Luke Ding was kind enough to lend me his Panasonic Lumix 20mm F1.7 pancake lens for my usage on the streets. Thanks dude !! You rock.
Before I moved on allow me to clarify that this is NOT a review of any sort for the Panasonic Lumix 20mm F1.7 lens. I have had the rare opportunity to extensively tried this lens on and I shall share my honest opinion and points of view while shooting with it on my street hunting sessions. The main reason why I did not want to push out a user-experience review is simple: I was using the pancake lens on my own Olympus PEN E-PL1 body, and I strongly believe that to bring out the len’s full capability, you will need to mount it on a native Panasonic Micro 4/3 body. The Af speed and accuracy, the lens distortion and CA correction view in-camera software and overall compatibility may not be fully optimized for the use with my E-PL1 body, hence the images produced from my shooting may not accurately represent what the lens should be doing at its best. Hey, lets just set aside all the boring technicalities, and start to just really, really enjoy using the lens, shall we? I surely did not want to have a thousand and one considerations running through my head as I used the lens for the first time, I just wanted to have fun, and having plenty of fun I did with this wonderful lens.
So cute !!
Anston's Nikon D300 in action. Great camera it is.
Anston preparing his gear for capturing street light trails. Love his tripod too.
Checking out the bokeh of the pancake lens. Not bad.
Caught a kid.
Gotta love the catchlight on the kids eyes. Notice that there are stray reflections and ghostings at the side of the kid's cheek. No thanks to a cheap UV filter on the lens.
Everyone is taking pictures on this street.
I took this out of reflex. Burst of laughter from three girls.
Anyone lost some keys?
Street shopping can be paradise.
I have tested this lens very briefly on several encounters before, mainly because too many of my friends have this lens in their collection. Almost everyone I know who has a PEN who has at least used their micro 4/3 system for a while would have somehow ended up buying this 20mm F1.7, which should not be a surprise because this lens unanimously received extremely positive response from any gear review sites across the world, and the user reviews generally resonated favorably to this lens as well.
There really is nothing much to complain about this gem from Panasonic, and all micro 4/3 warriors should be thankful for a lot of wonders that the 20mm F1.7 brings:
1) Tiny and feather-light pancake design, creating a truly pocketable and compact combination with a smaller Olympus PEN or Panasonic micro 4/3 bodies such as GF3
2) The unusually wide aperture of F1.7, which provides two very important benefits for the user of this pancake lens: to be able to employ much higher shutter speed than the native bundled kit lens (F1.7 vs approximately F4.0 on the kit lens when zoomed into 20mm, which is about more than 2 full stops of EV advantage)
3) And at F1.7, the capability to produce background blur, the beautiful bokeh which many people love
4) 20mm lens coverage is just flexible enough field of view for everyday general shooting. It is a little bit on the wide end, but it is just perfect for lifestyle shooting. If you want anything longer, there is always the beautiful and irresistible Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm F1.8 for your consideration.
5) Oh did I tell you I had a thing for pancake lenses? They are incredibly sexy and beautiful. You should find them sexy too.
I mounted the Panasonic 20mm F1.7 on my Olympus PEN E-PL1 (gosh I should be bringing this camera out more, have been under-utilizing it lately) and there I was, ready to pounce on the streets. I was joined by Anston, and we stormed Bukit Bintang and Sungei Wang area last night. After grabbing a quite bite for dinner, we roamed the streets there and snapped away merrily.
Oh dear I was on camera instead.
Sign languages, like literally.
Jalan Sultan Ismail.
In shock and disbelief.
Bokeh test 2.
Kids and alcohol are two common items on these streets.
Anston went low angle for some creative shots.
A kind of invitation.
Five foot way warriors.
Just for the record I rarely do night street photography, and I do not intend to do it often. Just a reminder to many of you beautiful readers who may not be too familiar with Kuala Lumpur, it is not exactly that safe walking around with your shiny camera on the streets here which are full of beggars, homeless and god knows what other kind of people all desperate to have that piece of camera of yours traded for a nice warm bowl of noodle soup for dinner. So seriously, if you want to do any stunts at night, be extra careful, travel with a few friends (preferably not girls or girly ones who can just scream and hide should anything happen) for purely safety reasons. There is no reason to put yourself up for unnecessary risks and danger. Yes, I admit the streets I usually walked to are not safe.
That aside, Anston was out with his trusty Nikon D300 and a gigantic tripod that seemed like you can use it to kill someone and still wound not have any dent on its sturdy metal legs. He intended to take some creative light-trail shots, and while he was stationed at a spot doing long exposure captures to record the motion and slow shutter speed, I attacked the passing by strangers and snapped them away with my PEN and pancake combo.
I stuck by one fixed set of settings which I did very minimal fine-tuning. I adjusted the settings to suit my shooting for this particular session only. I am writing this entry in a FULL paragraph, and listed the settings down in point forms because my usual style of writing it as the “side notes” at the top of entry somehow escaped the view of my readers, who would redundantly reply in my comments or emailing me asking me what settings I used for my camera to snap the photographs. Here, I share them, and I hope I do not get repeat questions again. Do keep in mind that I do not have one fixed setting for all shooting, and I set them appropriately corresponding to each shooting condition.
Aperture Priority mode for most shots, and some Shutter Priority to capture a little bit of motion blur
All images were shot handheld, with IS on.
ISO 1000 to 1600
Aperture set to fixed F1.7 at all times
I shoot with S-AF all the time. (Single-AutoFocus)
Auto White Balance
Saturation, Contrast and Sharpness all set to 0
Gradation setting = Normal
Noise Filter = Standard
I shot all images in JPEG at LF (Large Fine) quality
None of the shots were taken with flash, all shot with available street lights.
The street lighting was rather dim, hence I needed to boost up the ISO to 1000, and at some situations, 1600 to achieve enough shutter speed to adequate freeze motion. I did not push beyond ISO 1600, because that is what I deemed to be the acceptable high ISO limit for my PEN. I purposely slow down the shutter speed in Shutter Priority mode in order to capture motion blur, which I wanted to incorporate in my image. The lighting varies from place to place, hence there is no constant color cast or balance of light source, with multiple light from different sources (street lamps, from inside the shop, car headlights, signs, billboards, etc), thus I just let the auto white balance to do its job. The Auto White Balance did its job superbly, it balanced the different sources of light very well, though not 100% colour accurate, but the images come out pleasant and comfortable to look at, with believable and lively night street colors. I did not shoot RAW this time, mainly because Olympus produced such great JPEG image quality, I should really make full use of the JPEG engine more. I did not use flash because the flash would have destroyed the natural and gritty feel of the night street in Kuala Lumpur.
What a way to earn money.
Another uncle going at it.
Purple man and a parked street bike.
Jalan Alor, where the restaurants chop your necks off with their ridiculously priced food.
Charcoal BBQ by the street walk.
Durians. Don't say you have come to Malaysia if you have not tried this fruit.
The durian seller.
The green light is another demonstration of why you should not use cheap UV filter. You can say that a good option is to take if off completely, but hey, the streets was moist, dusty and dirty. Its not even my lens.
Street beggars. Hip shots.
Proud to be a Malaysian. Yeah !!
So how did the Panasonic Lumix 20mm F1.7 pancake lens perform?
I particular love how small and light the lens is, seriously. It felt like I was carrying nothing on the streets.
The autofocus on PEN E-PL1 was not fast at all, and there was a noticeable, but slight hesitation each time it tried to lock focus. It was almost useless to capture any moving subject. I usually had no issue doing panning shots, even with the native 14-42mm kit lens, but on the 20mm F1.7, I have 0% success hit rate on panning, but hey, lets be realistic, the lighting situation at night was not ideal for the struggling PEN E-PL1 to begin with. For non-moving objects, under such dim and challenging lighting condition, the PEN and pancake combo did struggle to lock focus, and at times, the focus was not accurate. I would not blame this entirely on Panasonic, or associate this to the lens alone, but there is a real compatibility issue when shooting this Panasonic lens with PEN. Lets hope Panasonic and Olympus would release a joined service and firmware update to resolve this issue in the future. It is a shame, such a great lens, but its full potential cannot be realized on PEN cameras. Come on guys, both Olympus and Panasonic are under the same roof, you guys should hold hands closer together !!!
The image quality? Simply love it.
Even at 20mm, thanks to the F1.7 wide aperture, I can render very good bokeh. The bokeh is creamy, smooth and very desirable. I love bokeh, and I need bokeh In almost all sorts of photography that I ventured into. I simply love the fact that at 20mm which is quite a wide coverage, I can still produce amazing amount of bokeh. Oh did you see how sharp the lens was? I wont do the 100% view in this entry mainly because all my images were shot from ISO1000 upwards, and you wont get the optimum sharpness like what normally did with ISO200, but still, from the images, the lens was very, very sharp and does very well in capturing the street people portraits. I am in love with this lens.
What I do not like, or rather, how the lens is not suiting my own preferences, which in all fairness has nothing to do with the lens on its own, is the 20mm field of view. I personally (you may choose to disagree) prefer the 45mm or 50mm coverage which provided me a lot more working space between me and my subjects. I notice a lot of the street people got rather uncomfortable as I moved myself so close to them with the 20mm pancake, which I needed to in order to fill them up in my frame. I don’t crop my images a lot, and I like to fill my subjects in my frame fully. This 20mm is a disadvantage to my usual shooting style. However, I do acknowledge the fact that the 20mm is an important field of view, and having this prime can be real life saver in some situations. It can be used entirely on its own, as I have demonstrated in this entry, and it proved to be very capable.
I know many of you readers who came to this humble blog of mine are Olympus and Panasonic micro 4/3 users, and I am very sure many of you owned the lovely Panasonic 20mm F1.7 pancake lens.
Do share your thoughts, what you like and what you not like (which I think is not many, heh!) about the lens !!