Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm f/4.5 Auto-Macro

Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm f/4.5 Auto-Macro and Olympus OM Telescopic Auto Tube 65-116 mounted on a Canon EOS R wuth an Olympus OM to Canon EOS R adapter

Olympus OM Zuiko 135mm f/4.5 Auto-Macro and Olympus OM Telescopic Auto Tube 65-116 (at longest extension) mounted on a Canon EOS R wuth an Olympus OM to Canon EOS R adapter

This is one of the more interesting lenses in the classic Olympus OM system catalogue. It that rare thing: a 135mm macro lens. But it's not designed to be attached directly to a camera… if you did the fact that the rear element pokes out of the back of the lens by quite some distance would probably result in a cracked mirror! In stead it's designed to be used either with the Olympus OM system Auto Bellows unit or the Olympus OM Telescopic Auto Tube 65-116. On the Auto Bellows this lens is designed to provide reproduction ratios of up to 1:2 (i.e. half life size), and on the Telescopic Auto Tube is focuses all the way from a reproduction ration of 1:3 (or one third life size) to infinity. This means that it can be used as a normal, if rather clunky, 135mm telephoto lens.

Clunky because you effectively have to manage two focussing controls: the Telescopic Auto Tube has a lockable push-pull control for rough focussing. The you lock the tube and use the focussing control on the lens itself to achieve precise focus. Above you can see the lens on its own, together with the Telescopic Auto Tub, and mounted on my new Canon EOR R camera. (New to me, but of course not actually new!) I found that in the field it was not at all easy to achieve pin-point focus, but that is at least partially because I'm still getting used to the (IMHO!) rather clunky manual focussing aid on the Canon EOS R. But hopefully I'll improve my manual focussing technique with the EOS R as I get used to it.

So what we have here is a clunky, awkward to use macro lens that doesn't focu anywhere near as near as a modern macro lens (most of which can focus all the way from infinity to 1:1 life-size macro without missing a heart beat!). So why would anyone bother with this piece of hopelessly out-of-date piece of s**t?!?! The thing is that this lens has an almost mythical reputation, and while one should usually never meet (or, in this case, buy on eBay!) your heroes, in this case when I first saw the result I really did go "wow!!! I might just glue this thing permanently only my camera!".

Well… maybe not literally… But while this thing might be just a bit too clunky to see regularly use in the field, for still life and table top photography this thing is definitely a keeper! One of the unusual things about this lens is that it stops all the way down to f/45. Normally when you stop any 35mm lens down much passed f/11 refraction places a serious limit on its performance. Now I'm really not one of life's pixel-peepers, but I really liked the way this lens draws an image both wide open and stopped right down, which is one of the things that makes it such a useful lens for still-life and table -top photography.