[pct-l] Film and Olympus Stylus Epic

[mark dixon <mdixon@bigsky.net>]

Jim,

In response to your comments about the Olympus Stylus Epic. I carried the
camera all the way on my thru hike this past summer. I had purchased the
camera for the very reasons you state in your post. Unfortunately this
camera, like so many autofocus cameras, don't always focus where you would
like them to. I have too many pictures from my trip where the people in the
foreground are out of focus and the background is in focus. Enough pictures
are like this to make my slide show quite disappointing. I was sufficiently
pissed off about it that I almost smashed the camera. Anyway, I am going to
get rid of the camera and find a fixed focus point and shoot like my old
camera. My friend Jim had the same camera, I don't know yet whether he
experienced the same thing or if it was a glitch in my camera. It seemed to
take fine landscape type photos when the camera is focused out to infinity.
The other annoying thing about the camera was that it always wanted to use
the flash if there was any kind of shadow in the frame. You can turn it
off, but it becomes a pain in the ass after a while. Using 200 ASA film
seemed to help both these problems a bit, because of the increased depth of
field.

Oh, I just counted the number of rolls I shot last year. It came to 22
rolls of 36 exposure slide film. There were periods where I was conserving
film because I knew I would run out. I would add 3 or 4 more rolls if I had
it to do over. Hope this helps.

Mark Dixon

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