Zuiko and E-5: Day 4

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This is the day. The sad day. The day I have to return the E-5 to Olympus Malaysia.

E-5 with Zuiko Digital 14-54mm F2.8-3.5 mk2

On my way to work, a small mishap happened. I ran out of gas!!! A small miscalculation on the reserve. I was just 1km away from the nearest petrol kiosk. But then, it turned out to be a blessing.

While waiting for the ELITE Expressway Patrol to pass by, I managed to make some C-AF rapid shots. The fast moving cars at the excess of 100km/h (55mph) were just perfect!!

As I had experience shooting C-AF sequence at 5fps with RAW + SuperFine JPEG (total of 18-20MB per shot) during my kid's concert yesterday, the limit of the buffer was 7 frames. As can be seen in the panorama stitch shot above, I was stuck after the 7th frame!

About the C-AF performance? Well, most of it was based on technique and approach. In this case, my experience was about 70-80% hit rate. This was the only clean sequence I got out of 4 attempts. To tell you the truth, if I had been doing this type of shots day-in day-out, the hit rate might have been in the high 90%.

A quick landscape shot of the ELITE and KESAS expressways interchange

After my mishap was settled, I sped off to Olympus Malaysia office at Mont Kiara. I was thinking, I might as well milk out the last drop of pixel out of this E-5. Yeah, that's a great idea! The indoor shots were between ISO800 and 1600, while outdoor shots were at ISO200. All using Dramatic Tone, as I was at high emotions actually!

Dark parking bay below the office.

Olympus office is somewhere here.

At Olympus, I was greeted by Mr Yang (not a real name). I shared my experience, and felt very sad about it. We exchanged experiences shooting the E-5, and he showed me some great prints at A3-size to show the edge-to-edge details. Well, I haven't printed my shots yet, and boy were the prints looked great!!

After about half an hour chit-chat, I bid farewell, just after we were joined by Mr Big Boss. I also exchanged experience about the shoot with him, and also tried to lobby them to loan a couple of E-5s to our small community's upcoming trip up Mount Ledang (the MyChiaroscuro.net). Hope they agree to the idea, because brother Robin Wong will be joining the trip, too.

Entering with sadness...

Olympus cameras display

I just wished that I just could just grab hold of the bag and ran away!!

Well, now I am having a severe E-5 withdrawal syndrome. My mood is a bit off, and strangely when I arrive home I immediately grab hold of the E-3... Three days were just not enough!!! And, I apologize for any shortcomings of my write-up regarding the E-5 as I did not have much time to really study and test its capabilities.

It's going to be a tough few weeks for me to cope with the loss!!