With Japan on hold for a while for a variety of reasons, Meg and I decided to go to Adelaide for a short week.

South Australia is a little like home mixed with most Australian tropes, but unlike Perth it is not the “big dry” and it avoids the feel of the faceless metropolis Melbourne or Sydney can give me. The people are generally friendly and real, the places worth going are quite accessible and the city itself is surrounded by hills similar in climate to here.

I took my habitual light weight kit with an old G9 instead of the usual OM10.2, which added weight and was mixed in capabilities (more on that to come).

Lenses are the 12-60 Panasonic and 40-150 Oly kit lenses, combined weight negligible with the 25 f1.8 for speed if needed. I carried the lot over in the Crumpler Muli 4000 bag, then tried to switch the day gear to a small satchel, but the G9 proved to be a little big, so I kept using the Muli with laptop etc removed.

The nice surprise was the lenses, yet again producing the goods.

No sharpening added, in fact not much processing at all and some really fine art quality results.

The weather was generally poor, great for a draught stricken state, but not so much for a tourist.

Photo opportunities came down to a day in the Adelaide hills, a trip to the zoo and a morning walk in Glenelg where we stayed.

The only negative was the combination of the G9 and 40-150 for moving subjects or low contrast quick grabs. It missed some and stubbornly refused to let go of the background. User error possibly, but not a combo I would trust for sport.

Kit lenses can be oddly satisfying. Their light weight reduces mechanical sloppiness and increases drop robustness (they don’t hit the ground as hard), even can even be weather sealed (12-60 is rated as such). They are often sharp, distortion and flare resistant thanks to unambitious design parameters. They are by far the best performer you can get for the money and can be eminently replaceable (never buy a camera without one).

Both lenses produced great results as usual, the 12-60 kit cementing its place with me as my core travel lens, the 40-150 was already a known thing. The bulk of the kit’s weight was the camera.

Gallery

Kensho