So let's list down my photographic problems. The first one is of course time. I've been working on and supporting our budgeting system for the last few months. Once I started doing timesheets I realised that I was doing this for 60 or 70 hours per week, and that was after things had slowed down a bit. I hadn't posted a PAD since February I but kept taking shots every single day up until a few weeks back. I realised then that I would need to stop just so that I could catch up. Of course, one has to question my sanity in putting my life on hold for a company that sheds staff more heavily and readily than El Gato sheds fur. But that's a different conversation.

The 40D's primary lens, the 24-105 f/4L died last year and my backup lens (28-135) is not one that I like very much. The 40D is now seven years old and while its megapixel count is fine for on-screen digital work, it leaves something to be desired for printing. And, of course, I've started to enter photo competitions albeit with a spectacular lack of success. Also, the overwhelming majority of my photography these days is in the form of PADS and the 40D is much too big to carry around every day even if I replaced the lens. Also, what do I replace it with? Another 24 to 105? Although I liked the lens overall (though it had already cost about $800 in repairs) I knew that the image quality was not as good as the 24-70. As one user put it, "It doesn't have the IQ that you'd expect from an L series lens." But the Canon 24-70 is hugely expensive and does not have IS. There is a good quality Sigma one available for considerably less but that doesn't solve the main issues with the 40D continuing to be my main shooter.

Of course, I also have the Olympus Pen EP-1. However while it's not a bad little utility horse, it's as noisy as hell compared to a real DSLR and worse it lacks a viewfinder. In the harsh Australian sun this equates to spraying and praying because you really can't see what you're doing.

But something had to be done. And that something turned out to be the Olympus OMD EM-1 Micro 4/3 with the f/2.8 12-40 (24-80 equivalent) pro lens. The deciding factor was that Olympus has a $300 rebate until the end of June and one of my favourite stores knocked a further $300 off the price as a weekend special. Is this ideal? No, of course not. The micro 4/3 format is smaller than the 40D's sensor which means more noise. However I had heard that the more advanced sensor (with seven extra years of development) countered that. Despite those rave reviews I still found the new Olympus to be relatively noisy in my first outing with it, but I've since revised that opinion. And there is no getting past the fact that it gives me vastly more portability than the 40D, does so with an f/2.8 lens and in-body image stabilisation, is weather sealed (and so is the lens), and once I learn to use it properly I think that things like the in-viewfinder histogram will help me take some pretty good shots.

Unfortunately, there are still a few kinks to work out. Adobe Bridge CS5 doesn't support the EM-1's RAW format, and it doesn't look like they're going to. Adobe's website pointed me to their DNG conversion utility which supports the EM-10 but not the EM-1. However it converted the Olympus files into DNG anyway.

And they looked like effluent. I had a horrible feeling that I had made a disastrous mistake. Then I loaded Olympus's own viewer and found less fuzziness and more colour richness. The DNG converter is a piece of garbage, at least for this particular file format. So it's looking like I'm going to have to put the files through the Olympus viewer and pump them out as .tifs before loading them into Photoshop. Thanks for that, Adobe, really appreciate it.

When I took this, my very first shot, I was feeling slightly exuberant. (You can't see it clearly from this shot but apparently someone else was enjoying the sun rising over the beach on a Sunday morning and had inscribed the words "F*** Yeah" in the sand just to the right of me.) Unfortunately within 15 minutes of taking this a rain front came through and it's been grey and cloudy and cold and wet ever since. I would rather still be shooting with a full sized DSLR having seen the results of my first excursion, but I think this camera still does have a lot of untapped potential and that the image quality will get better the better I get to understand it. And besides, the money isn't there to go into a full DSLR and quality lens.

Of course, I also have to find the time to post the missing four months' worth of PAD images, now that the shadow of the budget is no longer larger than my own.