Subject to Change

Lens Adapter (Pentax K, in this case) on the Olympus e420

I received a PK to 4/3 lens adapter in the mail the other day. My 50mm f/1.7 ought to serve as a decent 100mm f/1.7 portrait lens on the Olympus e420.

And, my Tokina 80-200 f/2.8 will make a nice 160-400 f/2.8.

Those two cover the most critical needs I have. I think they will work OK with manual f/stops, because I will tend to use them near wide open. Some of my other lenses may be useful, but probably will be more annoying to use. Those are a Vivitar 24mm f/1.8, plus 35mm f/2.0 and 100mm f/2.8 Pentax M’s. There was a time I had several more. But since I was not using them much, they went to new homes.

Some test shots with the Pentax M 50mm f/1.7.

At f/1.7. Who says you can not get a nice blurred background with 4/3? The tripod is about 2 feet from the camera. Full frame image downsized to 800×600 and saved for web. No other editing.

At f/4.0 at 5 feet. Shot this to see about what typical DOF would be on a head and shoulders portrait. Cropped to show DOF clearly. Cropped and downsized for web.

At f/4.0 Pretty close up, FL-50 on Stroboframe Press-T bracket connected via Yongnau rf-602 radio slave trigger. Full frame image, downsized to 800×600, and saved for web, no other editing.

It is very difficult to manual focus on the viewfinder screen, mostly you have to go by what looks most contrasty. My MX has a plain ground glass in it but is 100 times easier to focus. The screen in the e420 is designed for a very bright image, not for focusing. It might have been better to get an adapter with the focus confirm chip, so you could get a beep to tell you when you were in focus.

The 80-200 zoom, on the other hand, is not too hard to focus at 200mm f/2.8.

That was taken out the kitchen window, very dirty and screened, hand held at 400mm equivalent, the lens is actually quite sharp although you could not tell it from this photo. However, it does show that the lens does work on the e420.

Since my main reason for buying he adapter was to use the Pentax 50mm as a portrait lens I took this quick self portrait (Pentax M 50mm @ f/4.0, 1m, window light).

Yes, I know, I need to trim my face. Actually, I am surprised I got the focus that close since I merely set the lens to 1 meter, and the stool an estimated meter from the camera. It does show that a 50mm lens is OK for headshots on 4/3. I used f/4.0 on “A”, and the camera set 1/60 sec. That was about 1.5 stops under exposed (adjusted in ACR). The reason for the underexposure was because I did not think to use the eyepiece cover, I would not have that problem using the studio strobe. However, I think manual exposure is the way to go with adapted lenses.

Conclusion, this is a cheap way of getting a portrait lens, but you could have shot the same image with the 40-150 kit lens (which I do not have) set to 50mm. The 50mm f/2.0 macro would work fine (for $$$) as well. In this case, since I already had the Pentax lenses, it seems like it was a good $12.50 investment for me.