reasonable doubt

There are a lot of reviews out there about the e-p1. I know, I’ve pretty much read them all. Although they’re great’n all, I always find formal reviews somewhat unsatisfying – I have something for cameras as objects (which is fine, incidentally. I don’t collect, but I have nothing at all against collectors. I’m just saying that certain cameras are pleasurable to use – again, nothing wrong with that. It’s kind of a separate thing to photography, though.) so I find that formal reviews, necessary and useful as they are, don’t quite capture that feeling. On top of this, there are those who are far more knowledgeable about these matters than I, so I’ll leave them to it.

What I have always enjoyed, however, are review diaries. They are, above all, about a long term relationship with a camera, and, even better, are unashamedly partisan. Bias is fine, as long as you declare it, or make it obvious in your writing (for those who need a masterclass, please check out Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer. An inclusive bias, indeed.) And anyway, as Fitzgerald notes, life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

So. I’ve had an e-p1 for about, ooh, three months now. It is not a cheap proposition and, to answer the inevitable, no, I would not have it as my only social camera, let alone my only camera. I had sold some unwanted gear to get a Sigma DP-1 a year or so before, but whilst I consider it a great little camera, it just didn’t suit me in the end, especially as my particular one had an execrable battery life. So, I sold that, an that went some way towards funding the little Olympus. The twin lens kit seemed sensible. I didn’t think I’d use the zoom (surprisingly mistaken) and figured I could sell it for more than, effectively, I bought it for. I thought I’d love the 17mm pancake, and use the optical viewfinder almost exclusively. Again, wrong. The 34mm equivalent lens is just a little too wide for my preferences, and although it is a perfectly capable lens, I just can’t seem to get used to it.

So I took it on holiday with me, first to the south of France, then to New York. It worked. It was a perfectly serviceable, workaday camera, and I got a bunch of high quality, tourist snaps. I wasn’t very impressed with any of them. It told me two things: firstly, it did what it said it was going to do very well indeed. The images were great, you can use it instead of a DSLR when you don’t have the space, and so on. But I was having no fun with it. And it showed. Grr. The digital age reared it’s head once again. All perfection, little soul. Where was the soul? Does it not look the part? Do people not stop and take a little, jealous second glance at it? Is it not a beautiful little object in it’s own right? Yes, yes and yes. So why did I not feel like picking it up every time I walked out of the house, like I did with the Canonet GIII QL17, 40 years it’s senior, for which I had paid the princely sum of £23 a month or so previously?

I took it with me, out and about, throughout the summer. I couldn’t work it out. Then I did something that I thought was, frankly, ridiculous, and which had nothing to do with why I bought the damned thing originally.

I’ll tell you about it next time.