Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Rexatar Progress Report
27 June 2019
In We Concoct an Optical Plan B, we revealed our intention to shoot with an antique Rexatar 28-50mm lens on our Olympus E-PL1 while we tried to resign ourselves to replacing the defunct kit lens.
Cherries. Olympus E-Pl1 with Lenbaby Tilt Transformer and Rexatar 25-50mm zoom at f8, 1/320 second and ISO 200. Raw file processed in Piccure+ as a TIFF and tweaked in Photoshop with the Camera Raw filter.
You might wonder how that's going. The thought has certainly passed through our mind since we wrote that story.
We took it for a walk on a very bright sunny day this week. Then we processed the Raw files through Piccure+. That was always going to be part of the deal because we wanted to squeeze every ounce of goodness out of the data, starting as we were with that lens (which you can sometimes find on eBay for a whopping $30 -- or less).
The rest of the images from our walk were just as pleasing.
Then we tweaked the resulting TIFF in Photoshop's Camera Raw filter. Not much tweaking (particularly this image) but some. We smart sharpened after resizing and exported the test image as a JPEG.
We liked it enough to show you.
The rest of the images from our walk were just as pleasing. We processed a handful of them taken at different focal lengths.
It was a slower shooting experience than the autofocus kit lens, of course. Not only were we manually focusing through the electronic viewfinder but we couldn't just throw the lens to infinity and be done with it. On the Tilt Composer adapter we lost infinity at 50mm. We had to come back a bit into the high 40s to focus far away.
But we liked the captures' exposure and color and tone. They provided plenty for Piccure+ to work with.
And the lens isn't too heavy to carry comfortably on that little camera body either.
If we want to street shoot with it, we'll probably use the 28mm focal length, set the focus at the hyperfocal distance with a stopped down aperture and leave it at that.
So Plan B is sufficing and not really penalizing us in quality. But we're still dreaming about Plan C.