An interesting day out

Yesterday I went to a state park. I carried my Olympus camera. It was so nice in comparison to my old Canon camera and I’ll tell you why.

1. The entire camera is light and around my neck weighed almost nothing with the kit lens attached.
2. I had a longer lens (equivalent to 80-300mm) in a jacket pocket that was also very light and not really noticeable. 
3. I had a spare memory card and spare battery in my inside pocket.
4. I did not need a camera bag.

Now with my old Canon stuff, I’d have needed a protective bag because everything was just so big and bulky not to mention heavy. Just look at the difference in size.

The Olympus is on the left and the Canon on the right - both are with kit lenses. I can tell you right now which I prefer to carry and that is of course why I sold my Canon equipment. The only thing I regret about selling my Canon equipment is that I waited so long and lost so much money doing it.

This is one of the photos I took yesterday. Look at the color and resolution. Look at the exquisite detail and yet this is just an out of camera JPEG. I don’t have the ability right now to handle RAW images. 

Now let’s look at costs. New, I paid probably $800 for the XT and $100 for the lens for a total of $900. It’s now worth maybe $50 combined. That’s at least 95% depreciation. My Olympus I paid $75 for the camera and $50 for the lens. I can’t imagine that depreciating. New the body would have been $600 and I’m not sure what the lens would have been. I didn’t make the mistake this time - I bought secondhand.

When I was out, I saw one fellow with a massive Hassleblad digital. I didn’t talk to him as I knew I was well out of his league in his opinion. I did speak to another photographer who was using a Canon professional camera and who was all in favor of megapixels. I asked what he used those excessive megapixels for and all he said was he did a lot of editing. Well, editing is fine but what the heck did he need those megapixels for. I never got an answer to that. He didn’t seem to think too much of my reckoning anything over 8 megapixels is really overkill for most people. I guess he’d swallowed the camera marketing baloney hook, line and sinker.

All I can say is I am very happy with my cheap secondhand Olympus kit. It does everything I want with the push of a single button. Now if I were to go back to high-speed photography, I probably could still do that with my Olympus. I’d just have to focus manually. No problem!