The M.Zuiko ED 90mm F3.5 Macro works well with the 2x TC, although there is a caveat. The naked lens I would normally shoot closed to F8 - F11 for macro. With the TC, the equivalent apertures at 180 mm are F16 - 22, and this is when one should have concerns about the loss of light, diffraction, AF, etc.
Shooting the 90mm F3.5 Macro & 2x TC at F8 is equivalent (in terms of the DOF) to shooting the naked lens at F4, meaning that the DOF can be too shallow at close distances.
This shallow DOF is perhaps obvious in the following images.
When used as a telephoto lens at 180 mm, the 90mm F3.5 Macro & 2x TC combo is useable but the IQ is far from impressive (the raw files require a fair amount of sharpening) and it suffers from strong color fringing (unlike the 300mm F4 and 40-150 F2.8 lenses).
OM-1MarkIIOM 90mm F3.5 + MC-20 lens180mmf/8.01/500s320 ISO0.0 EV
OM-1MarkIIOM 90mm F3.5 + MC-20 lens180mmf/8.01/500s1250 ISO0.0 EV
OM-1MarkIIOM 90mm F3.5 + MC-20 lens180mmf/8.01/500s1250 ISO0.0 EV
OM-1MarkIIOM 90mm F3.5 + MC-20 lens180mmf/7.11/50s800 ISO0.0 EV
On a very dark night I pointed my camera to the sky and took this photo.
When I looked at the shutter speed afterwards, it turned out to be 6s - rather long for a hand-held shot.
Most light was from a fireplace, reflected as the orange-red in the trees.
ruthenium wrote:
The M.Zuiko ED 90mm F3.5 Macro works well with the 2x TC, although there is a caveat. The naked lens I would normally shoot closed to F8 - F11 for macro. With the TC, the equivalent apertures at 180 mm are F16 - 22, and this is when one should have concerns about the loss of light, diffraction, AF, etc.
Shooting the 90mm F3.5 Macro & 2x TC at F8 is equivalent (in terms of the DOF) to shooting the naked lens at F4, meaning that the DOF can be too shallow at close distances.
This shallow DOF is perhaps obvious in the following images.
When used as a telephoto lens at 180 mm, the 90mm F3.5 Macro & 2x TC combo is useable but the IQ is far from impressive (the raw files require a fair amount of sharpening) and it suffers from strong color fringing (unlike the 300mm F4 and 40-150 F2.8 lenses). ...Show more →
Which is why you can use focus-stacking to avoid all those drawbacks and end up with the whole subject sharply in-focus like the shots that Ronny posts.
Re taking close-up shots (not true macro shots) and only posting images online, does anyone see any great advantage of using the 90mm macro versus the 100-400? I don't see much point in getting the macro for these types of shots if viewers can see no noticeably better results with the macro.
The 90mm is a closeup super macro lens. I would not use it for these semi-macro shots. I would rather but a 2:1 TC on the 100-400 if I needed more magnification. I like the working distance for these semi-macro shots and I don't see better images from the 90mm.
That being said the 90mm @ f/11 at about a foot produces very nice macro shots, probably better than the 100-400 but you won't see it on the web.
ruthenium wrote:
On a very dark night I pointed my camera to the sky and took this photo.
When I looked at the shutter speed afterwards, it turned out to be 6s - rather long for a hand-held shot.
Most light was from a fireplace, reflected as the orange-red in the trees.
Tom Reynolds wrote:
The 90mm is a closeup super macro lens. I would not use it for these semi-macro shots. I would rather but a 2:1 TC on the 100-400 if I needed more magnification. I like the working distance for these semi-macro shots and I don't see better images from the 90mm.
That being said the 90mm @ f/11 at about a foot produces very nice macro shots, probably better than the 100-400 but you won't see it on the web.
To add to this, if semi-macro is taken to mean about 0.25 (full-frame 0.5) magnification, then the 90mm lens has this magnification at 0.5 m. This is arguably a bit too close. Not impossible, for sure, but I would prefer keeping a distance of 1 - 1.5m for semi-macro (e.g. for butterflies on flowers).
Some other lenses are indeed better suited for semi-macro, like the 100-400 at 400 mm that has a 0.29x magnification at 1.3 m min focusing distance. I like the 300 mm F4 with the magnification of 0.24x at 1.4 m because of the up to 6 EV steps 5-axis Sync IS and the exceptional IQ of this lens that seems to accept teleconverters nicely, without loosing much of the IQ.
These are two quite distinct situations: when one can get really close to a subject for true macro (when the 90mm lens would shine), and when one must shoot from a distance of 1-1.5m (or even longer sometimes) for different reasons, for example, because there is a body of water or other impossible terrain between the subject and the photographer.
