The Light Fantastic With Olympus

Pardon the heading - part of the business of writing a weblog column is re-cycling trite phrases to suit the content. Just groan and read on... Oh, and sorry for the hiatus in this series - I needed to report the Sony A9 evening yesterday to be fair to the firm. And to the barmaid. The heading image today is not so trite - it is a crop of Tuesday's facer, but it has important information about the camera and what you can do with it at every corner. Let's start at the left-hand side of the picture - two Allen head screw heads. No, you do not get a tiny IKEA spanner in the box, and no, you are not expected to take the casing apart. But someone may need to do so in the future, and these are a stylish way to do it. Olympus equipment is made to work, to last, and to be repairable. The right hand top shows two lights - an LED square and a flash tube - both obviously sealed against ingress of water, as is the rest of the camera. The flash is for stills, the LED for video. The real discovery is at the rear dial where you see the lightning symbol. Olympus have included a lot of options in the flash menu that appears on the screen - slow, fill, red-eye and LED as well. You can get more control in the close-up shots with this. Regrettably, there is still no strobe connection out from this camera, but that is standard with other small underwater types. Back to the front and at the lower right is a button to press that lets you remove the bezel that surrounds the lens. The lens assembly is still sealed in behind the glass, but the bayonet mount thus revealed allows you to attach an amazing number of accessories - supplementary lenses and clever flash diffusers that take the flash from the tube at top and channel it down into a ring-light about the lens. Macro shooters who know that the limiting factor for all their work is the illumination that they can get into their tiny subjects will recognise the value of this instantly. As far as putting the camera into an additional housing - the PT-058 - I have no more information. Presumably, it allows even deeper diving with the assembly. The onboard flash can be a little directional when used at close ranges - here it is on the film set of The Pearl Of El Paso compared to non-flash. This is presumably the effect that the ring light is designed to overcome. Interestingly the Olympus advertising picture - which was on the inside flap of the camera box - shows two ring lights and I reckon one of them is for the LED rather than the flash. The regular flash has a fill setting: Before you squawk - the laying-down gnome is how it comes onto the Wordpress page, though the image is upright in the computer. Go figure. In any case the flash tube of the TG 5 has just enough power to overcome a shadow, but only close up. Your best dry-land bet is still plain sunlight or a diffused room light.