Some hundred pictures are shot now with the new ‘M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 40‑150mm 1:2.8 PRO lens’ and here are the two most important lessons I’ve learned so far:

1. The depth of field becomes quite shallow quickly at aperture 2.8
2. It’s important to keep an eye on your ISO settings to get top quality out of this lens

So let’s start at point one: The Cheetah’s picture at the top has been taken at distance of about 2.5 meters at  [ 260mm | f 2.8 | 1/250s | ISO 400 ] and as you can see, just the space between the right eye and the nose got perfect focus. The left eye is OK but is already out of focus. This is because you get a depth of field of about 30mm if you do the math. Of course everything is clear in photography if you think about it but it’s important to take care of it ;) I didn’t because till now I’ve used the Olympus 75-300mm / f4.8-6.7 at zoo which gave me double depth of field at the same settings because the minimum aperture is more than twice of my new lens. And so I got a nice depth of field automatically.

So for the future I’ve to get used to taking more care about depth of field. On the other hand it’s quite cool to be able now to isolate the subject and get a creamy bokeh much easier.

The second lesson I’ve learned is to take care about my ISO-settings! Im used to set my camera to AUTO-ISO, so in ‘Aperture Priority-Mode’ the camera takes care for sufficient exposure times by choosing the right ISO-speed. But the quality of this new lens is so high that sensor-noise starts bugging me at ISO 400. Correcting this noise by lightroom will wash out parts of the details one could get from this incredible lens.

So if you take into account that your OM-D E-M5/M1 owns a body-built-in picture-stabilizer which should give you up to 2 f-stops, it shouldn’t be a problem to decrease your ISO-settings for 1 or 2 stops. For todays picture this means an ISO of 200 would have been sufficient to get maximum details without any other disadvantage.

So my resume for future use: “For maximum quality keep an eye on ‘depth of field’ and stay away from AUTO-ISO setting.”

See you again soon,
Andrew >:o)