ROBIN WONG : A Day Out In Sekinchan with Olympus DSLR E-1

I was supposed to publish this blog article alongside the POV street video I did with the same topic, but I forgot my laptop during my recent 2-week holiday home to Kuching, Borneo. Composing a blog article on a smartphone was a bad idea, I gave up at the second paragraph, and I thought I'd just do a proper one after I have returned from that short trip. My friends Jon Low and Andrew Chow invited me to tag along their day trip to Sekinchan, a 2 hour drive out of Kuala Lumpur location with vast paddy field (rice plantation) and a fishing village by the ocean. It was a splendid place for photography, and so we had some shutter therapy adventure.

I did a POV street video using the Olympus DSLR E-1 here (click).

I also did behind the scenes documenting places we go to, some cool drone footage covering the area, the food we ate and crazy adventures we had, go to my vlog channel here (click).

For this particular session I brought along the dinosaur E-1, alongside Zuiko Digital 14-54mm F2.8-3.5 II lens (lens borrowed from Jackie). I am continuing my series of "old cameras are great cameras". If E-1 was an awesome camera some almost 20 years ago, it is still an awesome camera today, though many new and supposedly superior cameras have been released ever since. The E-1 has a Kodak CCD image sensor that renders very pleasing, natural looking colors. The 5MP resolution may seem like a cringe to many shooting with Trillion Megapixel cameras today, but to me, the 5MP is still plenty of resolution, even being displayed on my Quad HD screen, and I believe it still looks respectfully decent on 4K screens (video was rendered in 4K). It is not about getting the best gear, or chasing technical perfection. I believe photography is a lot more than that, and we don't need the latest and greatest to hone our craft. We don't need to break the bank to truly enjoy photography! The E-1 is still freaking fantastic if you ask me, and I thoroughly enjoyed shooting with it.

Jon and Andrew host a weekly talk show on their FB live, which I do participate in the comment section, (text) chatting live with every one. Do come in and say hi, if you are free on Thursday evenings at 930pm Malaysian time. You can find us at The Jon and Andrew Show (click here).

It was a really fun day out at Sekinchan for me. The place was far from the city, so it was quiet and peaceful. I must admit the sun was very harsh and we all got roasted alive but I do think it was so so worth it, the lighting was glorious and good light makes good photography. I did not have anything particular planned out for this trip, I just took picture of anything that caught my attention, and I managed to sneak in some close up portrait shots of the fishermen resting after a day's work by the sea. I also took this opportunity to fly the drone (DJI Mini 2) that I got recently, overseeing the huge rice plantation and fishing village, the aerial footage was quite something. You can find my drone action in the vlog channel instead of the main photography one.

All images here were shot with the DSLR E-1 and 14-54mm F2.8-3.5 II. Aperture Priority used, ISO fixed at 200 mostly. Images were shot in RAW and post-processed in Capture One Pro.