Brad Ideas - Photography - Comments

Agreeing with what's below

brad — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:32:56 -0700

I just don’t hear stories of camera wear-out. Most people never use the camera to the extent that a test-bed like this would. I would prefer to focus on problems that are likely to come bite me.

Pentax is a decent brand

brad — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:31:09 -0700

But I still recommend people to stick with the big 2 (as much as I love small brands) because

There will be more people to help you with them
There will be more aftermarket products available
There will be more of a market in used products on eBay

This doesn’t mean stick entirely with them, but just to count the above things as worth a lot, and thus accept that you might get less camera for the money on initial purchase. If you get a lot more camera for the money with the Pentax (or other brands) and it meets your special needs, by all means go with any brand with a reputation for quality.

re: Canon are (not) more resilient than Nikon

Schopenhauer — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:24:49 -0700

Not sure why one would use a camera to test an SD card (rather than a test deck), but the number of cameras being discarded due to mechanical wear must approach zero: Anecdotal cameras in use on muddy dusty and dangerous race-track environments lasting only a few 10s of thousands of shots excepted :-).

On the "which model is best" front, I am happy with my magnesium framed Nikon P5000. It (and its successor the P5100) are very compact (much smaller than the G9), yet has great hand feel and excellent imaging. Combine that with full manual control and an SLR-style command wheel, plus compatibility with converter lenses and the Nikon flash systems (low light is the enemy of imaging and lack of it the biggest weakness in point and shoot) and you have a great always-there camera. No sign of it wearing out yet :-)

There's a good review with test images here http://imaging-resource.com/PRODS/CP5100/CP5100A.HTM

Pentax

Phillip Helbig — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:58:03 -0700

I would like to recommend the Pentax K10D. (I don't get
any money for the recommendation.) 10 MP, more bang for
the buck than any other camera, allows one to use essentially
all Pentax lenses ever made WITH shake reduction (since the SR
is in the camera, not in the lens), nice to use for people
familiar with traditional film-based SLR cameras (most stuff
one needs to change---and one can change a lot---can be done
via various wheels withouth having to go to the menu), has a
dust-reduction system, has the traditional 3:2 ratio for the chip
(which is about half the size of 35-mm film, thus traditional
lenses behave as if they had a longer focal length), can shoot
JPEG and RAW simultaneously.

For those thinking about changing to a digital SLR: Why a SLR and
not a point-and-shoot, apart from higher quality and the ability
to change lenses (the main advantages)? A viewfinder gives one
an immediate view, whereas a display is delayed somewhat. Also,
with a viewfinder one has much higher resolution than a display
(nice if one needs to focus manually). Also, if it is bright,
then one can't see much even in a good display.

Why digital rather than film? The resolution argument for film
is no longer valid, for almost everyone. 5 reasons: shoot like a
pro (take lots of pictures and keep those you want---with film you
have to change film or have several cameras), change sensitivity
("ISO") on the fly (even automatically) (with film you have to change
film or have several cameras), no worries with negatives, you have
the originals in high resolution (you can scan film, but convenient
scanning is low resolution and high resolution is a pain) and finally
it is easy to take a quick picture and upload it somewhere (say, for
selling something on Ebay).

There is a wide range of high-quality lenses and other stuff available
for Pentax digital SLRs.

Canon are more resilient than Nikon

Kevin Marks — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:17:15 -0700

My friend works for a big company that makes SD cards, and he reports that in their destructive testing labs (taking photos over and over again to judge lifetime of the cards in real operation), the Canon cameras outlast the Nikon ones significantly. This is borne out anecdotally by a friend who shoots horse shows Nikon DSLR breaking down after a few tens of thousands of photos.

Bad News

brad — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:31:08 -0700

There don’t seem to be many below f/2.8. Ricoh has an f/2.4 and there are some powershot models at f/2.6 but that’s about it.

This is probably due to them getting better at noise at high ISO, so they can get away with less light, but of course shallow DoF suffers.

Thanks for the tip about the

Anonymous — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:28:27 -0700

Thanks for the tip about the Canon G-series. I've been looking for a point & shoot with a fast lens, and I had figured they just didn't exist.

Unfortunately it appears Canon dropped the nice lens form the G9 and G7, and the G6 is discontinued.

Do you know of any other fast p&s models?

Nice Job

Beatrice M — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:23:59 -0700

this is gorgeous!

GE Community with Israel community data

Ilan Toren — Sun, 11 May 2008 10:03:28 -0700

We have made a kmz file for Google Earth that shows some 700 localities in Israel. It might be an idea for the posting of some of your data. Look at the example and let me know what you think: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1164471

Bracketing is useful

brad — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:35:24 -0700

While bracketing is useful, one of my goals here is to speed up what has become one of the major time components of photography — selecting shots. I’m not saying to delete the only picture of grandma, but to make it easier to pull out the best pictures of her. If the system says “none of those shots were any good” then the user can take the time to hand pick with the human eye.

quick review, or multiple shots?

tim bates — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:35:03 -0700

I liked the accelerometer idea. Feels like idiot proofing, but it's nice. But automation is so hard here.

For instance, the idea of photo management software scanning over the photos, and find ones that are blurry... Some of our best shots ever are wide-aperture images with no focal depth - most of the shot is out of focus, and that's the point.

Worse yet, the idea of suggesting shots to delete based on poor optical properties is not going to be loved if it suggests the one and only last shot of your .

I think most of these problems need an aesthetic mind, and the cameras are not up to that task.

Here's one idea:
1. Camera space is cheap - The camera could also take and store bracket shots, deleting them if it runs low on space for new shots. Brackets could include exposure and auto focus modes. If power consumption was low enough and light high enough, it could store maybe 20 images - compressing them as diffs.

Then in iPhoto or whatever, when you don't like a main shot, the software can show you a cloud of bracket shots, perhaps offering to stitch them or use them to rescue over and under exposed regions into one good shot. And if you do like the shot, you can explore pro options for post-hoc varying the aperture, exposure etc.

Marketing could say “Take those ‘pro’ manual shots with the new GE auto!”

So is the greece one. This

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-Jake
dual action cleanse

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Anonymous — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:13:58 -0800

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You've summed it up

brad — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:05:43 -0800

Raw is of course the most complete saving of data, but a pain to work with, and provides minimal benefit for 98% of your shots. Where it can provide benefit include shots where you might want to change the colour balance, or night shots and shots where you wish to alter exposure or bring out more shadow etc.

Many photographers don't want to give that up and shoot raw. But the disk space/flash cost is quite high -- raw + large superfine jpeg means 4-5 times the disk space.

Now disk space is cheap and getting cheaper, so more often it's about the flash card space. But those are also getting cheaper. So most folks will probably go your way in time.

A slight saving is to shoot raw + a smaller jpeg, but it is only a slight saving. The idea being that once you have identified your "keeper" images you then go back to the raw files to work from them. It would be nice if tools made that easier to do -- catalog, tag and play around with small jpegs, then do a batch command to pull out the raws of those same images.

Jpeg compression artifacts are not a big issue on superfine jpegs. It's the loss of bit depth and a bit of colour info that are key.

saving raw data

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:29:22 -0800

Not really related to your article, but just a general
question. Having finally purchased a digital camera,
I am thinking about what data to save. The camera
can save JPEG and raw data simultaneously. I'm thinking
of saving high-quality JPEGs and raw data for all shots.
The JPEGs will probably be good enough for printing
things out, even enlargements, but if I really want
to go back and reprocess the raw data, I could.

Basically, with just JPEGs, what you see is all you've
got. With just raw, all the images have to be processed
before getting a useful, practical format. With both,
I have the best of both worlds, at the expense of saving
the raw data (about 20 MB a shot). I can still get more
than a hundred combination shots on a memory card, though,
and don't take enough pictures that disk space will be
a problem. (I take about 100-200 per year, or at least
have in the past. I'll probably take a lot more with the
digital camera, but take several shots where I took one
before then keep the best one and delete the others from
the memory card.)

What do most people do?