50mm Challenge

Now that I have found my old Olympus 50mm lens I have decided to use it as much as possible for the rest of the month. I was curious to see how it would perform macro using extension tubes. I have been trying to capture snow flakes for a while and it was snowing this morning. It wasn't that cold so the snow was melting fairly quickly. I put a freezer brick outside so the flakes wouldn't melt so quickly. Hubby very kindly held an umbrella over me and the camera but it also protected the brick so we had to get the coverage right!. The old lens has to be manually focussed which proved to be quite easy but I needed to decrease the aperture on the lens to get everything in focus. It was mostly powder snow falling so the flakes were quite "chunky" and the minimum F1.8 was too shallow. I think I used about F8. It is not recorded on the EXIF data as the aperture ring is on the lens. One thing I found tricky was that changing the aperture didn't seem to change the depth of field. Then I remembered from way back that there were depth of field preview buttons on the lens. I had to press these while exposing the shot as the Lumix doesn't recognise the manual settings. I just have to remember next time if I want an FStop >1.8. Overall, it was an interesting exercise and I was quite pleased with the detail. The extras show a powder snow flake, the first one with the 50mm lens and the second one with a 40-150mm digital lens both with a 21mm extension tube. I didn't reproduce the settings on the zoom shot but that could be a comparison exercise for another day.