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02/19/10 |
            
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Photo Equipment
I started taking pictures with a Kodak Instamatic camera. This only served as a proof-of-concept Early photos were shot on film with an older Nikon body and a 3 Nikon lenses: a 28mm, the standard 50 mm, and a 75mm - 150mm zoom. I would mostly use print film but Kodachrome is still the best. For scans of paper prints from that equipment see the Europe 1998 gallery, for scans of transparency film I will post something later since despite having a transparency tray in the scanner, the results are not yet good or consistent enough for posting. Since then, and for convenience, I have used a number of point-and-shoot cameras with print film and varied results. One that stands out (in a good way) was a borrowed Pentax which model I don't recall. I used it to take photos during the trip to Southern France in 2000. In 2003 I borrowed a Nikon F301 body and used my Nikon lenses with it. I shot a good bit of Fuji Professional print film with nice results. An example of this is the Antarctica 2003 gallery. I had a rather bittersweet experience using a Canon 20D with self-stabilising lenses during my job in Antarctica in 2004-2005. This camera was selected over the Nikon D70 by virtue of the fact that its timer / remote shutter release can be set to take photos at whatever time intervals the user chooses. Not so with the Nikon. Anyhow, the first problem that I ran into was with one of the lenses. The camera was mounted in the tail of the survey aeroplane pointing down through a Lexan window, and the focus ring (focus set to manual) had been duct-taped to infinity. Alas, the pictures looked fuzzy. After much messing with it I finally discovered that for sharp pictures of objects far in the distance, one had to set the focus slightly before infinity. The difference in the results was huge. Sometime later, I started getting the dreaded "Err99" code, which boiled down to be a firmware issue. This should have been an easy fix, but I happened to be living in a tent on a glacier 600 miles from the South Pole at the time, and internet access was spotty at best. Then, one day, the shutter froze shut (the irony is not lost here...) and we had no choice but to send the camera to New Zealand for repair, just to find that the worldwide warranty on this top-shelf thing is not really worldwide after all. Canon of Auckland would not repair the camera under warranty so it had to go to Los Angeles. Weeks later it came back working. So, yeah, we beat the crap out of this thing, making it take a picture every 5 seconds, forcing it to operate in an area of the (vibrating) plane that usually was at minus 10 degrees F, but so what? It shouldn't have croaked so easily. There is no question that this camera can take excellent pictures, but these issues left a bad taste and make me wonder whether the Nikon D70 may have been a more robust choice. For personal use either of the two cameras would be a fine choice. Of course, a new D2X would be nice, but then so would be a Ferrari 430. I have no samples of the pix taken with the 20D, as they were all work-related. There may be some in the UTIG website... Currently I use a Canon PowerShot A70 equipped with a 1GB card and a 52mm adapter for filters, extra lenses and such. It can sometimes take well defined pictures, but suffers from a known "soft focus" problem. I like the fact that it can be used in fully manual mode (including the focus), but even then the "soft focus" problem appears sometimes. I also like the fact that it can take short video clips (up to 3 minutes at a time). In all it is a good machine for snapshots but not for real photographs. For that one needs real optics which "pocket" cameras do not really provide. Photos and videos in the Antarctica 2004-2005 gallery were all taken with the little PowerShot. As of late 2007, said PowerShot A70 started becoming less and less
trusty, so after a while I had no choice but to replace it. And remember
the aggravating soft focus problem, so good riddance after all, but it
served me well. After quite a bit of research I finally decided in
favour of the Canon G9. Clearly in a different league, this
appears to be the closest you can get to a DSLR without the bulk (I did
consider Leica’s offerings but still opted for the G9). Of particular
interest are RAW image support, better video quality, bracketing, image
stabilisation, and an unexpected perk: time-lapse capability. Two
important deciding factors were the ability to go from sophisticated
program modes to full manual mode, and its superb display, which can
clearly be seen even in bright sunlight, and is of sufficient quality to
allow polariser fine-tuning. In a nutshell, a bit over $1K did the job. Was it worth it? Hell yeah! (crab, fish) This may not be Cousteau quality, but it’s pretty damn good for a little camera that ultimately fits in your pocket.
Note on filters: All of my SLR and digital pictures taken in bright (sunny) conditions were shot through polariser and skylight 1A filters. To scan the prints and slides used in several of the galleries I used a Microtek Scanmaker-4 flatbed scanner. The prints were ran at 300dpi and then re-sampled with Photoshop in jpg format with a quality setting of 9 (out of 12) and a size close to 800X600. This seems to provide a good compromise between file size (generally between 100 & 200 KB) and picture quality. The slides and negatives were done at 1200dpi and processed with Photoshop in a similar way to the prints. So far I am having very poor results with the negs and transparencies. Reflective material is scanning fine.
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Copyright (C) 2003 - 2006 by the author. This site was last updated 02/19/10
