About ten years ago, or so, I dragged out my father's old 35mm camera. It is an Olympus OM-1n. It's black and it's pristine. It had the factory issued 50mm lens and that was it. I took a bunch of pictures. I bought a zoom lens for it and a 28mm lens. I spent a LOT of mine getting pictures developed. I wanted to take photographs, not simply snap pictures. I wasn't doing a great job at being an artist and I didn't have any outlet for my work. Eventually, my subject matter turned almost entirely to my young daughter. I wanted to move away from slow, fully manual control to a more responsive, faster, more automatic camera. I got myself a Canon A2 and took a LOT more bad pictures that I had to pay to develop. I think that I actually took less acceptable pictures that I did when I was shooting full manual. I didn't help any that I steadfastly refused to shoot in the automatic setting.
What was wrong was my shutter speed. I was, and sadly still am, a bit of a bokeh addict. To make sure I got lots of the lovely stuff on each and every shot, I would have my depth of field set so shallow that I would inevitably wind up with out of focus pictures. Alternatively, I would be trying to take indoors shots without a flash and have the shutter speed set so low that I got nothing but fuzz.
I eventually got a digital point and shoot and the Olympus (and the Canon) kind of faded into the background. I did what I could with that for a long time and it did a great job, for what it was. After my second child was born, my wife began to encourage me to get a "nice" camera. What that meant to me meant a SLR: a digital SLR. Being an "Olympus Man" I picked up the first second hand Olympus DSLR kit that cam along. It was an E-600. It was cheep. I took it into my hands and the first thing that I noticed was how small it was. A LOT smaller than my EOS A2. Then again, I had held exactly zero DSLRs in my hands before that. Probably not the best researched purchase that I ever made but the stats were there. In fact, on paper, this was a great camera compared to others of it's era and even when compared to the very last generation of Prosumer offerings from the Big companies. It's just so....small. So much so that, being left eye dominant, I find it difficult to work the controls. There is simply no room there. The grip is too small and I really, really miss that little wheel under my index finger that lets me change my beloved apature settings. So, since I already have a few Canon lenses, I am thinking about ditching my Olympus and switching to a Canon. If I do that I also get a video camera in the deal, since all the new DSLRs shoot video too! The one trouble is that I can't seem to sell the Olympus.
This does bother me greatly, since I AM an Olympus fan-boy. Why can't any one else se beyond the marketing and hype of the Big Two? Oh sure, I understand the hypocrasy of it. Of course in my case it's a physical limitation that's driving my decision. It just bums me out a little.
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