TOTKat: (hand coded) online journal of a girl geek since April 1999.
WARNING: contains personal opinions. A sense of perspective is required when reading.

Photography

|   [Albums]   |   [Flickr]   |

I just bought a Canon 400D with a 17-85mm f4/5.6 IS USD lens. My first few tests are here. I've also started to use my account.

Opera House (Sydney)

Søren Larsen

Amedee Islet (New Caledonia)

I've been to a few countries, had some good times and taken a few pictures. I thought I'd share my images of good places to be in the world. There are pictures from UK, USA, Portugal, Iceland, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Australia. Most of the early pictures are of architecture, but I've recently broadened my attempts to nature, scenery and people. Some of the photos in the galleries are perfect as desktops or wallpaper for your PC - hint; choose the landscape shaped ones rather than the portrait as landscape is the same ratio as the standard screen resolutions.

Bodiam Castle (Kent)

Worthing Beach

Bodiam Castle (Kent)

I've started to use a Canon IXUS II. It is very small, very light and I intend to use it with a marine pack, which includes a sealed case that will allow me to use the camera up to 40m under water. The bulk of the results from this camera will show up in early November.

I have been using a Minolta DiMAGE 7i, having been fed up with the cost of film development and getting old developed film into digital format. When I was just starting out in digital photography, there were a few test images to select from. There's a directory of those raw images here.

Golden Gate Bridge (San Fransisco)

San Fransisco

The DiMAGE 7i is a very good looking digital SLR-a-like. The one drawback to the physical design is that it feels and looks a bit bottom-heavy, as that is where the battery chamber is. The hand grip is nicely positioned and chunky enough to feel right for even my not-so-small hands. The grip on the zoom and focussing ring is nicely rubbery, as is the pad on the eyepiece - very pleasant when it is cold! The control buttons all feel satisfyingly positive and the most commonly used ones are well positioned. Having compared the 7i with a couple of Sonys (the F707 and the F717) in a shop, I really didn't get on with the "floppy" feel to the Sony - you actually hold the Sonys by the lense, rather than the body. The Sony interface didn't feel as intuitive to me, either.

Lisbon

Expo 98 (Lisbon)

Lisbon

Torre de Belem (Lisbon)

This is the first "nice" digital camera I have owned and having moved from an APS SLR to this, it took some getting used to using. The tricky part is the viewfinders. Through the eyepiece, the view is tiny. You might well say, of course it is, it is an eyepiece, but as LCDs go it is very very small. Because of this, the picture is nowhere near good enough quality for you to tell whether the object in the frame that you want to be in focus is in focus or not. There is aliasing (the lines look blocky, rather then smooth) along diagonals, which looks terrible through the eyepiece, but fine once the shot is captured. The rear LCD is better because it is larger, but this carries its own penalties in that it really drains the battery very quickly. Although it gives you more of a fighting chance to see how the picture is likely to look, I keep it turned off when shooting pictures, purely to prolong the battery life. It seems to at least halve the life if you use the LCD as a viewfinder. With the capacity for 240 pictures at 1280x1024 on the 256MB compact flash card I bought to go with this camera, I figure I can afford to have a few duff shots in there due to using the eyepiece rather than the rear LCD.

Flat Iron (New York)

Twin Towers (New York)

California Street (San Fransisco)

Chrysler Building (New York)

Nob Hill (San Fransisco)

The flash does not automatically pop up, as I was used to with my old SLR. You need to judge whether the exposure time vs steadiness of the camera, distance of the subject and brightness of the subject would require the flash and manually open it if you think it is necessary. Seeing as I'm not brilliant at judging that yet (my many, recent, fuzzy photos inside dark buildings will attest to this), it would have been nice were it possible to make the flash kick-in automatically. Having said that, I may just have missed an option in the tome of a manual that comes with the camera. There is also a shoe for adding a more powerful flash if you feel the need.

and Hallgrimskirka (Reykjavik)

Lava

Strokkur

Sintra

Unless you are going to be blowing up the photos to poster size, or cropping a tiny section to blow up, you can probably get away with taking all of your photos in 1280x1024 and find that that is larger than you need anyway. At least at that size, you can use the automatic "improvement" tools in the provided software and give the software a lot of data to play with. I've found that using the three tools "Brightness, Contrast and Color Balance", "Hue, Saturation and Brightness" and "Tone Curves and Histogram" on the automatic setting, really perks up flat looking colours, contrast, under and over exposure.

The great thing about this type of camera is the option to use it in fully automatic, fully manual or any graduation between those two modes. Having 7x optical zoom and 2x digital makes for better quality zoom than with some other cameras in this genre.

Portrait

Woodland (Suffolk)

The Wheel (London)

Lisbon

Overall, I like it. It does take a while to settle into some of the features, but this is outweighed by the benefits of having a good zoom, lots of control over the photo, nice design and good software. It isn't a Canon 1D, but then at 2/5 of the cost (and that's without any lenses for the 1D), I don't expect it to be. The nearest rival by performance and price is the Nikon Coolpix 5700, but that just topped out of my price range and the 28-200mm equivalent on the Minolta 7i was more what I wanted for shots of architecture than the 35-280mm of the Nikon.

I used to a Canon EOS IX (APS) SLR camera with a Sigma 28-80mm lense (not the smart new silver one that would really go with my camera quite nicely, 'cause it didn't exist when I bought mine). I got the body second hand from the London Camera Exchange on the Strand, in pretty much mint condition, so that was nice. On a trip to San Fransisco, I bought a Sigma 100mm-300mm zoom lense and a polarising filter.

Lightning (Long Island)

Temple of Diana (Evora)

Capitol (Washington)

Prior to the Canon, I used a Minolta Vectis 25 (APS), which was reliable and small (at the time it was bought for me as a present, it was one of the smallest APS cameras with a zoom.) I think the only gripe I had with it, for what it was, was the fact that the zoom motor was quite slow.