Improving the ergonomics of the 12-32mm lens

The Lumix G 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 (my review) is representative of a trend I dislike: That every consumer electronic item must be clad in a smooth metal surface. This makes the items harder to handle, as I see it.

Here is the Lumix 12-32mm lens (on the top), compared with the Nikon 10mm f/2.8 (bottom):

The Nikon lens has the glossy tab on it, which makes it easy to feel with your fingers which way to mount the lens to the camera. It also has the ribbed ring on the front, which provides a good grip.

The Lumix lens, on the other hand, only has the thin, smooth ring with the white dot and the "12-32" text on it to hold on to when mounting it. And there is no physical mark to feel to know which way it goes on the camera. None of the two lenses have a focus ring.

Lens cap tip

Front lens caps typically come in two categories: The pinch side type, and the pinch centre type:

The left cap is the slimmer, and came with one of the pancake lenses. The right cap is the pinch centre type, which I prefer.

The reason is that it is easier to remove and insert when you have a hood mounted, as illustrated with the Lumix X 45-175mm lens:

In this case, inside the hood, the slimmer pinch side type cap would be impossible to remove when you want to take pictures.

However, I often find that the pinch centre type hood grips are a bit slippery still. Especially in cold weather, it can be hard to get a grip on the levers that loosen the hood. To improve the usability, I tend to glue some small plastic parts on them, to increase the friction. Here is an example:

I took the yellow plastic parts from the locking ring of a soda bottle cap, however, any plastic part that has some texture can be used. Adding these strips of plastic makes it easier to feel where to grip the cap, and easier to hold it. The yellow colour also makes it quicker to spot the grips in dim light.

Why the manufacturers don't add some grip surfaces on the lens caps is beyond me: That would surely improve the ergonomics out of the box.

Cheap and simple macro soft box

When taking macro pictures, or pictures of fairly small objects in general, a common problem is to get the lightning right. More even lightning can be achieved by using a "soft box", essentially a contraption that spreads light from one (or a few) light sources over a larger area.

A very cheap and simple soft box is a transparent bucket, like this one:

Preferably, it should have as neutral density as possible. If it has some colour tint, the images will get the wrong white balance. It is of course possible to adjust the white balance later, especially if you're using RAW images, but it is better to have as correct colours as possible from the start.

When photographing the object, place it inside the bucket, with the light source on one side, or from the closed end, like this:

In this case, I used a Panasonic Lumix GH1, with an Olympus 50mm f/2 macro lens. This combination can only be focused manually, which is no problem for macro use.

The light source is simply the sun light coming from the window on the top side of the image. One could also have used a flash pointing towards the side of the bucket, however, an off camera TTL flash would have been preferable, which is probably not so common for people to have for this system.

Here is an example picture, taken with (left) and without (right) the softbox. As you can see, the softbox image has softer contrasts. Besides, the picture taken without the softbox has reflections from the window. The right image also has some shadows next too the feet, which you may need to edit out later.

I used ISO 100, f/5.6 for both images. The shutter speed was 1/3.2 second for the left image, and 1/5 second for the right image, since the softbox steals some light.

Here is another example image, showing a Pelikan M425 piston filler fountain pen. I used f/13 to achieve enough depth of field.