The other week I bought a new and rather brilliant digital SLR camera: an Olympus E-510. I am very very pleased with it and have been obsessively carrying it around with me and taking pictures. It's really getting me back into photography in a way I haven't been for years. For the time being I think I've had it with film.
It's quite a jump from my previous SLR, a "classic" very battered and totally manual (other than a bit of automatic shutter-speed) OM-10. The E-510 is of course totally digital with more buttons and settings than you can imagine and I feel like I'm trying to figure out how to just leave them all alone and deal with what is important (taking good pictures).
It's got a compact zoom lens which calls itself a 14-42mm (equivalent to 28-84mm on a 35mm camera) which I'm finding fine for everyday photography. Kit lenses do seem to have a rather bad reputation these days and in honesty the lens does a little on the flimsy side, the zoom a little slack and easy to push inwards. Still I can't complain. It produces very sharp images and covers a good range for wide and portrait shots. I am looking forward to my bank balance recovering enough for me to warrant the extra £100 for the OM adapter so I can fit my old prime lenses on the new body. Oh and getting that 8mm fisheye. I'd better go down the docks doing favours for sailors then.
Minor disappointments are that the camera's RAW format is not yet supported by iPhoto so I am restricted to shooting in JPEG or using Olympus' own "Master" software. The latter gives good results but it's totally horrible to use - slow, cumbersome, fiddly and is going in the bin. I've looked into hacking OS-X so that it understands the RAW files but I've ended up deciding that I can just wait for the apple to catch up in a month or so.
So apart from the gorgeous pictures of my family and the countryside I've been sneakily taking pictures on my journey to and from work. Of random people waiting for trains. I did get told off for taking pictures at Piccadilly though - apparently if I ask nicely they will give me a pass (normally for trainspotters) allowing me to take photographs of anything or anyone on the station. Probably wise if I'm going to carry on in this vein.
