I admit it. I'm a photography junkie!

And I just have to have a 'fix' from time to time. So, when I found this great deal on an Olympus Evolt E-300 body and accessories, I had to go for it. Snagged it for $275. And then I got a 14-45mm Evolt series zoom lens (that's the equivalent of a 24-90mm zoom for 35mm film cameras) for $66. This is the first camera upgrade I've had in four years - back then I bought a Panasonic Lumix FZ-10 which is one of those high-zoom-range four megapixel cameras. After four years of suffering through high color noise (that's the stuff which makes a solid expanse of one color in an image appear to be speckled with other colors) and JPEG artifacting-which makes the image just not quite as 'sharp' or accurate in detail as a RAW image. My (gently used) Evolt E-300 shoots RAW format as well as JPEG, so I can avoid all the bother. Hooray!

Unfortunately, although both cameras were sent out the same day from two places about the same distance from my home in central California, the body and accessories showed up on Thursday but the lens won't show up until Monday, January 15th. It's been sitting in the local DHL facility, not more than 12 miles from my house, since early Friday morning! Go figure.

However, I had this beautiful eight megapixel camera begging to be used. So today I went *LOW TECH*. Out of my spare body cap (it covers the opening in the camera body when a lens isn't attached) I created a pinhole using a spare piece of wafer-thin brass sheeting (used by many alternative process photographers to make custom pinhole) in which I had punched a tiny hole using a sewing pin. This is the first image from my new toy and it's of the shed in my back yard. I took the image from my bedroom window with a shutter speed setting of 1/1.3 of a second (slower than 1/2 a second and faster than 1 second).

Enjoy!