ROBIN WONG

I am a prime lens shooter, I am not ashamed to admit that, and I have been quite vocal about it too. Nothing against zoom lenses, but I think prime lenses will give you better results, if you give it a chance. However, there are also days where I am lazy, yes I am allowed to be lazy, and I want convenience over anything else. That is where a superzoom lens comes in, and I recently acquired the Olympus 14-150mm F4-5.6 Mark II, it is super compact, light, weather-sealed, has versatile zoom working range and produces decent image quality. Yes, I turned on my lazy mode, mount the lens on my Olympus PEN E-PL7 and did some shutter therapy on a lazy Sunday morning. Images came out looking not too shabby, I must say! 

I attended quite an unusual theater play at KLPAC (Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center) recently - the show was called "Being Carried". The casts include a diverse group of disabled, deaf, mute and neurodivergent people, bringing together series of heartfelt, painful and hopeful stories in the form of performing arts, mainly story-telling and dance. It was one of the best shows I have watched and I was glad I brought my camera to document the scenes from the stage. I was a seated audience so I had no freedom to move, I shot everything with the Olympus 14-150mm F4-5.6 Mark II on my Olympus E-M1 original for this entire show. 

I recently found an old lens from the Four Thirds DSLR days, the Olympus Zuiko Digital 70-300mm F4-5.6 at such a good price, I just had to nab it. I mount it on my OM System OM-1 and brought them to the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park to do some close up bird portraits. I am starting to think the birds there can recognize me and really like me, you can see how some of them flew close to me at the end of my latest video talking about this very lens. The Olympus 70-300mm is perhaps the most economical 300mm lens with autofocus for Micro Four Thirds.  It isn't perfect, it has some flaws, and I'd still recommend the new Micro Four Thirds native version Olympus M.Zuiko 75-300mm II over this lens for being smaller, lighter, having better AF and produces slightly sharper results. Nevertheless, if you already have the old Olympus 70-300mm DSLR version lying around, or if you can find one at such crazy cheap price in the market, why not? It is still a fantastic lens and can deliver good results. Video here (click). 

Since I flirted with the Sony RX100 Original quite some time ago, I cannot help but wonder if there are significant improvements in the later iterations of the camera. I found the RX100 Mark III in the used market so I gave it a go, hoping I will be impressed with it, and maybe will become my daily driver. On paper, the camera really did have dramatic upgrades - better, faster zoom lens, newly improved BSI 1 inch image sensor, built in electronic viewfinder and LCD is now tiltable. However, real world use case is not exactly all roses, there are some noticeable stutter and lag during camera normal operations, the controls could have been more efficient especially when moving the focusing points and the handling of the camera is a nightmare. I felt that Sony could have fixed these issues which already existed since the Sony RX100 original, and they left them unchecked, while pushing technological specifications to sell the camera. Not the best approach if you ask me, but hey, what do I know, I am just a random photographer from Malaysia. I share my thoughts in my latest video here (click).