers were a welcome addition. |
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| The 12-60mm isn't a macro lens, but it can give a respectable close focus in a pinch when desired. With an achromatic close-up filter, it does have fair macro capability. |
The Olympus 75-300mm is a long zoom. It's good for wildlife, far-off structures, and even for portraits where you want to have something in the distance fill the background.
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| I didn't see any whales, puffins, or other wildlife. Birds seem to like flying by cruise ships though. I guess they use the rising warm air as a pick-me-up. |
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| We passed the Cape Elizabeth lighthouse while pulling out of Portland. At 156mm (312mm effective in full-frame terms) It fills the available space in the background. |
The Sigma 16mm is fast becoming a favorite of mine. The F1.4 aperture is nice and bright for indoors and at night. It's somewhat wide, giving a decent depth of field. Sharp, flare-resistant etc... It's a good lens. A little big though, especially compared to the competition - a 15mm F1.4 Panasonic and 17mm F1.8 OM. It is cheaper though, and doesn't seem to sacrifice image quality.
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| Night on a cruise ship is generally quite dark. It certainly wasn't this bright. Faces are perpetually ill-lit, with multiple light colors to make post-processing a pain. |
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| The arcade is one of the darker areas on the ship. A bright F1.4 lens really shines here - especially if it's wide enough to capture more. |
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| It's a fast lens - but that doesn't mean it's useless in bright light. You can stop down - or just let it rip and enjoy a bit of background blur. |
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| The 16mm F1.4 gives a 32mm effective focal length on Micro Four thirds. It's a nice wide-normal type field of view, making it really comfortable to use indoors. |
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| It was a cruise - it won't be complete without a food pic 😁. Last night of the cruise - Lamb and vegetables. |
Final thoughts...
If I had to use one lens, it would easily be the Sigma 16mm F1.4. It doesn't have to specifically be this lens - the 15mm Panasonic and 17mm Olympus are also great options for normal-wide type primes. The ability to shoot in dark areas is great. I didn't bother to take it outside, because I had the 12-60mm zoom - but it would fare well outside too, just stopped down. It wouldn't have the versatility of the 12-60mm of course.
Why doesn't this apply to the 50mm? Well, 50mm on the micro four-thirds platform is an effective 100mm. It's too narrow a field of view, making it rather restrictive. The reducer makes it 35mm - but that's still too narrow.
The next lens in my arsenal I wouldn't go without is the fisheye. I used the zooms far more than this lens, but I was really pleased with the standout fisheye results.
Other than the 50mm F1.4 (35mm F1) that I could definitely do without, what else would I probably drop? It might be the 75-300mm. I got some great shots with it, and there's always the possibility of wildlife where I just need that range - but nothing really stood out this time. Perhaps a better idea would be a superzoom lens - Olympus has a 12-200mm superzoom (though costly!). Tamron has a 14-150mm that has decent sharpness (and it's cheap too).
How do you carry what you need comfortably? Get a decent bag. A small sling is fine for light loads. Get a proper backpack when it starts getting heavy.
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| 5 Lenses, the Panasonic G9 Camera, a 360 cam, tripod, spare cards, adapters, wipes, my laptop, tablet, chargers, snacks, passports etc. all fit in this bag. A Tarion Pro backpack. If you want to carry 2 cameras, or even 2 systems and a laptop, this will do this very nicely. On the ship I used my Domke F-802 "reporter's satchel" - seen rolled up and being carried by the Tarion in the rear straps. |
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