Love this:
"I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can."

Lots of useful links on the E500

Don't cede your right to photograph in public. Don't propagate the terrorist photographer story. Remind them that prohibiting photography was something we used to ridicule about the USSR.

Hydra is about mixing a number of under- and overexposed shots to get a natural sight of a scene. It provides human eye-like perception to your photographs by allowing you to create high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs