I was on a brief holiday sojourn to Lorne, one of our beautiful coastal resort towns in Victoria, Australia when a car burst into flames in the main shopping strip just as I arrived.

I quickly parked the car at a safe distance and grabbed my Olympus E510 and Olympus OM 200mm f/4 manual focus lens to give a nice 400mm effective focal length so I could keep my distance and still get close shots.

None of these shots have been cropped or PS – just resized for the web. Click on the photos to see a 1000 pixel wide version.

In this shot it appears like the guy in the white shirt is asking superman why isn’t he putting the fire out – I will let you work out a version of the story line.

and moving in a bit closer….

oh.. and in case you are wondering, the guy is wearing a surf wet suit – the surf beach is only about 100m from the shops.

and the Country Fire Authority (CFA) arrive and the Captain watches his female junior carefully as she does a great job in putting it out.

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More photos of this event can be found here.

More photos of use of the OM 200mm lens on an E510 can be found here.

For those who can’t afford the wonderful but big, relatively expensive Olympus ZD 50-200mm SWD lens, and can manage with manual focus, the Olympus OM 200mm f/4 lens works very well and is quite compact and light. Of course, with the Olympus E510/520/E30/E3, image stabilisation is provided. Although I do not have one, it would be worth getting an adapter with a AF-confirm chip on it to assist with manual focus.