Has the black Olympus 12mm lens gone for good?

Started 7 months ago | Discussions thread
Tom Caldwell
Forum ProPosts: 19,280
Re: The old prime vs zoom arguments
In reply to Guy Parsons, 7 months ago

Guy Parsons wrote:

Olydude wrote:

That's the whole point... You're not learning anything about focal lengths or why they exist, or why there has been standard focal lengths such as 24, 28, 35, 50, 90, 100, and 135mm for such a long time.

Standard focal lengths are there because that's what started being made and unimaginative photographers keep buying them as they become "must haves" for no other reasons than they box their view into those set focal lengths.

There is a specific and valid reason why these focal lengths are chosen more often than not by photographers, and that is that they suit the style of photography and have done so for so long that they are somewhat of a standard. That's OK if you don't want to adhere to that, but you should at least recognise that such standards exist for good reason.

Feet set the perspective and focal length sets the framing and something like the 12-40/2.8 makes that all so convenient and way more versatile than a set of primes.

Just because photography becomes painful at times with primes (swapping to the right lens, if you have it in the bag) doesn't mean that pain makes for better photography. The contemplative method of find the spot to shoot from for the desired perspective, then vary the zoom to get the desired and highly selective framing makes for better photography.

You might have 12/17/25/45 primes, I have a zoom that covers 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 and 40mm plus minor cropping to cover a bit further up to 45mm.

Each to his own of course but zooms work fine for me. Been there done that with primes in film days and now rejoice in the fact that one lens does it all.

Regards...... Guy

I can handle a quality zoom with f2.8 fixed and internal zooming plus IS.  Nice mixture.  Not so sure about the slowish kit zoom with extending lens and even slower at telephoto.

However the neat little 12-32mm f3.5-5.6 kit zoom that comes with the GM1 breaks most of these rules and still comes up smiling.  So I am willing to compromise on my first statement.

But of course a 12/2.0 is a whole lot faster at 12mm. Hey, but who needs f2.0 much anyway?

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Tom Caldwell

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