When I sold my secondary camera, an Olympus E-M10 II to a friend, I also sold my 25mm f/1.8 lens with it. I thought that having the 12-100mm f/4 Pro would be a good enough replacement. Well, I was wrong. the 12-100mm is a very versatile lens, and if I were to travel with only a single lens with me, that would be it. But truth be told, the f/1.8 had a wide enough aperture that made certain subjects way more pleasing thanks to the bokeh it introduced.

I also noticed (and you can see the relative inactivity for almost 2 years now) that I kinda didn’t feel like going out to take photos. I mean, I did; there are other projects in the works during that time which I will eventually publish, but I didn’t feel that itch, the urge to grab my backpack and go somewhere and explore. The 25mm was my favourite lens for non-architectural and non-landscape photos and while I always like to take photos of those, there are certain subjects that I’d like them to pop-out more. Was it the lens? Only one way to find out I guess! So, after a bit of deliberation, I decided to buy the 25mm again, only this time I went for the Pro f/1.2. Now, the extra aperture comes with a price multiple times higher, but it also gives you an extra stop when you need it and of course, more bokeh!

I don’t want to dwell on the lens and my inactivity for much longer, but the 25mm f/1.2 is a brilliant one, on the same height of quality as the other Pro lenses I have from Olympus (now sadly sold and renamed to OM), looks good on the E-M1 II camera (unlike the f/1.8 one which looked tiny) and producing sharper results, although it’s not like you can see much of a difference in the photos posted here, since I limit their size to 1920 pixels maximum to allow the website to load faster.

I tend to travel rather spontaneously when I decided I want to take some photos. I pick a place in the map, either in Switzerland or somewhere much further (I’ve a travel to Sweden pending), grab my gear and… drive there. I give only a cursory look at Google Maps, just to see if said place looks appealing enough to visit, but I don’t research it too much; discovering things as I walk around is almost as exciting as photographing it. And thus, I chose Bremgarten, a small town in Switzerland, less than an hour’s drive from where I live.

What can I tell you about Bremgarten that makes it special? Well, not much really. It has about 8,7K citizens, it’s in canton Aargau and is split into two levels, aptly named Upper and Lower town. An area (that spans both these regions) is also named Old Town and it’s a well preserved part of the town from the middle ages! I mostly walked around the Old Town which seemed to be the most interesting part of the whole place. Apart from that, I tried to see if I could discover something more by walking to all directions from the Old Town and found pretty much nothing worth exploring; industrial and residential areas.

I also decided to use my 25mm lens (almost) exclusively. Unfortunately I was a bit unprepared and while I brought my tripod with me, I realised that none of my ND filters or adapters fit the lens, so with the exception of one subject where I simulated a long exposure photo using multiple takes, the rest are as sharp and noise-free as a sunny day allows. For the panoramic shots, I used the Brenizer method which (usually) works well enough.

And… as anticlimactic as this sounds, this is it! For the most part, the most interesting photos I took were from the Old Town which while I found very pleasing to walk through, they were very few compared to what I had in mind. You can find them below. I’ve added my comments on each of those, so click through them to see any additional information and/or my thoughts about each of the subjects photographed there.

Stay tuned for the next one; it will be far more interesting!