For 5 years now, my family have been holidaying in England during the Easter Holidays. We select a seaside resort and make it an adventure to discover a new place. This year we chose to return to Devon, as the children loved it 2 years ago.

I normally blog about the places I visit, it’s an opportunity to take photos and also recommend what I liked about a place. This year I brought my small and mighty Olympus Pen EPL8. The first trip in a very long time that I didn’t take my DSLR. The English coast is rugged and beautiful, and even on a wet rainy day, the scenic landscape is breathtaking.

The most wonderful thing about this camera is that I carried it in my handbag the whole time. It’s so lightweight, that it hardly makes a difference. Perfect with children around, as you have so much to carry anyway. I simply put the setting on Auto (P) the whole holiday, to see what kind of results I could achieve, and here they are.

I am still finding my way around this camera, so I recommend to start on Auto (P) and work your way through settings, as you familiarise yourself with it. This is so simple to do with the Pen, as you can carry it with you anywhere, and learn on the go!

Why choose the Pen over a phone?

The most important aspect I would say is the familiar ‘Storage Full’ message.  As a parent, we all become a little snap happy on our phones, and this normally leads to the phone being useless with constant and frustrating storage issues.  We binge with photo taking on our phones and don’t value the images as much. What a point and shoot camera (Olympus Pen) does, is take our photo taking mentality back to the ‘joy’ of taking a photo. Taking the time to take fewer images but focus on the quality.  Using a camera almost changes our thought process, and teaches you to look and take time to create a frame.

Another aspect that I really love is that it can be used just like an iPhone where Auto does all the work for you,  but you are able to progress to more of the pro settings when you are ready. I think that this camera would be far easier to learn on than a DSLR.

The Olympus Pen has Wifi, selfie mode, filters and video, but what I like best is having something small and compact, and still have the settings I normally work with ( shutter speed, ISO, Aperture). For someone who doesn’t use these settings yet, the Auto setting on the Pen is brilliant, and the picture quality is also amazing.

I think you’ll agree that considering this was all taken on Auto, the image quality is pretty amazing. The Olympus Pen is a great little camera.

I hope you found this post useful, I’ll continue posting tips and writing about the camera via my Instagram account. Olympus have been very generous and given me a 10% discount code – BLOGGER10 – the link to use this discount and to purchase this camera is here the discount is valid until Septemeber 31st 2018. Do message me if you have any further questions.

This post is in association with Olympus Cameras, however, all opinions are my own.

I hope you enjoyed reading

Tia x