About the Image(s)

Every year here in the UK we have a “Photography Show” in the National Exhibition Centre, near Birmingham. It’s always a slippery slope to go there, as people show you all sorts of interesting bits of kit to buy that “will transform your photography”. But I’m too old to fall for that. Or am I??

I came home with a couple of Laowa lenses. One is a “normal” lens, if you can call a 6mm focal length “normal”. Wow, it focusses so close!! The magnification is still well short of macro levels. But it wasn’t bought for macro. On the other hand, I also brought home a Laowa, 25mm, f2.8, 2.5x to 5x zoom magnification, macro lens. In some ways it’s like the Canon MP-E lens that I used to have, which is 60mm, 1x to 5x zoom magnification. The Laowa is less capable in terms of magnification, but is a fraction of the size of the Canon, although being mainly metal construction, it’s heavy for a micro 4/3 lens. Still, that’s no problem.

My OM Systems 90mm macro lens goes up to 2x magnification, so the Laowa takes over nicely where the OM leaves off.

The Laowa is a completely manual lens, with no autofocus or automatic iris. So, you’re on your own with these. But I’m sure you know that moving the camera rather than focussing the lens is often what we do in macro, so setting the magnification you want and moving the camera to focus is no problem. The lack of an automatic iris might sound a nuisance, as the viewfinder will look darker as you stop the lens down. However, the OM1 has an “S-OVF” setting, which means “simulated optical viewfinder”. What does that mean? In a DSLR (or indeed a film SLR) you look directly through the lens, not at a screen inside the camera, so the viewfinder cannot present you with a picture showing how the picture will turn out in terms of exposure. For mirrorless “SLR” cameras, I think the digital viewfinder is a great feature ??“ you always know when the picture is correctly exposed. I think Canon DSLRs call this “Live View”. But it’s a nuisance here, so, I just set S-OVF to “on” and rely on the histogram to judge exposure.

So, it’s early days for me with this lens, but here is one for your thoughts.

The “original” is a photo of the setup, taken with my phone.

The main image was taken as follows:

OM Systems OM-1, Laowa zoom macro lens, 5x magnification, f5.6 (you have to remember that, it’s not in the EXIF!), on a WeMacro rail stand. 1/250 sec, f5.6, ISO 800. Lit by 2 off Adaptalux “super bright” lighting arms on “boost” mode. A bracket of 94 frames with a 0.04mm spacing, merged in Helicon Focus, processed in Affinity 3. WeMacro rail controlled by WeMacro software. (If only Helicon would make an Olympus version of their excellent “Remote” software! But being in Ukraine, they have a lot on their minds.) Helped by Olympus Capture, which lets you operate the camera almost completely remotely.

I did run the image through Topaz Denoise AI, but it made no apparent difference to the result.