Welcome to Zuikoholism Brian!
I will second Gary Reese's remarks about the 35-105/3.4~4.5 Zuiko MC Zoom.
I tend toward the primes, and was concerned about how well this one would
do as it is a 3X zoom with much glass internally. Now I would not part
with mine. It is one of the best zooms I have used and very sharp. 50"
screen projection of the first roll of Kodachrome 64 shot using it was all
it took. The drawback? Unlike many of the primes, this lens is larger and
heavier, especially compared to the primes within its focal length range.
It is also about a half-stop slower than I would like, but faster would
have made it even bigger and heavier. This is my lens of choice for
shooting large family gatherings. I can shift the focal length quickly to
handle a group you can't back far enough away from without a wide angle and
in the next shot do a tight 1/3 or less portrait that you need a modest
telephoto for.
I would recommend a wide angle prime on the other side of your standard
lens, either a 28mm or 35mm, an f/2 or f/2.8 depending on what you can
afford. The super-wides are great lenses (I have a 24 and an 18), but the
28 and 35 are more forgiving of perspective and easier to use hand held.
Go for a super-wide at 24, 21 or 18 after you have a 28 or 35. I don't
recommend trying to make a shift lens do as a general wide angle. The
manual stop-down and sequence of steps to take a shot are too cumbersome
for general work. One of the reasons I got a 35mm f/2 prime was to plug
the gap between the 24 and the 50mm. I got tired of pressing the shift
lens into this gap for things other than on-tripod shooting of
architectural objects.
About the shift lenses:
I have a 35/2.8 Zuiko MC Shift and do architectural work with it. I cannot
(yet) afford the 24/3.5 Zuiko MC Shift or I would have one of those also.
The 35/2.8 Shift is about half the cost of the 24 and a very good lens. It
will work under most conditions unless you are after very tall or very wide
objects in someplace like an urban setting where you just cannot back up
enough. I have not run into this very often with the 35mm. It does have
slight pincushion distortion at full shift (near the edge of the image circle).
I think you nearly have the idea on how they work. The 35/2.8 is really a
24mm lens with an image circle much larger than the film gate (rectangular
hole where film gets exposed). What you are doing with the shift is moving
what portion of the image circle ends up on the film. The result is an
angle of view that is equivalent of a 35mm lens. Why not just use a 24mm
and crop? It is much more expensive to have custom cropped prints done and
you are using less of the negative which means resolution loss (and
therefore less ability to enlarge to large print sizes). With the shift,
the 35mm angle of view you crop out of the 24mm image circle ends up on a
full frame of film.
Little used for this (AFAIK) but I have done it is to create a modest
panoramic using the shift lens by shifting full left, then full right. You
can see a couple here that I did as an experiment to prove the concept:
http://members.xoom.com/_XMCM/johnlind/panoramic/ShiftLensPanoHowTo.html
This is a piece of my site still under construction, so if you need more
details on how to do one, just ask.
If I were limited to just three lenses, it would be a 28 or 35, a 50, and a
100 or 135. Then again, over 900f what I shoot can be covered by one of
them (might not be that easy, but still can be done).
Hope this helps out.
-- John
At 06:12 6/22/00 , Brian wrote:
>* regards the shift lenses -- i've seen it written that the effective angle
>of view increases w/ the amount of shift. (The 35mm at max is ~28, & the
>24mm is 18mm). Is this a property of all shift lenses?
>
>* Would the Zuiko 35mm rate highly among all shift lenses on the market?
>(i'm trying to decide for which system to purchase a lens for architecture:
>the Oly, a Nikon 28mm w/ adapter to Minolta, or the 50mm for Mamiya 645.
>I'm leaning towards the Mamiya simply for the > neg size..)
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