I guess I should introduce myself and the purpose of this blog.
My name is Matthew and I live near Baltimore, Maryland. I work in IT in the Baltimore area as a Team Leader/Project Manager. The purpose of this blog is to share my opinions and testing data about photography, specifically about the venerable Olympus OM series of cameras and lens/accessories for the OM line of cameras. Recently I have switched over from shooting almost exclusively 35mm film, to digital. As such the site will be shifting from a focus on the Olympus OM film cameras, to the Olympus OM-D/Pen series of cameras and Micro 4/3rds in general. I won’t bother sharing the history of Olympus or the OM series of cameras, there is plenty of information out there regarding the company and the cameras. My purpose is the share my likes, dislikes and general test information (subjective and objective) on the cameras and lenses.
I became interested in photography a few years agp, back around the spring of 2006 before a trip to England. A few years before, during college, my father had given me his old Olympus OM-1 and a few lenses and accessories as it had been collecting dust in his closet for a number of years. Well it continued to gather dust in my closet through college and for a year or two afterward. Right before this trip I finally picked up the camera with the intention of taking it with me and learning how to use it.
The learning curve was a bit step, but I admit I didn’t put that much effort in to learning the camera before the trip. I managed several very good pictures, but I really didn’t have that much of a clue about proper exposure, the light meter was broken on the camera and sunny/16 was something I had heard of, but didn’t really know what it meant. That being said, the wide lattitude of negative film and some not terrible guesses on exposure meant most of my pictures turned out okay in terms of exposure.
At the time of my England trip my total photographic backpack (okay, a 10 year old rucksack and not a photobackpack) consisted of an early run OM-1, zuiko 50mm f/1.8 silvernose, vivitar t-mount 135mm f/3.5 and a few filters for the 50mm lens (not that I knew what to do with a filter).
After coming home and getting the photos developed I vowed that I would learn how to use the camera better (afterall, I had a blast using it). Over the next few months I really mastered sunny/16 and the camera became intuitive. Just in time for my honeymoon. I also purchased off Ebay a 28-80mm f/3.5 no-name brand zoom (samigon or something like that). I played with it a bit and used it on my honeymoon, fortunately limitedly as for whatever reason the lens was clipping the corners at anything over about 20ft focus at all focal lengths…so that lens went in the trash shortly after getting back.
Since my honeymoon (years and years ago now 
) I have been collecting more and more lenses and cameras. Each of which I will discuss in some amount of detail, hopefully to be updated with images and finer details such as sample pictures, weight, size, etc when I have the information collected. Someday, when I acquire a negative scanner, I plan on doing fairly systematic tests of all of my lenses at all f-stops to compare them at 100% blow ups with at least 3600dpi scans to get a true impression of just how sharp each lens is and at what focal lengths. With the shift to digital, posting comparisons will be easier than ever.
In addition, because I like to write I’ll probably also talk about trips I take, what equipment I take with me and how it worked out.
My email is azazel1024@hotmail.com
