Focus Peaking - Panasonic G6 with Pentax 50mm f1.7

Pentax 50mm f1.7 manual focus lens

Focus Peaking

Manual focusing using old lenses can be a hit or miss affair and takes practice to develop your technique. However, when using the Panasonic G6, manual focusing old lenses is made a lot easier with the focus peaking function.

For those who are not already familiar with focus peaking, it's a manual focusing aid that can be used for stills or video shooting on the Panasonic G6.  So how does it work?  When manual focusing your lens, the live view (EVF or monitor) will display a blue shimmering outline indicating the area of the scene that's in focus.

The two pictures below illustrates what focus peaking looks like.

Click on images for larger view.

 Focusing on the tea box with focus peaking activated

Close up of Focus Peaking blue outlines

Focus peaking is a great feature to have if you use manual focus lenses, allowing you to focus quickly and accurately. It's also useful for fine tuning autofocus when the camera is set to AF+MF mode. Without it manual focusing can be a much slower process and the live view has to be magnified to determine accurate focus.

Pentax 50mm f1.7

The Pentax 50mm f1.7 is a great little lens that's fun to use producing sharp results with nicely rendered out of focus areas.  It's already sharp at f2.0 and is extremely sharp at f2.8 and onwards. It must be noted that depth of field is very shallow when shooting at large apertures such as f2.0 so a small movement can shift the plane of focus. The character in the straw hat shown below moved slightly just as I was about to press the shutter, so the focus point has shifted from the eye nearest the camera to the eye furthest away.

I used a Pentax to M4/3 adapter to fit the 50mm lens on the G6.

Here's some shots I took with the 50mm lens using focus peaking.

50mm @ f2.0

50mm @ f2.0

50mm @ f2.0

50mm @ f2.8

Now let's see how it performs with a more distant subject.

50mm @ f2.8

Below is a 100% crop from the image above.

100% crop 

Although the above image is nothing special I think the 50mm lens aided by focus peaking has produced a sharp result. Bearing in mind that the subject was moving, the focus peaking has allowed me to manual focus quickly and accurately. Without focus peaking this shot would be very difficult indeed.

There's lot's of old manual focus lenses out there and the Pentax 50mm F1.7 is one of the good ones. Coupled with the Panasonic G6 it makes a great combo that you'll have a lot of fun using.