After receiving a small Canon point-and-shoot back in 2006 or so, Mom had little use for her aging Olympus C-5050, and so she passed it on to me. DPReview has a much more thorough review than you’ll find here, in fact, all you get from me today is a brief usage report and a couple of sample close-focus pics.

So the C-5050 has close focus setting, and I thought I’d reached its limits… but as I was hunting in the DPReview for the focus limits, I came across a ‘Super Macro’ focus setting… So thats’ what the cartoon flower with the ‘S’ means.

So maybe next week I’ll take it for a true ‘macro’ test run…

Until then, this is as close as it gets:

This ancient camera (released in August of 2002) came with some surprising (to me, anyway) features, including the ability to save in Olympus’s RAW format. Even more surprisingly, Lightroom 5 can read these files, and produces some nice-enough results. Street price for this gem was an astounding $799 in 2002, but you can have one today for ~$30-$100.

InshaAllah, I’ll play around with this some more soon enough. I should probably pick up a CF card first, though. 33 RAW files on the included 256mb xD card really doesn’t cut it for any marathon shooting sessions.

On second thought, maybe treat it like a film camera… Continue reading “(not quite) as close as it gets”