I really enjoyed my Illawarra sojourn; loved the hotel, loved the food. Oh, the company, yes, right, of course, I loved that too.

But I have to confess, from a kilojoule perspective there was perhaps a bit much of the food. Not that all of it was nutritionally bad; the Greenham Tasmania-grass fed free range centre cut fillet was so juicy, so tender, so lean, so exceptionally well cooked... not only was it the best steak I've had in about 2 years, it's an iron and protein blast for the body. And since I opted for only the 250g serving, it's hardly diet-busting.

But having the Belgium chocolate fondant with black pepper ice cream both nights was probably overdoing it. Although if you look at it another way, nothing that good (oh, so very, VERY good) could possibly be bad. That's my theory anyway.

But now that I'm home, it's time to eat a bit more healthily and sparingly. Time, too, to do a bit more experimentation in the macro range, which I've acquired a taste for from some other PADers' galleries even though I don't (yet) have a proper macro lens. I've seen what the 40D can do with the 50mm prime, so tonight it was the Olympus' turn with the aforementioned healthy diet. I decided to use the 17mm prime f/2.8 "pancake" lens because I haven't given it much of a run to date, and also to give the E-P1 as much open aperture as its heart desired. Then I did something that I haven't done for years, which is use the auto (macro) setting to see what the E-P1 would do with it. It decided to crank the ISO all the way up to 800 (this seems to be a trait common to Olympuses in auto mode; the mju did the same thing when I shot the Ron Mueck exhibition) so not all of the graininess in this shot is from the bread. It also opted to use f/4, which was probably an OK choice in this case; had it gone wide open, the DOF would have been way too shallow. This wasn't my favourite shot of the batch; the plate is too abstract and the front tomato slice a bit overpowering, but it's the best overall one of the bunch. The result isn't bad (IMHO), but once I think I might leave macros to the Canon for the most part.

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