An unexpected journey:

Well, here goes. My first blog post. Much is written about photography and the tools of the craft, making it difficult to find a unique topic. Recently though, a trip to Japan and an unplanned purchase there led me to consider how Olympus's design vision has contributed to my photography.

Looking back, I realize I've been a fan of Olympus for quite some time. When I was young, I longed to have an OM camera. But as a teenager with limited means in the late 1970s, the hand-me-down Minolta SRT-101 had to do. It was a good camera and it's Rokkor 50mm f1.4 was a nice optic. The OM-1 seemed so much more desirable though. The efficiency of it's compact design was not only practical (the best photos come from the camera you have with you), but it also suggested a level of engineering elegance that I would later come to fully realize, and appreciate. Already endowed with Minolta gear, I continued to grow with that system during my film shooting years.

Fast forward to 2000, when a handful of digital cameras became affordable. That year a colleague let me borrow his Olympus C-2500L. In the hand it was small yet comfortable to handle. It offered a good deal of photographic control, was technically advanced for it's time, and it was reasonably priced. Most of all, in good light the image quality from this compact, 2.5 megapixel DSLR was remarkable. Nearly 2 decades later, I found myself once again drawn to Olympus and their design sensibility. A week after borrowing the C-2500L, I purchased one and began exploring the new realm of digital photography.

Olympus C-2500L OOC jpegs from Chicago Illinois, Merano Italy, and Alpbach Austria, 2000

That little camera drew me back into photography. It became the "camera I always had with me"; the realization of Olympus's original vision, now digital. Malcolm Gladwell writes it takes ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. The convenience of digital imaging has certainly helped me iterate quicker and improve my skills. But thanks to Olympus, having a compact, high quality camera nearby has had the greatest impact on fulfilling those hours towards mastery.

After the C-2500L, Olympus cameras remained the most at-hand part of my kit.

...Jim