Using Manual Focus Lenses with the Olympus E620

Call me a Luddite, but I like using manual focus, even with my Olympus E620. It frequently makes my photography more fun. And it allows me to use some premium quality prime lenses that I couldn’t otherwise afford in their AF incarnations.

Many of us have some marvelous glass left over from our Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Leica and Minolta film camera systems. And frankly, nobody (with the possible exception of Leica and Ziess) makes lenses with the same durability and quality as many of the solid, brass-n-glass gems we used in the days of film. (Remember film?) Even though they were big and heavy, they made incredible photos.

One of the great things about the four-thirds camera format is that it’s so easy to use almost any lens on the planet with it. All you need is an appropriate adapter. And those are readily available for as little as $15 US.

Thanks to those inexpensive adapters I’ve been shooting my e620 with some favorite Rokkor (Minolta), Nikkor (Nikon), Takumar (Pentax) and Zuiko (Olympus) legacy lenses for several months. And the results can be fantastic.

Best of all, you can pick up some incredible used glass for a fraction of what a similar new lens will cost. Don’t have $6,000 for a new ZD 300mm F2.8? Look around carefully and you may find its legacy manual focus counterpart for less than a tenth that price. And I don’t mean some bargain basement, off-brand piece of junk, but a premium-quality Nikkor, Rokkor or Zeiss that originally sold for $3000-$5000 back in “the good old days.”

Using legacy manual focus lenses with a Four-thirds format camera presents some new challenges though. I’ve found that the biggest of these is achieveing the same razor-sharp focus that was so easy to get with my film cameras.

Since auto focus isn’t available with legacy manual lenses, you must rely on your eye to get it right. Often that’s not easy when you’re restricted by the tiny optical viewfinder built into most of today’s digital cameras. And the lack of any optical focus aid — like the ground glass or split-prism screens manual focus cameras used — makes it tougher.

Olympus DSLR users have several ways to meet the challenge, though — and more choices than users of other full-fledged DSLR brands will have:

• Add a viewfinder magnifier.
• Install a split-prism focusing screen.
• Use zone focusing.
• Add an AF-confirm chip to your adapter.
• Use LiveView focus magnification.

Add a Viewfinder Magnifier

This is easy and inexpensive to do, but some people may not realize much benefit from it. I stuck an Olympus ME-1 magnifying eyecup to my e620 long before I began using manual focus lenses and keep it attached permanently. I find it makes the viewfinder image closer to the size of the film cameras I’m accustomed to using. It helps with manual focus, but only slightly.

Another option could be a right-angle magnifying viewfinder like the Olympus Vari-Mag Right-Angle Finder. It offers more magnification and it’s adjustable, too, so it might be a better option. A bit pricey, though.

Install a Split-Prism Focusing Screen

You can do this with most Olympus DSLRs, but unfortunately not with the E620. When Olympus designed the mirror box of the E620, one of their major criteria was to keep it as small as possible. Result: there’s not enough clearance to seat a different focusing screen.

For other Olympus cameras, the KatzEye focusing screen is great. I have one in my E420 and it’s a hugely important manual-focusing tool. Highly recommended.

Warning: There are some sellers on Ebay advertising focusing screens they say can be used with an Olympus E620. Don’t believe it. There is not enough clearance in the E620’s mirror box to install any screen other than the original one installed by Olympus. You’ll damage your camera if you try.

Use Zone Focusing

This is a technique I use often with “normal” and wide angle lenses. It’s not really appropriate for telephotos because of their shallow depth-of-field.

Zone Focusing relies on the character of a lens’s hyperfocal distance to pull everything within a specific range (or “zone”) into focus on your photo. News and sports photographers used it often in film days because they had to shoot quickly and frequently didn’t have time to adjust focus for a fast-moving subject.

Zone focusing is only convenient if you have a lens with a depth-of-field distance scale marked on the barrel. Sadly, most auto focus lenses don’t have these markings — manufacturers stopped putting them on AF lenses — but you will see them on almost all manual focus lenses.

To use zone focusing you must first determine the nearest and the farthest points of focus. Once you know these distances, adjust the lens aperture ring so the index mark is centered between these two distances.

The two aperture scales on each side of the index mark will show you the near and far focus distances covered by each aperture. Pick the aperture that brackets the subject area that you want in focus, then set your lens accordingly.

You’ll find more discussion about zone focusing here.

Adapters with AF-confirm Chips

These are available all over Ebay and a few other places, too. You can find the chips in two flavors: the mount-it-yourself-to-your-existing-adapter version, and the already-mounted-to-an-adapter version. (More about this in a future post.)

LiveView Focus Magnification

Just as you can use your Olympus DSLRs LCD to zoom in on a photo you’ve just shot, you can also use it to nail a precise focus in LiveView. It’s another feature that (AFAIK) is uniqe to Olympus DSLRs. Unfortunately, most Olympus camera manuals don’t make it easy to figure out. So below is a step-by-step “how-to” using the E620.

This is easiest to learn and master when your camera is mounted on a tripod. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to perform the drill easily even when the camera is hand-held. At least it’ll be relatively easy with a normal or wide lens. You’ll always need a tripod (or monopod) with even the shortest of telephotos.

Here’s the drill…

1. Set your E620 to manual focus (duhhh!). I set mine to manual exposure as well, then pre-set the ISO, shutter and aperture.
2. Push the LiveView button so your subject is displayed on the LCD.
3. Press the “Info” button several times until you see a green rectangle superimposed over your LCD image.
4. When the green rectangle appears, press “OK”, then turn the control wheel to magnify the image. You’ll be able to choose 5x, 7x or 10x magnification with the control wheel.
5. Now adjust the lens’s focus ring until your desired point of focus snaps into sharpness.
6. Press “OK” again to exit the magnification stage and view the entire frame on the LCD. Careful! Don’t move the focus ring or you’ll change the point of focus!
7. Recompose to frame the image as desired.
8. Adjust shutter speed and aperture appropriately and press the shutter release.

It’s not absolutely necessary to exit the magnification view before snapping your photo. If you’re confident the image is framed as you want, just press the shutter release whenever you’re ready to make the image. But be sure to stop down the lens aperture first!

I find it easiest to set the shutter speed and aperture first, then roughly-compose my shot in the viewfinder before begining the focus drill. I then set the lens wide open, switch to LiveView, focus as above, stop down and shoot. (It takes longer to read that than to do it!) Practice with the drill until you develop a techinque that’s comfortable for you.

And most of all… have fun!

18 December, 2009 — Filed in: How To,