First test shots - Tamron 90mm f2.5 Macro Manual Focus on E-300

[dougjgreen]

These are my first test shots of my old standby Tamron 90mm f2.5 SP Macro lens manual focus lens adapted to my E-300

These images were purely to test the lens resolution at the corners - the first shot is just to show what the 2nd image was cropped from, and it has been severely downsampled to get the image to fit, so any lack of resolution is due to that severe downsampling. The shot was taken at f4.0, hand held at around 1/320 sec at ISO 200. Image #2 is a 100% crop from the far corner of the non-downsampled image. The 3rd shot, a 400% crop, of the non-downsampled image shows that this lens outresolves the sensor in the corners of the 4/3 frame, as the pixelation can be made out easier than any lack of resolution.

A couple of weeks ago, Paul posted results for this lens that were extremely soft at the corners (apparently, at long distance, not in the macro range) , which was completely contrary to my experience with this lens. Certainly at close-up distances, this is not the case.

[dougjgreen]

Now, some quickie shots of flowers. The very narrow depth of field is quite apparent in these photos. All hand held, and manually focused, typically these shots were at f5.6 or f8 at between 1/480 and 1/1000

All of these were at between 1/4 and 1/2 life size, so the effective aperture was really around 1 stop smaller than the setting.

All of these were severely down-sampled from SHQ mode to fit well under the 128K image size

FYI, this lens was fitted with a Tamron Adaptall M42 mount, and an M42 to 4/3 adapter. Other than cropping, downsampling and compressing to fit, NO postprocessing whatsoever was applied to the camera's SHQ mode, ISO 200, auto white balance. All shots were using Aperture priority stopped down metering using evaluative metering, with no exposure compensation applied.

[Raist3d]

I don't know why but I find the flower shots "muted" somehow...

- Raist

[dougjgreen]

They were taken completely in the shade, and IMHO, they are a tad underexposed. But, as I mentioned, there was no postprocessing done at all to the first set of these shots. Were I going to edit them for aesthetics, I would punch up the contrast and brightness a bit, especially on the yellow flower. I actually prefer them the way they were initially fresh out of the camera, because they don't blow out any highlights at all. It's certainly easier to add brightness and contrast such as below, while preserving detail, than it is to try to dial it back if the highlights are too aggressively exposed.

If I were to post process them, I would not touch the white and violet flowers, but here's what I'd do to the yellow and pink ones. This is with less than a minute of editing for each in photoshop. As I said, I prefer the way that they came out of the camera, because that way, they are trivially easy to punch up without losing highlights:

Arguably, this 2nd set is more like what the colors would look like straight out of a Canon 20D, where Olympus' default settings are more dialed back but allow for more flexible editing.