Birding with the 75mm f/1.8 is doable.
I've been wondering if the Olympus 75mm f/1.8 was sharper than the 300 f/4 Pro given all the online sites that say it is their sharpest.
Decided to go birding with it and see how the feather detail comes out. To get close enough, I decided to use the Olympus Ol Share app on the iPad and connect to the camera's Wi-Fi. That way I could be 25 feet away and get the camera behind a bush about 4 feet from their feeding stump. Does take a bit of anticipation for the delay on focusing and hitting the shutter to transmit to the camera from the iPad - maybe a second or two.
I also stuffed the big Godox AD600 Pro flash with a parabolic reflector behind the bush for a screen, also 4 feet to the side (A Godox trigger was on camera's shoe.).
I wanted the background a bit darker so I dropped the ISO to L100 instead of recommend ISO 200 as I wanted no ND filters to be used. I wanted the lens around f/7.1 to keep the background soft, but still some DOF. Given all that, I had to fiddle with the light meter and move into HSS mode for a 1/1250 shutter speed - and the Sekonic L-858 with the Godox trigger helped work that out. So the camera's speed became 1/1250 with a flash duration of 1/1491 at 1/4 flash power on the AD600. The sonic flash
"Boom!" at that lower power isn't as disturbing to the birds as much as the full power
"Boom!" that it can make.
Result is below of one that landed and kicked up the seed. Two catchlights: Smaller being the sun, and the larger the Godox flash with the Phottix long-throw parabolic reflector. No sharpening was applied so the 75mm is indeed sharp, and maybe more than the 300mm f/4 that takes a bit of sharpening at times. The 75mm doesn't need it.
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