... Look me in the eye after you examine the above shot and tell me, in relation to the 40-150 f/2.8 Pro, "I don't want that lens". I dare ya.

Hmm, actually it's possible that you could, based on the 1000 pixel wide incarnation that I've had to load to PBase. But if you can extrapolate what the original looks like in your own mind, you won't.

Frankly I was a little disappointed with the performance of it on my airport photo shoot yesterday. It sometimes hesitated in focusing ("Oh, you want me focused on that thing that's the size of an office block hanging in the sky? Oh, yeah, I see it now...") and the sharpness of a lot of the images left something to be desired. However to be honest the early morning light also left a deal to be desired quality-wise, and I was shooting from, in many cases, well over a kilometre away.

This morning I was shooting from a hilltop several hundred metres from the action, and as the morning went on the light got worse from glare. I really should have had my circular polariser filter with me. Also there was the fact that at the start of the shoot I had no idea what I was doing. Which is to say that although I did the occasional surf image with the 70-200 f/2.8 on the Canon 40D, it's never been a specialist subject for me. The first shots were still at good ol' general purpose f/8 and an ISO of 100, yielding an exposure time of around 1/100th to 1/200th of a second. As I went on I discovered that this was far, far too slow for these shots, which needed to be closer to 1/640th or faster to avoid motion blur of the surfers that made the image all but unusable. So in the later shots I increased the ISO to 200 and opened up to f/5.6.

The other thing is that there is no way on Earth you can aim at the surfers and shoot; they're gone by the time you've done so. You need to anticipate where the wave is going to go, focus at that point, then blast away as the surfer passes through there. It's much like old fashioned WW II era fighter plane gunnery where you need to "lead" the target.

Like most Olympus lenses (I've noticed) the 40-150 f/2.8 Pro seems to demand that you put in some effort to understand how to work it right. But when you do... this is what you can get in return.

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