I have sufficient lenses for my GX1 (not that has ever stopped me). But when we were passing a camera shop and my wife was looking for something to purchase for my birthday, this lens seemed like a good thing to point at.
It’s the Olympus body cap lens and its main attraction is the price, less than 2,000 baht; and presumably equally cheap in the currency of your country. It’s other attraction might be that it is very small; but there are already very competent pancake lenses in similar focal lengths which will blow this little toy out of the water in terms of image quality. We can only hope that it might compensate for its rather obvious optical limitations by knocking out interesting and quirky images.
Most modern cameras can produce beautiful sharp images, accurately reflecting the scene they captured. But sometimes you don’t want that. You want distortion, lens flare, screwed up colours; an amalgamation of flaws that produce something that you can point at and say “look, art”. Lomo sell a wide range of cameras and films based on that very idea, ensuring that the images you will capture will definitely be technically inferior; but they might be interesting. In the digital world you only have to dive into Instagram to find a range of filters and effects that will attack a perfectly good photo and fuck it up. Personally, I have no problem with this. Most of my shots are boring, and if I can spice them up and make them look less boring to me; then that’s a result. So I was rather hoping that the body cap lens might produce something weird straight out of the camera; would save me adding weirdness later.
The portents were good that this might be bad. The lens is tiny, although Olympus claim they have stuffed three elements into the tiny hole. There is no aperture control, the lens is a fixed F8, which is what many of the Lomo cameras are fixed at. There are no electronic contacts on the camera either, so you just stick it in Aperture Priority mode and shoot away. The only control available is a little manual focusing slider on the front.
In the closed position, the lens acts as the most expensive body cap in the world (although a Leica body cap, no lens included, runs it close). Slide it a little way and you have focus at infinity and, given the aperture is F8, in focus to a point not too far away from you. Move the slider a little further and you feel it click into place, this is the hyperfocal setting, meaning that everything from three feet away to infinity will be in focus, although the far distance will not be quite as sharp as with the infinity setting. This doesn’t really matter because the lens is not that sharp anyway; so stick it at the hyperfocal point and just snap away.
I am not used to shooting without some form of focusing first, and it took a while to adapt and just press the shutter to take an instant shot. Different, but no more pleasurable than the nearly instant, staggeringly precise autofocus of the GX1, or the slow but satisfying process of manually focusing.
If you want to get close up, then your can push the slider further across and look through the viewfinder to focus. Trouble is, with an F8 lens which is not that sharp, it can be difficult to ascertain the correct focus point.
My initial shots looked average, but with no signs of the Lomo style funkiness I was hoping for. In desperation, I pointed the thing towards the sun in the hope of weird flaring and rainbow colours. Nope.
After a while, I did start to appreciate the pleasure of just shooting without focusing; but then I could take any other lens, set it at hyperfocal distance, and do exactly the same, with better image quality.
Obviously there is an advantage in it being so small. Stick it on the smallest body you have, put it in your pocket and whip it out and snap when the mood takes you. But you better not get in the mood if the light is bad, shooting at F8 needs loads of light or a very high ISO. To be honest, I felt it was too small. A GX1 with a 20mm Panasonic pancake on the front looks cool; with the body cap lens it just looks stupid and the camera feels a little unbalanced.
The images it produces are soft, with no compensating funkiness to compensate. Perhaps Olympus should have left out a couple of the elements, sold it for less, and given us something that produced weird but occasionally interesting photos.
Which leads me to my conclusion: The Olympus 15mm body cap lens; insufficiently crap.
Comments 🔗
2012-11-21| Spanky saysNormally I agree with you but I think you are being too harsh. It’s designed to be an always on lens for your camera so you can snap those spontaneous shots. For the princely sum paid you could do a whole lot worse and if you are in the selling mood I’ll be happy to take it off your hands.
Is it sad I can tell by your shadow what type of camera bag you have?
2012-11-21| Grant saysI see you went with the classic black and silver again, doesn’t it come in duck-egg blue and violent orange?
2012-11-21| Robin Parmar says“insufficiently crap” – nice conclusion, and I see your point
2012-11-22| The Lightweight saysAlthough we only get to see the review now, I think the purchase was made prior to the purchase of the read beast, i.e. probably still before the colourful phase in Spike’s artistic development. As for the comment regarding the camera bag - also interesting, which colour is it?