How good (or bad) is the OM 75-300 mm f/4.8-6.7 mkII

I bought this lens (£259 used from MPB) last year.  We were going on holiday, knew we'd be doing some bird hides in nature reserves near Ryde in Kent, and my longest lens was the 210mm of the OM 40-150mm f2,8 with the 1.4x teleconverter.  This was added to the bag as stop gap until I could afford the 100-400mm MKII I now use as my main telephoto.  So, how good is it?

75-100mm attached to my EM1 Mk2.  Lens hood cost extra.

Actually quite good.  It's well built, not up to the standards of Olympus / OM systems PRO lenses, but solid enough for what is a fairly lightweight lens.  Zoom and focus rings turn smoothly and the autofocus is decently snappy to acquire and lock on to subjects.  The minimum focus distance is also quite good.  If you want to stick with Olympus/OM system lenses there's really no cheaper way to get to a 600mm equivalent reach - but it does bring compromises in it's wake.

Firstly, it's light in weight, has no lens stabilisation, and relies purely on the body IBIS for stability when hand holding.  Frankly, it's pushing the limits in my 76 year old, at times shaky, hands.  You either need a fast shutter speed or, better, if you can, to use a tripod or monopod for support to stop your subject jiggling in the viewfinder.

Secondly, it's slow.  With a wide open aperture of f6.7 at the 300mm end low light work is problematic.  Good light, no problems, poor light and ISO needs to increase significantly to get an acceptable shutter speed for anything but static subjects.

Thirdly, although the lens is decently sharp across it's range it doesn't have the absolute sharpness of my PRO lenses.  I can certainly see the difference.

But is it good enough?  Well, judge for yourselves with a few images.  All taken wide open at f6.7 unless indicated otherwise. I've done a 1200 x 900px lifesize crop to show the detail in the subject for three of the images.  Click to embiggen.

Black headed gull ISO 1600, 300mm, 1/3200 sec, uncropped

100% crop showing head and feather detail

Oystercatchers with chick ISO 1600, 286mm, 1/2500 sec - slight crop

Skylark with grubs.  ISO 1600, 286mm, 1/5000 - slight crop

bird and feather detail at 100% 

Four spot chaser dragonfly.  ISO 1600, 300mm, 1/4000, f8 - cropped to about 2/3 of frame

Common darter dragonfly.  ISO 800, 300mm, 1/1600 sec, cropped to 3000px long edge

Common darter 100% crop

It is possible to work handheld at low shutter speeds - but it's more by luck than good judgement that I got this shot. 1/40 sec is rather too low for working at 300mm.

Photinia villosa berries.  ISO 400, 300mm, 1/40 sec, uncropped

So, is it a good or bad lens?  For the price - remember I only paid £259 for the lens - good.  In good light and with careful handholding / support technique it can certainly yield sharp results without the weight of larger, more expensive lenses.  There is a lot of comment on line about perceived softness in the 250- 300mm and wide open at f6.7.  I have to wonder how much of that is down to poor technique and not the limitations of the lens.  It's not perfect but, for budget limited photographers who want the range without the expense, it's good enough.

Will I personally continue using it?  No.

I have both the 100-400mm MkII and my 40-150mmf2.8 and 1.4X teleconverter and these two cover the 75-300mm range with full weather sealing and better image quality.  But Maria uses it on her EM5 MkII so I'll always have it around if I do want to travel light.

My Alamy experience - part the seventh

For the first time since I started this series of Alamy experience posts I'm not optimistic.  Yes, sales and revenue are holding up but recent changes to the Alamy contributor contract has made me doubt my future at the agency.

First the good part.  Sales continue to come in - 3354 to date - and gross revenue has now risen to $61,639.  My portfolio now contains 11,793 images and I continue to expand it.  However, there has been a definite downward trend over the last three years, exemplified by these sales and revenue graphs.

Total sales by year

Total revenue by year

Still respectable but the trends are definitely downward. Obviously we're only a little over halfway through 2026 so the final data points reflect this.  If things continue I should at least equal last year's figures.

If.

Now the bad parts - and that's where the if comes in.  Here starteth the rant.

Firstly, Alamy operate a tiered commission rate.  This has operated such that any contributor with a gross sales figure of over $250 per year is automatically in their Gold 40% to the contributor commission tier.  Easy enough to achieve.  But they've now issued a new contract and the significant provision is that the threshold from 1 September 2026 for the Gold 40% commission tier is now to be $3000, a 12x increase.  It is also based on cleared balances only for the previous 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026.  Don't achieve that and you go down to Silver and receive only a 20% commission rate.  To say that this has caused a great deal of anger and soul searching on the Alamy contributor forum is to understate the situation.

Secondly, Alamy also introduced a new, AI driven, Smart search facility late last year.  It's a pile of stinking ordure.  It throws up spurious and irrelevant search results based on AI hallucinations of what is germane to the customer's needs.  The result has been massive falls in reported sales, views and zooms by many contributors.  There is anecdotal evidence that customers are abandoning Alamy because they can't find what they want.  Why this was ever foisted on a live system God alone knows.  In my previous working life if I'd tried to do something like this I'd have been summarily fired.  Yet Alamy claims it's working as planned.  Delusion or design?

Was the plan to make it hard for many contributors to achieve Gold level commissions by both raising the threshold and artificially reducing their exposure to potential buyers in the remaining weeks before the new contract kicks in.  If so it's working.  My own sales have crashed over the last two months and many others are reporting exactly the same over an even longer period.

I'm currently in Gold.  My figures are such that I'll stay in Gold from 1 September.  But if the sales crash continues I could find myself out of Gold for the following year.  And that presents a problem.

It's not viable for me to continue contributing images to Alamy at a 20% commission rate.  I'm not covering my equipment, travel, Lightroom / Photo shop subscription etc costs let alone making a small profit.  Yes, photography at the interface between horticulture and ecology is both my hobby and main source of stock images.  I'll continue doing it for personal pleasure, to generate imagery for The Garden House, and to illustrate my own writing.  But I won't be short changed by a short sighted stock agency whose actions will very likely drive away specialist contributors like myself.  Contributors whose lack of volume is surely outweighed by the diversity of unique images they contribute.

Here endeth the rant.

 When focus stacking fails

In camera focus stacking on Olympus/OM systems bodies is wonderful.  Providing that:

• the subject remains still
• the camera remains still
• the initial focus point is correctly chosen

Get any of these slightly wrong and at worst the stack completely fails in camera, at best the result is some ghosting that can be edited in Lightroom using the Generative AI remove tool after stacking in Photoshop.

But occasionally the OM stacking algorithm throws a wobbly and actually manages to complete a stack.in camera when it shouldn't.  Is it trying to create it's own art?  Take this example:

Painted lady butterfly on Eryngium

Five handheld stacked images of the butterfly at 1/1250sec all overlaid on a still image of the Eryngium it's feeding on. The subject moved but the stack was still generated.  Motion blur without the motion blur.

A little while later I was shooting a pair of  Azure damselflies.  They tend to stay fairly motionless during the egg laying process and I used focus stacking to increase the apparent depth of field and get both male and female reasonably sharp.  Then they took off...

...and what I actually got was this:

Focus stacking failure I'm very familiar with.  I stack, see the orange failure message and try again.  But this is not just failure, it's spectacular failure.  One to play with perhaps.