PUTTING PEN TO PAGE - 1

I bought the new Digital Olympus Pen, not just for its size and weight but for its flexibility to use, via adapters, a whole range of lenses old and new.

NIKKOR 10.5mm FISHEYE

To mount the Nikkor on the Pen two adapters were used:

1. A cheap "Travor" Nikon to 4/3 adapter from Hong Kong (under £11 including postage - arrived in a week).
2. This fits into Panasonic's Lumix 4/3 to micro4/3 (currently cheaper than the Olympus adapter).
(A Nikon direct to micro4/3 can be found if preferred)






"G" Nikkors do not of course have an aperture control ring and are stopped down to their smallest aperture.
To get over this a small wedge of wine bottle cork was cut and used to open the diaphragm to an intermediate f stop. The spring of the aperture lever has kept it in place so far.

The Nikkor fisheye will not, of course, autofocus on the Pen.

Manual focussing using the display screen is not the Pen's best feature but pressing the Info button until the zoom option is reached and pressing OK will give a magnified view of 7x or 10x. (Pressing OK again returns to full view.)

The cheap adapter is not as precise as the more expensive better engineered versions (Novoflex or Voigtlander) and focusses a little beyond infinity.
However, a few test shots determined an optimum focus setting (0.5m in this case) for most shots (remember hyperfocal distance?) and the considerable depth of field takes care of the rest.

The pictures below were taken with this Pen/Fisheye-Nikkor combination.
I usually use Nikon Capture to straighten out the barrel shaped images but it will only work with Nikon RAW files.

These pictures were "defished" using PTLens from epaperpress.com
This excellent and reasonably priced application works as a standalone or as a Photoshop plugin.
First 10 images are free and I find that it is better at correcting fisheyes than Photoshop's own Lens correction filter.

This combination gives the equivalent of a 21mm wide angle on the Pen and will have to do until I can afford the Lumix 7-14mm (or whatever crops up in the meantime).