It wasn’t much of a photo week this week, so we’re going to turn back time and present some imagery from the first instance of RAW image collection, in this instance with the Olympus E-10. As we’ve discussed, the E-10 showed up about 2003 and as a faithful disciple of DPReview, the E-10 was fairly well thought of at the time. This was before the landmark introduction of the Nikon D100 which kicked the “prosumer level DLSR niche firmly into gear.
The E-10, brought a lot of positive attributes. It was referred to by DPReview, and other as a ZLR (Zoom Lens Reflex) camera as the lens was not interchangeable. At introduction, the E-10 was a pricely $1,900, which was real money in those days. By the time this E-10 showed up, Olympus had introduced the E-20 with a bit more resolution, so the E-10 was widely available for sale at discounted prices.
This copy was was purchased from Office Max on a price match with one of shady New York Camera dealers. Honestly, Office Max never should have matched the price as it was absurdly low at ~$800, but they did. Don’t remember the camera dealer, but their reputation was if you ordered a camera from them, it would suddenly be “out of stock” unless you succumbed to the hard sell tactics in selling you a plethora of overpriced “accessories”.
The E-10 was the first zoom lens experience for me, and to be honest, it took some time to wrap my head around it. The images are decidedly non-optimum, even for this camera, as learning the nuances of digital photography was taking far longer than anyone would have expected.
We had discovered Destin, Florida a couple of years prior on a lark and had been making fairly regular vacation visits. This time we booked a fairly nice townhouse rental outside of town on the beach. It was a tumultuous time in our lives, as the business we had started in 2000 had recently failed and we were just starting to get back to our feet. The money to rent the townhouse was literally everything we had, but we knew the immediate future wasn’t going to support such luxuries, so we pulled the trigger.
Meghan had started school at Ole Miss the previous fall, and as she had her own transportation, had announced that she would not be spending the whole time with us as she had other plans. It was that time in her life where she was exerting her independence and as she was a genuinely good kid, we let her do that.
We typically spent a week in Destin, arriving on Saturday and leaving the next Saturday. This was a typical sequence and so we showed up on Saturday afternoon to find our new home for the week:
At first glance, this was something of a surprise to us. This was in the days before the innerwebs, and it was typically difficult to get a lot of detail about the places you were renting. It was all done by phone. Honestly, it was perfectly fine, it was just very different to the motel style facilities we had stayed at in the past.
There was a small inlet behind the townhouse:
And then, of course, the Pièce De Résistance, the beach.
After a couple of days of doing little other than laying like a jellyfish on the sand on the beach, we began to do some exploration of the area. There were two attractions that had been Identified; the Gulfarium and we wanted to take a ride on a Glass Bottomed boat.
So we set out with the first stop on our whirlwind tour being The Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park. We spent the first part of the day exploring the facility and taking in a number of the live animal exhibits.
We had booked seats on the Southern Star for a Dolphin Cruise in the afternoon, so we left the Gulfarium after lunch. It was an extended cruise and Jourdan got lots of hands on activities, which he enjoyed:
On our last full day in the area, we drove into Pensacola to go to the Naval Air Station. There is a really nice naval aviation museum on the grounds, and once through security, is an easy drive.
We have been to the facility several times over the years and we’ll talk about those other visits in a post to come. It was our first time here and there is a lot to see, and I can’t say we saw everything. Jourdan got the opportunity to sit in several aircraft:
All in all, the Olympus fared fairly well for itself. No complaints at the time, but there was literally nothing else to compare it to, so as they say “ignorance is bliss” and I was exceedingly blissful. This first tranche of RAW imagery presented some interesting repercussions as I had no tools for RAW file development at the time. I had not in any was embraced post processing at this juncture, and to be kind this time was a bit of a jumble. I had found a ORF->jpg converter online, but for the life of me I can’t find reference to it to give the author credit. Again, I was exceedingly blissful about all this so, it was wonderful…. for the time.
That’s all for now. Pending some exciting developments, we’ll move ahead in the future to an exciting event at the Ringling Brothers Circus.