Hi everyone,

As I left this morning to take some shots I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing, my camera!, no it wasn’t in my camera bag, I didn’t have a camera bag, it wasn’t draped from my neck either, it was in my jacket pocket!.

The purpose of this morning’s brief outing locally to the river was to put my new camera through its paces. My latest purchase, an Olympus TG-5 Tough, this TG-5 Tough, fitted with Forevercam adaptor, 52 mm filter and one of my Olympus lens caps:

For some while now I’ve been looking around for a modern replacement for my very elderly Canon G-10 backup/pocket camera. I settled on the TG-5 as it’s small and fully featured. I know that it is rugged, waterproof, drop-proof, sand-proof, freeze-proof, crush-proof etc. but that’s not the main reason why I got it.

I’m not in to what I believe the collective term for is “adventure sports”, white-water rafting, kayaking, mountain climbing, scuba diving, skiing, hang gliding etc. etc. but I do like the idea that this camera will survive being drenched, dropped or crushed. The fact that this camera is claimed to be waterproof down to 50 foot isn’t a consideration, as a non-swimmer, if I ever found myself 50 plus feet underwater it wouldn’t be my camera that I would be worried about. 🙂

When I’m away I’m tired of carrying around a second camera body all day and I wanted something light and pocketable to take out in the evenings after I’ve freed myself of the weight of my camera gear. On the whole I’m quite impressed with my first findings, the camera performed well, it’s a little soft at the telephoto end but nothing to be over concerned about. The 24-100mm (in 35mm terms) zoom range is perfectly adequate for my requirements. I did find using the LCD screen and not a viewfinder a little strange but that’s just my preference and years of using viewfinders dating back to my film camera days. Although it was a sunny morning and it was okay,  I can’t help but wonder how visible the display will be in strong sunlight. My wife’s point and shoot is more like point and hope as one can’t see a darned thing on the screen in bright sunlight! and it’s a hit and miss (more miss than hit) affair 🙂

The camera will do 4K video but this doesn’t interest me and I’ve not got anything to view 4K videos on if  I took them, I’m not in to videos at all. What did impress me was the GPS recording feature which made it easy to geotag my photos on my return. I didn’t feel inclined to test it with their mobile app but I will be doing so. Instead I used GPS Track Editor on my PC to convert the .log format file in to .gpx format fle and  Geosetter to  geotag the images using the .gpx file.

I really like the macro mode, what they call the microscope mode which allows the lens to be as close as 1cm from the subject. I’m not in to macro much but it was fun to try out. Another great feature for me is USB charging, as it’s something that I’ve come to love when travelling and, in my opinion, something that should be a feature of all cameras. Apart from all of these useful features it does look incredibly sexy in red. 🙂 , chosen really because, if I drop it it’s more visible than black.

In my experience  like all Olympus cameras the menu system can be a steep learning curve for those starting out but fortunately, courtesy of my years of experience with their Micro four Thirds cameras, I consider myself to be pretty much at the top of the learning curve so it came fairly naturally and intuitively to me.

A few test shots, all from RAW files @ISO 100, with a bit of fairly basic processing. I’ve yet to see a straight out of the camera shot that wouldn’t benefit from at least a few basic adjustments. This post isn’t a review as such, there’s plenty of them on the web,  I like to show what the camera is capable of rather than what comes straight out of the camera. That’s not to say that the camera doesn’t produce good quality images but, processing is my “thing”. 🙂

Click above for a full-size image.

Best wishes,