What I Did for Winter Vacation Part IIb

[catsittingstill]

old camera--
2.0 MP (pix usually ~700 Kb)
no zoom (digital only)
Wake up time ~10 sec
Time between pix ~10 sec
Movies? What?
Waterproof? Don't be silly!
shockproof? Hah!



new camera—
7.1 MP (pix so far about 1.5 Mb)
3x optical zoom (plus digital zoom)
Wake up time ~1.5 sec
Time between pix ~3.5 sec, except in burst mode, ~0.5 sec
Takes movies at 15 fps
Waterproof to 10 feet
Shockproof to 5 feet.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, have fun with it!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Oh, I will. I discovered last night while perusing the manual that this lowly little PNS has burst mode shooting! It will shoot about 2 pictures a second for about 7 pictures worth. The pictures are smaller (fewer pixels) than normal, but they're still bigger than the pictures from my old camera. I went for a walk today and shot dogs (we're friends with about 2/3 of the dogs along our walk; it's remarkable how easy it is to worm one's way into a dog's affections with doggy treats.) I got a lot of blurring, and I'm still working out why. I think it may be that 1) in fast burst mode the camera focuses once and goes for it instead of refocusing for every picture, which is a problem if the subject is moving toward or away from the camera and 2) it was 5:00 pm on Dec 31 so long exposure times and short depth of field were the rule.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

It might be worth setting the camera's sensitivity to ASA 800 or 1600, to allow a faster shutter speed; I don't think the camera will do that automatically. If it has a shutter-preferred mode, pegging the shutter speed to 1/125th of a second might help.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I see, working to get a faster shutter speed will help if the dog is moving during the exposure (which is sometimes the problem; I've got some very appealing photos of earnest gazes and blurred (wagging) tails, which I kind of like). But in some cases I think the problem is that I focussed on the dog when it was ten feet away and snapped pictures as it danced in and out: 10 feet, 8 feet, 6 feet, 7 feet, and so on. For that greater depth of field would be the thing to try for, which would involve smaller apertures and longer exposures. Setting the sensitivity higher would allow either or even both, faster shutter speeds and smaller apertures, of course. Better light wouldn't hurt either :-)

I can specify sensitivity in anything other than full-auto mode: it goes to 1600. The camera will bump sensitivity up automatically if I do things like suppress the flash (which I usually do because I 1) think flashes are obnoxious and 2) don't like the flat look of the resulting pictures).

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think if you want 800 or 1600 sensitivity, you have to set it, because the noise (grain-equivalent) goes up visibly at those settings. Yeah, on-camera flashes are a pain, but fill flash is often worthwhile; the dynamic range of most smaller digicams is comparable to that of slide film and the fill helps a lot.

Now me, I have a stack of images I want to print and file...

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Actually, the camera will bump it up on its own, depending on what I'm asking it to do. There's a menu of options (landscape, portrait, night shot, etc), and one of the options is described as "for shooting sensitive subjects in low light" which translates roughly as "low-light portrait; don't use the flash." I took one picture on this setting, using the zoom, in ordinary room light, where the camera bumped the ASA all the way to 1600 (looking at the picture in iPhoto after the fact). So I know it *can* do it on its own.

But I think my canoe trip shots would have been better had I bumped it manually. A lot of those shots were blurred and would probably have been improved by greater depth of field. I think my problem was that I was moving and the subjects were moving and I had a hard time getting a focus lock on them. I think it's a focus-on-the-wrong-thing issue rather than a subject-moves-while-shutter-open issue because the shutter times were 1/100th and 1/250th of a second, which wouldn't allow a lot of motion. If I'd manually increased the ASA, I might have been able to persuade the aperture to decrease.

Re: printing files--It's amazing to me how many pictures can fit on a little XD chip. The only thing is they're so small they might be hard to keep track of.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm looking at the Barber's haircut paradox. The one where you move into a new town, and there are two barbers, and you have to pick one. So you chose the one with the worse haircut. So the fact that your old camera looks better in the picture is a good sign.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) I'm pretty happy with this new one. But a camera posed on a grimy stool on a cloudy day is hardly going to be a glamour shot, either way.

[jenrose]

What brand?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Silly me! The old one is a Kodak EasyShare CX4200, the new one is an Olympus Stylus 720 SW (where I think the SW stands for shockproof/waterproof).

[braider.livejournal.com]

Happy new year!

We will be down Thursday night. Need your address. Look forward to seeing you soon!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I e-mailed you; let me know if you didn't get it. cat @t hwaet d.t org