Old Dog Photography

Now that I’m armed with an Olympus ring light, I took “the pup” to the local butterfly place so she could wander around, and I could test my gear out on the locals. Here’s one of the better results (50mm macro lens and 2x teleconverter):

I’ll write up a full review of the ring light in a later post (hopefully by the end of the week). In the meantime, here are my quick thoughts on it:

1. It’s a bit bulky, but has some nice features, and is incredibly powerful.

2. For this flash, the minimum distance from your subject is about 6 inches. Oddly enough, the limiting factor seems to be the flash controller’s ability to ramp down the flash brightness in TTL metering mode. Apparently if you want to use flash closer than this, you need to get the twin light set (beaucoup bucks for that…).

3. In spite of what a couple of reviewers have said in blog posts and shopping site reviews, the ring light does not fit on the end of a 50-200mm zoom lens. It fits on an adapter for Oly’s 50mm macro lens (which holds a 67mm filter), and on Oly’s 14-54mm zoom lens (which also holds a 67mm filter), but not the 50-200 (which, of course, also has a 67mm filter mount). Go figure — I have no idea why Oly has two incompatible 67mm bayonet mounts.

And, as you can see, the ring light gives you really flat lighting.