Staff Nurse Susan Thapa normally works in theatres at St. Woolos Hospital, but moved to ICU during the pandemic
Olympus OMD EM5 Mk3, 25mm f1.2 PRO lens, 1/500s @ f1.2, ISO 800
9th September, 2020
For the majority of my mountain photography I use zoom lenses with the robust and weather-sealed Olympus 12-40 mm f2.8 PRO lens having been my workhorse lens for the last 7 years. The convenience of not having to carry multiple lenses in the mountains is a great advantage and the stellar optics of the Olympus PRO zooms means that there is negligible compromise in image quality compared with prime lenses. In contrast, when planning to shoot on the Royal Gwent Hospital ICU I knew that I wanted to use fast primes so that, as far as possible, I could use existing light. Intensive care is a bright, stark and clinical environment and I wanted to capture, simply and accurately, that reality. In addition, flash had the potential to be distracting to staff working at a previously unimagined level of intensity.
Olympus UK very kindly loaned me a 25 mm f1.2 PRO lens and a 45 mm f1.8 lens which I supplemented with my own 17 mm f1.8 lens and, on occasions, the remarkable 8mm f1.8 fisheye PRO lens. The tiny 45 mm f1.8 lens is one of my favourite M43 lenses and must be one of the best value for money portrait lens available for any system. I shall be posting some examples of the portraits I have shot with it in a later blog entry.
Despite the claim that the 25 mm lens, or 50 mm in full frame, approximates most closely to the perspective of the human eye it is a focal length that I have never really got on with. A cursory glance of my Lightroom catalogue of over 60 000 images shows that less than 4% have been shot at or around this so-called standard focal length. This was all about to change as I became acquainted with Olympus’s 25 mm f1.2 PRO lens. The lens is pin sharp across the plane of focus from wide open at f1.2 with the background melting away into the most gorgeous feathery bokeh. The fast aperture enabling high shutter speeds in existing light and dreamy separation of the subject from the background meant that the 25mm f1.2 PRO lens rapidly became my go to lens on ICU.
Taking photographs in personal protective equipment (PPE) proved challenging. Operating a camera in gloves is very familiar to me, even something as small as the Olympus EM5 which I have used in the mountains, particularly when ski touring over many years, but trying to photograph while wearing reading glasses behind a full face visor was not easy with reflections bouncing around from the bright overhear lights. I eventually acquired some industrial PPE varifocal glasses which meant that I could dispense with the visor but even then using the camera's electronic viewfinder could prove frustratingly difficult with it impossible to have the whole of the viewfinder in focus at the same time! Eye focus was very useful when taking portraits but would often be confounded if there was too much glare on a subject's face visor. A lot of time was spent asking subjects to move their head a few millimetres up or down or to one side or the other to try and reduce visor glare.
With coronavirus able to survive for several days on hard surfaces I kept all of my camera equipment in a tough, waterproof stuff sack which could be dipped in the Actichlor disinfectant solution we used to clean our clogs with when we left the red zone in ICU where full PPE was worn at all times. This meant that I could transport my camera equipment to other red zones such as the temporary ICUs created on adjacent wards to cope with the exceptional surge in patients we needed to care for. Images were written onto SanDisk Extreme SD cards which are waterproof and easily withstood being wiped with an antiseptic wipe as I took them out of ICU. This was then repeated when I got them home for added safety before uploading them to my computer.
Superb separation of Dr. James Fullick from the background of ICU.
Olympus OMD EM5 Mk3, 25mm f1.2 PRO lens, 1/400s @ f1.2, ISO 800
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