First play with the Olympus TG4 – underwater camera.

So for some time now I have been toying with the idea of purchasing a waterproof camera, not because I go diving or even swimming in the sea much but I do like exploring rock pools and playing in the waves and as we all know sea water and cameras do not go well together. I have spent a lot of time reading different reviews and trying to decide if I should just buy a waterproof casing for my Canon G15 or buy a specifically designed underwater camera.  The reviews I read all say the image quality is not that great, so why spend the money on another camera that is not going to give good quality images. In the end I decided not to buy a casing for my G15 for the reason that if the camera died or I upgraded it I would be left with an expensive casing and if the casing failed at any time I would have lost the camera as well.  So the decision was to buy an underwater camera purely for playing in the water with, although this means I end up with two compact cameras – not ideal but I don’t really want to swap my G15 for anything at the moment as it is a great little compact.  So it was back to the review reading, each time I thought I had made my mind up on the best one to get I would read a negative review and that would send right back to square one.   So at last I settled on an Olympus TG4 but then I read some comments re uploading raw files and not being able to open them.  Thankfully a number of chaps at the camera club are using Olympus cameras so I emailed one of them and asked if he had any problems, to which he doesn’t.  On chatting I explained what I was looking at and why – it turned out that he had bought the TG4 for his wife in Sept for a trip to New Zealand, she took two photos with it and never looked at it again!! If I wanted to have a look at it and a play I was more than welcome as he was looking to sell it!! Talk about meant to be – even more so when he said it was red as that was the colour I was after! 

So last Sunday afternoon even though the weather wasn’t great I took myself off to one of the local beaches Towan Beach to have a play and try out some of the different settings.  Admittedly I think there are a number of settings that I may never use but it will be nice to try them out at some stage.  So far I have had a play with the underwater macro mode, panorama mode, landscape, sports (on waves), aperture priority and microscopic mode (which I think is going to be my favourite). 

Below are some of the images for you to see.  I am not disappointed and once the warmer weather arrives I will get a lot of use out of it, of that I am sure. 

The first show the microscopic mode – none are cropped. 

A sea anemone, I was pleased with the colours on this. Unfortunately they were all asleep whilst I was there. 

The next two I used the sports mode for the waves.  As you can see by the colour of the sky it was a very dull damp day. 

I need to practise with the panorama mode – it takes three images and then stitches them together but I obviously didn’t keep it very straight lol. 

I am really looking forward to playing with this some more, especially when I can get in the water and test it properly.