A New Addition

One of my favorite and most-utilized gifts of my entire life was the DSLR that Brent got me for Christmas in 2009.  I wore the thing out.  I cannot even estimate how many pictures I took with it, but I filled an entire laptop.  The camera fell off of the ledge with me at Rock City, went to the top of most of the mountains in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, went to the Grand Canyon, went to Las Vegas twice, and was well-loved and well used.  Unfortunately, when we went on our last hike to the Jump Off, Brent was carrying it in his backpack and fell down backwards, landing on it.  It is now cracked & broken beyond repair. So, since then, I have been mostly using my iPhone for photos.  The iPhone is a good camera for capturing things you want to remember, but not really for playing with - different angles, low light, etc.  Plus the pictures are not sharp and while they look fine on the iPhone screen, they don't look good as prints or blown up on the blog:

We are planning a 10-year anniversary cruise next month.  We will be visiting New Orleans for a couple of days, then cruising to Belize, Roatan and Cozumel.  In light of this, we knew we wanted a new camera, but I also realized that I was willing to sacrifice picture quality for something that was more compact/portable, especially for an active vacation and future hiking trips.  It really is a hassle to haul the big DSLR around when hiking and sightseeing.  Plus, at this point I'm just not ready to pay for another DSLR.  So after MUCH research, we finally decided to go with a point & shoot, specifically the Canon Powershot SX 260 or 280. They seemed to have the best reviews online for cameras in that price range and they are compact. I knew that it wasn't going to be taking pictures like the DSLR, but decided that was okay because it would be easier to carry around.

Well, we went to Sam's to see if they had the Powershot because it wasn't at Wal Mart.  While at Sam's (they didn't have it) I happened upon an Olympus that looked pretty neat. I don't have any experience with Olympus, but this one got my attention because he original price was $499 but Sam's had it on sale for $278, which was less than what we were planning to pay for the Powershot.  It was an Olympus Pen Mini EPM-1.  Never heard of it.  It was very small & compact, but had an interchangeable zoom lens.  Right away in the store I started looking at reviews online and after we went home I really started reading up on it.

 

 With every single review I read, I liked it more & more. It is essentially a compact DSLR. I really didn't even know this technology existed!  And the controls are SO simplified.  There aren't a lot of buttons, etc.  Basically, instead of setting the ISO, aperture, etc, you choose from numerous settings like candlelight, fireworks, sunset, landscape, portrait, etc. You choose a setting to improve the color saturation and blur the background. Ha! Easy as pie. But you can also go to the settings and adjust all of that manually if desired. There are three different macro settings (my favorite setting).  And it also has six different "art filters" that are applied at the time the photo is taken  - kind of like Instagram, but different in that Instagram filters are applied after the image is taken.  And it has a fisheye filter & a tilt shift filter.  I actually looked at a tilt shift lens for the DSLR and it was over $1,000, which I could not justify for something that I would likely (mis)use recreationally and infrequently.  (See dramatic filter below.)

So Brent took me back over the Sam's (I was so nervous they would sell out or it would go off sale) to pick it up.  We got the last one, and it appears that it was a return but we are not 100% sure.  It came with 1 interchangeable lens, a 4GB SD card and TWO rechargeable lithium batteries with the charger, along with the usual accessories - camera strap, camera bag, etc.  I felt like this was a great deal and I was so excited to get home & try it out!

Macro

Soft focus

Dramatic filter again

Macro again, above & below

Dramatic filter again!

The pictures below were taking in very poor lighting:

Pop Art Filter

Another macro setting -> Macro Nature

Pop Art filter again!

Needless to say, I'm very pleased!!  I don't think the pictures are as good as they were with the DSLR, but for the price, the size/portability and the easy functionality (I really don't care to understand the technicalities of photography or post processing; just want to take photos that are on the good end of average), I will gladly sacrifice some of the image quality.  Can't wait to take it on our trip!