New bit of kit.

Not blogging much, photographing instead :-)

Bought myself a newish Olympus e-500 digital SLR which I have been trying to get the hang of. Well it's sort of new....Olympus are upgrading this to the E-510 so this is the last of the series and Olympus are doing end of product runouts (just like the car companies). I was looking at the very popular Canon EOS but they were about $1400, so instead of the Beemer I went for the SAAB of cameras after reading a LOT of good reviews on it. Picked up a refurbished one from E-Bay and it seems to be like new.

Not only do I have to get my mind around the controls and menu but I've two lenses..... which means focal lengths, white balances and other such things to now deal with. So far it's been pretty good..... I just leave it on auto or pick a couple of the "scene " modes. I took it to the Olympic Stadium on Wednesday night and took it down to Parramatta River this morning to get some shots for more HDR.

It's better for HDR as the files are bigger, the sensor is better and thus images come out crisper with less noise. The downsize is my poor old computer is really groaning at Photomatix, Photoshop and Windows XP all crunching away at pixelorial data at the same time. Think circa early 90's internet speed rates!

So far the results seem a lot better than my old Fujifilm 5500s.

Nightshot using the "fireworks" scene.....either that or a 13 second exposure on a tripod. No adjustments made to pic.

Shot done this morning I "auto adjusted"' on Photoshop and that was it.

Another nightshot using the "fireworks" setting. Needs tilting back to normal, don't ask me how I managed to get a tilt on a tripod!