Tag Archives: Olympus 12-50mm

Ziplining adventures

Being suspended over a hundred feet in the air by a pair of steel cables that you are racing down at around 45mph may seem an odd way to spend a Saturday, but it was great fun.  My wife, some friends and I headed up to Seven Springs to take their new canopy zip line tour and it was a blast.  The 2 guides that accompanied us (and kept us clipped in so we didn’t plummet through the trees) were awesome and also hilarious.

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A whirlwind few weeks

The past few weeks have been crazy.  There was a week spent at the beach for vacation, followed immediately with a 5 day business trip and within hours of being at home from that, a camping trip to finish off the weekend.  Needless to say, updating the site has been a low priority.  Here are a few shots for now though.

A morning hike

Early this morning I grabbed the camera gear and made the drive over to Ohiopyle state park for another of my half day hikes.  I was packing the E-M5 with a 12-50mm, 45-200m, 14mm, 20mm and 45mm.  For some extra light I brought along my newly acquired FL-300R and to block light I had an ND filter and a circular polarizer.  All of this went into the Domke F-5XB.   My Benro Travel Angel tripod went into it’s own bag slung over my shoulder.  Why am I telling you all about the gear I packed you ask?  Simply because I only used a single lens, the 12-50mm kit zoom.  Put the pitchforks away, I wanted to put it through its paces and see what it was capable of. The primes were for backup and the long telephoto was in case I saw some animals.  I learned a bit about this setup and definitely will make some changes next time I head out.  For now though, here are some pictures!

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My thoughts on the Olympus OMD E-M5

Way back in digital camera history (circa late 2008), if you wanted to have an interchangeable lens camera system that produced great image quality, your only choice was a large DSLR system by Canon, Nikon or other companies.  Enter the Micro 4/3’s system.  This was a system built from the ground up using a smaller sensor than DLSR’s and also eliminating the mirror box and pentaprism as well.  This results in a system that is markedly smaller than traditional DSLR’s.  I quickly bought into the system and hoped it would be everything I had in a big DSLR in a small compact package.  My first foray into m4/3 was with the Panasonic GF1.  While it was a great little camera, it just didn’t quite produce the image quality I was hoping for.  So I sold all the gear and kept using my Nikon D700.  Panasonic iterated numerous models over the next few years and another one caught my eye, the G3.  This had an all new 16MP sensor and the performance seemed to finally catch up to a DSLR.  I bought back into the system and soon my D700 was sitting on the shelf more and more.  While the G3 wasn’t perfect, it was good enough at the time and let me carry a small camera that I felt did not compromise on quality.  So I sold all of my Nikon gear and never looked back.  The G3 could never compete with a DSLR in terms of controls and speed of use, but I knew that eventually, a m4/3 camera would be released that would satisfy those criteria.

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