{"id":2104,"date":"2009-09-25T12:35:36","date_gmt":"2009-09-25T02:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2104"},"modified":"2009-09-25T12:42:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-25T02:42:02","slug":"melbournes-tulip-festival-why-i-love-the-olympus-zd-50-200mm-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=2104","title":{"rendered":"Melbourne’s tulip festival – why I love the Olympus ZD 50-200mm lens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I decided on a day trip in very poor weather to the nearby mountain ranges to check out Melbourne’s annual tulip festival<\/a> in the Dandenong Ranges.<\/p>\n

When I first arrived it was pouring rain, so I decided to go to nearby Olinda where one of my favorite pie shops “Pie in the sky<\/a>” resides and indulged in a pie floater – a beautiful steak and mushroom pie sitting in a pea and ham soup – just the thing to warm you up on a cold Spring day!<\/p>\n

The bad news… whilst eating my pie and soup, the rain stopped and this absolutely gorgeous light streamed through the clouds, but then disappeared by the time I was ready to leave \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

Now onto the tulip festival – this as I found out, reinforces how multicultural Melbourne<\/a> really is – this is a Dutch festival but that Saturday was Turkish day complete with a belly dancer, but the tourists were dominated by Japanese and other Asian tourists including locals.<\/p>\n

I decided I was going to only take one camera kit – my Olympus E510 Four Thirds<\/a> camera with my much treasured Olympus ZD 50-200mm f\/2.8-3.5 lens – you can see how useful this combination is, by checking out my photos taken with this here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One aspect I do like about this lens is that it is weather resistant <\/strong>so a bit of rain is not going to hurt it (but I do have to protect the E510 although it has survived a wave at a beach washing over the top of it without any issues! For complete weather sealing you really need the Olympus E-3 or its successor which should be announced soon), and its big lens hood which helps to prevent rain drops hitting the front lens and ruining your images. I must admit I tend to often not use the lens hood on this when its not raining as it almost doubles the size of this already large lens and tends to intimidate people.<\/p>\n

Now, onto a few candid pics of the day to show how nice this combo is (click on images for larger view):<\/p>\n

Note that these are all straight jpegs from the camera, no post-processing apart from resizing for the web – Olympus cameras arguably have the best jpeg engine out there<\/strong> – if you don’t want to spend time processing raw image files, I would strongly advise you think carefully about buying Olympus – I would rarely use a jpeg straight from my Canon 1DMIII and I believe the general consensus is that applies to other cameras too!<\/p>\n

A Japanese lady admiring the tulips (and taking a few pics herself):<\/p>\n

\"Japanese<\/a><\/p>\n

Turkish sisters posing for a family portrait amongst the tulips whilst I was some 50m away:<\/p>\n

\"Turkish<\/a><\/p>\n

Horses taking kids for carriage rides:<\/p>\n

\"horses\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some girls are not afraid of the mud, or perhaps are more fascinated by the row upon row of tulips:
\n
\n\"girl\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and some lovely tulips:<\/p>\n

\"tulips\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I decided on a day trip in very poor weather to the nearby mountain ranges to check out Melbourne’s annual tulip festival in the Dandenong Ranges. When I first arrived it was pouring rain, so I decided to go to nearby Olinda where one of my favorite pie shops “Pie in the sky” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[17,14,37],"class_list":["post-2104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","tag-four-thirds","tag-olympus","tag-zd-50-200mm"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t