I had the chance to see and try out a prototype of the new lens during the E-M5 Mark II launch in Prague a few months ago, but I wasn’t allowed to bring the pictures home. As always, I’d love to connect via the socials, so hit me up on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram.

When photographing people, you can get lots of distortion at 7mm especially if your subjects are not in the centre and are close to the lens. Measuring 79mm in diameter and 106mm in length, the 7-14mm turns out to be almost exactly the same size as the 12-40mm when the latter has its lens hood attached and is set to it shortest physical length (16mm position on the zoom). In short, Olympus have done it again and have produced yet another lens more than able to take on the mantle of being a ‘PRO’ lens. At 14mm, the irony is that the lens corrections overcorrect, creating a really small and ignorable faux pincushion from a small and ignorable real barrel distortion.To continue on the story telling theme, composition comes into play in a very fundamental way in my opinion, when shooting really wide. Having said that, the lens is exceptionally sharp in the centre of the frame, especially at its widest setting. By launching these lenses at around the same time, give or take a year, they’ve presented them to us in a way that Canon never did. A manual focus clutch t lets you instantly switch from AF to MF by pulling the focus ring toward the camera body, and there's also an L-Fn button on the base of the lens that lets you make changes in an instant with your thumb. Not least of which is down to Yahoo’s horrible and constant tinkering to try and turn it into an instagram clone.

The separately available waterproof lens port makes it possible to use this lens for wide-angle photography underwater. However, the front element does not extend beyond the end of the body of the lens – the lens remains the same size, albeit the front element simply extends outward (not beyond the lens hood). Both employ the same motor-assisted mechanism, but pulling the ring back switches the camera to manual focus mode with visual assistance which can include magnification and focus peaking.

A weather-resistant design benefits handling in trying conditions while an L-Fn button offers lens-based control over various settings.

Olympus provides a slip-on lens cap that locks to the hood, which is better than the slip-on only style a lot of competitors use (e. My first “extra” M4/3 lens was the 7-14mm f4, which I got for documenting my architectural interior design work.

You may have to work a little harder to direct your viewer’s eye through your scene to get it to where you want it to end up. The reason is that at this focal length, the front element is very much exposed and the hood doesn’t protect it that much.