So which camera did I choose, the Pentax K100D or the Canon PowerShot G9?
Neither.
For the last two weeks I’ve been intensely researching my next camera purchase. I’ve analyzed how I use my camera. I’ve compared and contrasted a few cameras that interest me the most. I’ve visited several camera stores to get my hands on some digital SLRs (and their point and shoot competition). I’ve also read countless camera reviews, scoured the camera manufacturers’ websites, and re-educated myself on basic photographic concepts.
In the end I realized there were essentially two things I wanted that my current camera doesn’t have:
Part of the reason I’d actively thought about this for so long was the question of weight. To buy a DSLR means to carry more than a pound of metal and plastic in you hands, or around your neck. When I thought about my photographic style (and the places I like to take pictures), I worried that the weight and heft of the SLR would spoil my mojo. And yet the SLR is such the pinnacle of professional photography. I was having trouble reconciling these perspectives.
Until late last night. I was looking at the sample photos people upload to Amazon for various cameras, and realized no matter what the camera, some people take brilliant, interesting, beautiful photos, and some people take crap. Actually everyone takes crap, myself included, I just wouldn’t upload it to Amazon.
What’s funny is that the quality to crap ratio changes, depending on whether the camera is a point and shoot, or an SLR. I’m not sure how much that’s due to the camera. It would seem that the type of person willing to invest the time and energy to learn how to use an SLR is probably a higher caliber photographer to begin with (read: has a more developed “eye”). Thus their photos are probably going to be more interesting.
But cameras are essentially tools. Different cameras have different strengths and weaknesses. I’m reminded of a project where several professional photographers were asked to shoot a project with a sub-megapixel camera phone. The results were compelling, as is the moral of the story: an artist will create art with a $5 dollar brush or a $5000 brush.
So I decided to get camera that has full manual controls, image stabilization, and only weighs about 50g more than my svelte SD400. Here’s the irony: it’s one of Canon’s entry-level, homely, A-series point and shoots, the A570 IS. Here’s the best part: it only costs $164.
In all my blathering about getting a “fancy” new camera, two years and 12,000 shots later I finally decided to read the manual for the pretty decent camera I do have. And I actually learned a thing or two.
For one, it turns out I can customize the self-timer delay and number of shots to create something approaching stop-motion animation—or at least allow for multiple attempts at those family group shots during the holidays—without all that running back and forth.
But the neatest feature hidden deep within the camera is the ability to set the shutter speed to a value between 1 and 15 seconds. Wish I’d known about this looking up at that night sky in Bryce. Here’s a 6 second test shot I took out my window this evening.
I also discovered that there’s a hidden stitch assist mode, neat for helping line up multiple shots, but still requiring panoramic software to do the rest of the blending.
Lately I’ve been pretty enamored with the idea of getting a new camera. What am I saying, “lately”? I’ve wanted a Digital SLR about as long as I can remember.
As I was telling Stephanie over IM and Mark last night, camera shopping is less about which camera to buy, and more about who I am and who I want to be. Hence my last post.
I really value portability and unobtrusiveness. And convenience. Though the more I get into photo taking, the more I value greater configurability. When I think about the person I want to be, I want to play with settings like aperture and shutter speed. I want to (re)learn more about the technical art of photography. I’m open to change. I’d like a better lens. I like the road less traveled.
So it’s not the eternal question of whether I should get a Canon or a Nikon, but what type of camera matches who I want to be next. How do I want to change? What camera out there is the least like the rest of the pack?
It turns out there’s one really unusual camera that comes pretty close to fitting the bill. It’s not an SLR, it’s just another “crappy” point and shoot. It has a fixed focal-length, wide-angle lens (that means it doesn’t zoom) which is completely unheard of outside the SLR lens market. It has manual controls like those found on an SLR. And it’s only about 25g heavier than my Canon SD400. You’ve probably never heard of it, at least I never had, until I went searching to see if a fixed-focal length P&S even existed. It turns out yes, only one does, the Ricoh GR-Digital—and then I remembered reading about it recently on Tim Bray’s blog of all places. Actually he was more interested in the GX100, a recent upgrade of the GR-Digital with a zoom lens.
Here’s the rub. The GR-Digital was announced in 2005 and has been on sale since 2006. It’s over 2 years old. It doesn’t have image stabilization. And most reviewers have poo-pooed the level of noise and lack of sharpness in the photos it takes. I have to agree. If it was cheaper, I could call it an experiment, but at $650, it costs about as much as an entry-level DSLR body. And given its age, I have to believe Ricoh would be priming for a GR-D2 sometime soon. Right?
The other camera I’ve been thinking seriously about is the Pentax K10D. Pentax has some nice prime lenses for their DSLRs (unlike Canon, Nikon, or Olympus) which are even more irresistible due to their “pancake” profiles. I could very easily pick up the DA 21mm (though I wish it had an maximum aperture in the 2-range) and be happy as a clam. Outside of the expense (which is actually very reasonable given that Pentax’s competition charges twice as much), I just can’t get over the fact that the combined weight of this kit would be two pounds! Five times my current fits-in-the-palm-of-my-hand bundle of joy. This is where I bump up against the vision of myself as I want to become. I have a hard time knowing whether it would get the same kind of rambunctious use as my pocket cam. Or whether it would be a $1100 boondoggle.
Well anyways, here’s a chart:
Camera
MP
Weight
Cost
Pros and Cons
Canon SD450
5
175g
$0
This is my current camera, for reference
Canon SD870 IS
8
185g
$332
Pros: Image stabilization, wider angle lens, 3″ LCD, no viewfinder, very small/light
Cons: Wide angle blurry at corners (judging by SD800 IS), functionality similar to SD400, limited manual controls
When out hiking, I carry my camera (a 5MP Canon SD400) like this:
When not in a photogenic environment (or mood), the camera slips into my pocket or into a small neoprene sleeve in my cargo shorts.
Trudging through the Virgin River was no different (except I kept the camera in my hand—above the river—the whole time). Not only does being able to hold the camera in the palm of my hand keep it available at a moment’s notice, it also affords some protection from the elements (e.g. a light sprinkling rain at Arches or river splashes at Zion). Presumably on account of its size, more than anything else, I’ve taken well over 10,000 shots in the 2 and half years since I purchased this camera.
99% of the time, I use the LCD to frame my shots. Not only does it provide a more accurate representation of the final photo, but it’s easier to see than squinting through the view finder. It also feels more natural, especially in social settings. I’m not “the photographer” who constantly has a camera in front of his face. I’m an active participant who happens to be taking the occasional photo. I emphasize this because I’ve read things like the following quote that strike me as almost anachronistic:
I probably wouldn’t have bothered to quote that if it weren’t for that aghast exclamation point at the end. Of course the review was written in 2005, and times change. It does remind me of Clay Shirky’s post, The Future Belongs to Those Who Take The Present For Granted where he says:
I had this thought while talking to Robert Cook of Metaweb, who are making Freebase. Freebase needs structured metadata, lots of structured metadata, and one of the places they are getting it is from Wikipedia, by spidering the bio boxes (among other things) for things like birthplace and age of people they list in the database. While Andrew Keen is trying to get a conversation going on whether Wikipedia is a good idea, Metaweb takes it for granted as a stable part of the environment, which lets them see past this hurdle to the next one.
This really resonates with me. Again and again.
I turn my camera off between shots, to preserve battery power and to further protect the lens surface. That said, my camera appears to have some sort of motion activated gyroscope that turns off the LCD when not in use, and knows to turn it back on when I flick it back up to my eye.
When I shoot, 99% of the time I use the camera’s “manual” mode. The exposure setting is usually stopped down 2/3 because I find that it tends to overexpose shots, especially in broad daylight. I adjust it down further in ultra-bright situations. It’s easier to fix an underexposed picture than an overexposed one. I also set up the white balance in advance. Auto-white balance works ok some of the time, but I often use the sunny and cloudy settings depending on conditions outdoors and the Tungsten setting for indoors shots in low light. I’ll very occasionally set the ISO to 200 or 400 in low light situations.
I almost never use the flash, except to experiment with shadowy outdoor settings, or to take non-artistic settings indoors (e.g. a group photo at some party or event).
I use the macro focus setting occasionally because I like taking close-up pictures of flowers and food. But the results (and depth of field) are sometimes unpredictable, so I usually take 2-3 shots at slightly different angles and distances to ensure at least one comes out ok. If there was one setting I wish my camera had, it would be to manually adjust the aperture to predictably reduce the depth of field (like those Dooce and 101 Cookbooks macro shots). When that effect happens in my photos, usually I feel like I got lucky.
I never touch the zoom 99% of the time. When I do use the zoom, I usually zoom in all the way, and the result is rarely a photograph (compositionally) that I want to show off. To me, using the zoom feels like taking pictures through a microscope. I’m much more of an immersive wide-angle landscape photographer than a zoomed-in animals in nature photographer. Zooming in on things makes me feels like I’m cropping out life.
My camera has the ability to record very decent video and ok sound, a feature I barely use (but wish I did) because I don’t have a good platform for editing video.
The final product of 99% of the photos I take are resized and processed down to a 380 pixel wide image that goes up on my blog. Excepting situations where I stitch together multiple photos into a panorama, that means I’m only displaying either 108,300 landscape or 192,280 portrait pixels from the original 5 megapixel image. Granted I’ll frequently crop the original 5MP shot before resizing it to improve the composition, but the sharpness of the original 5MP image is something that has little to no bearing on how I’ll actually use the image. I’m rarely making prints (once a year, if even) and I’ve never made a print larger than 8×10.
…or how to “Justinify” your photos …or how I learned Lisp on a Saturday night
Yesterday I was working on a project where I needed to resize and “retouch” over a hundred photos for the web.
I tried playing with ImageMagick’s command line mogrify tool, but I wasn’t too pleased with the results—that and there’s something inherently tedious about making visual transformations from the command line. I performed the same operations in GIMP to compare, and it looked much better.
So I was confronting the idea that I’d have to manually edit all 100+ photos when I finally decided to buckle down and learn how to script GIMP.
GIMP uses Scheme (of all things) as its scripting language; Scheme being one of the two popular modern dialects of Lisp; Lisp being the holy grail of high-level programming languages (and the second oldest, after Fortran). So little did I realize, scripting GIMP was going to force me to learn Lisp…
I have to admit I’ve thought for a long time it’d be great to have a tool that brought together all of the settings I usually tweak when I’m editing a photo (color balance for brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpening) because in GIMP they’re located deep in three different submenus. But doing one photo at a time was never motivation enough to dig under the hood. The thought of retouching 100+ photos, however, was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.
I learn best by looking at very simple but functional examples, so I started scouring the web to see what other people were doing, eventually landing on Dov Grobgeld’s Basic Scheme tutorial at gimp.org. It goes from how to add numbers in Scheme to creating your first extension in less time than it’s probably taken you to read this far. David M. MacMillan’s Some GIMP Scripts-Fu was also a great resource.
I have to say the best thing about GIMP’s extensions is that they enable the creation of rudimentary user interfaces for inputting configurable parameters. So I wasn’t limited to just my standard defaults for contrast and saturation—I could actually “build” an interface with tweakable values. Hot!
Around 3am last night, I finally put all the pieces together. Here’s what the Web Photo Editor looks like:
