Olympus PEN e-pl1 Micro four thirds camera and underwater housing.... I want....

Aloha,

Haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with work and life lately, and haven't had new photos to work with too much since my camera died early last fall, so I got away from posting the last couple weeks. I have been researching camera choices though, and I've pretty much got a camera targeted.

My early forays into underwater digital photography were with Olympus cameras, I kept upgrading... easy habit to do once you get the bug... and ended up with an Olympus 8080. At the time I thought, gee, too bad someone doesn't make a camera about this size with interchangeable lenses.... After the 8080 I picked up an SP350, very easy to use and small... loved it. After that I picked up a Canon G9... loved it too, although the learning curve wasn't immediate for me with the new menus and such. When it died last fall (around August/September) I planned on waiting to see what was around the corner for cameras.

The Canon G11 had been announced, then I found out about the Canon S90 (sort of a G11 crammed into a small package). Both cameras are great and I was very interested in the S90 because of the size.... Well, a couple of falls ago Olympus and Panasonic got together and announced a new format of camera, Micro 4/3rds, which sort of is a hybrid between a high end point and shoot and an interchangeable lens DSLR. When I heard that I've been keenly watching the progress of the camera lines. Then, earlier this year, it happened.... Olympus announced and has just put out a micro 4/3 camera with an underwater housing. I think it's been decided which camera I make the move to next.

I've been researching the camera and housing a bit. Since they just came out, there's a huge lack of anything about them to be found readily on the net, coming at it from an underwater hobbyist's viewpoint at least. You've pretty much got to glean through Olympus' site and a couple of the online camera catalogs and try to figure it out your own at this point as far as for underwater use goes. The camera is getting good user reviews on dpreview.com, that's a plus, but it's all above water stuff. There's tons of 1 page "reviews" by gadget gurus which are little more than announcements, nothing that really gets into readily listing what you need to really get this camera water ready. Coming from the point and shoot world and into the world of trays, strobe arms, strobes and such it's quite a bit to sift through. I'm gonna give it a try myself... and once I've got it all together (could be weeks or months, you never know) I'll report back on my experience. I'm looking forward to another new camera learning experience that'll keep my UW photo hobby exciting for me 'til I get the next bug to upgrade.... of course this all assumes I'm getting the camera - Pat's amazed I've held off this long, but I've got a shop to put together for the summer.

I hope to be displaying some photos from a new camera sometime in the next month or so. For now, here's a repeat posting of one of my favorite shots that Pat has taken with her G9. It's of a frogfish. We've started seeing the juveniles appear again, it's that time of year. They're sooooo cool!!!