Shut up Olympus

This and This came to my attention over the weekend. Its a viral print campaign by Olympus to highlight the quality of a compact camera and take a stab at camera's in mobile phones for producing "rubbish" photos, I find this vexing, its a blanket statement that amounts to little more than FUD , according to Olympus using a phone camera = bad pictures. The device used to capture and image should never be a measure of an image's value - Damon Winter's cell phone camera shot won third place for feature picture story from Pictures of the Year International in November of last year - Is the camera used to capture the image important? is the image less effective because he used a cell phone?

I shoot with high end Canon camera's for a lot of my professional work but I take a selection of iPhones (International 2G phone for when I am abroad and a UK 3GS) on all my jobs - these are great for unobtrusive photo opportunities where a large lens DSLR will distract or confuse a subject - they are simply ideal for candids. On the recent Femme Fatale tour I used an old iPhone 2G with Hipstamatic to capture most of the candid pictures between filming - a selection of which are below in this post.

Olympus clearly want to protect their business interests in compact camera's but this product segment is under growing risk from high quality mobile device's that, in addition to taking great pictures, can also edit and publish images online - Its no surprise to see the Wall Street Journal adopt iPhone 4 as its ENG device of choice.

In my opinion it comes across as aggressive, fear-mongering advertising and leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.