The photo above, and this post, show how distracted I’ve been recently. I meant to write this four years ago!
Waaay back in 2021 I decided to sell my (second-hand) Nikon D90 – the one on the left of the banner image above. It’s a lovely camera but it rarely got an outing with it being such a hefty camera.
But with it being so old, I also wondered what was new, and ended up buying the Olympus E-PL9 – the one of the right of the banner image. I didn’t mean to buy the limited edition ‘Denim Blue’ version, but obviously couldn’t help myself…
It wasn’t the latest version (there’s an E-PL10), but the differences were minimal, and I thought I was bagging a bargain on eBay. Which I was.
But you can see why I went for the Olympus over other cameras, when you look at the one in the middle of the banner image. That was my dad’s camera, an Olympus Pen EE half-frame. That means you got 72 shots for every roll of 36. It also meant the image quality was a bit less, but it was fine for anything up to 5×7-inch snaps.
(As an aside, the E-PL9 uses an APS-C sensor, which I smaller than a full-frame DSLR. The upshot is that the focal length of the Micro Four-Thirds lenses it uses is actually twice the size; the 14-42mm kit lens is the equivalent of 28-84mm.)
Upgrades
My dad’s camera will have been the first one I used – under his supervision, of course – before progressing to my own 110 camera. I think. I’m sure there was a 126 camera in there somewhere, but I have no photos or negatives from that time except what I discovered in my mum’s collection after she died. Certainly there are some I don’t remember, but which I will have taken.
Then I got my first SLR, a Zenit TTL, in around 1984. That lasted a few years until I broke it by trying to rewind the film while the shutter blade was open after trying to do a headless self-portrait. Great idea, stoopid photographer. Fortunately, I could borrow a camera at TASC as I was doing a photography course. I didn’t get my own camera – another 110 – until 1989 so I could take photos at that year’s Going Down Ball.
Then in 1993 – finally! An upgrade back to 35mm, and an Olympus μ[mju:]. I got a lot of mileage out this one. It also acted as my backup camera when I went to Egypt in January 2002… just as well, as the APS camera I’d bought to replace it wasn’t working properly. I don’t regret much (ha!) but I do regret offloading it as I made the move into digital a year later.
My digital experience started with the Casio Exilim EX-S2 (about the size of a credit card), the Z4, the X55 and finally the H15 in 2010 (which I still have). I only got my first smartphone in 2015 because I much prefer a camera, but that’s snobbery for you. I think I got the D90 around the same time too.
And now, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t upgrade to an OM-5. Olympus sold its camera business, so the successors are called OM System. No built-in flash, but there’s a viewfinder, and the screen on the back is more flexible than the E-PL9. A bit larger though, of course.
Anyway: here’s a small gallery of some of the thousands of photos I’ve taken with these cameras over the years.
