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December 17, 2008

[REVIEW—PANASONIC LUMIX DMC-LX3 compact camera]

Price: $829 camera $359 viewfinder

Seriously good

The low-down: This is a 10 megapixel camera with a 24–60mm (film equivalent) fast (f2 to f2.8) zoom lens. It has effective optical stabilisation. Construction quality is outstanding, with most important controls accessible on the camera body. Two ring selectors around the lens set aspect ratios – 3:4, 2:3 and 16:9 – and focus mode – auto, macro and manual. The 75mm LCD is clear and sharp but not totally truthful to the tone and colour of the captured picture. Capture in RAW is provided and conversion software is supplied, and the latest version of Adobe Camera RAW handles these images. We used the optional optical viewfinder, which has only one angle of view – 24mm and is very expensive.

Like: Image quality at low ISO speeds is exceptionally fine. At ISO400 a little noise is apparent, and we found that shooting RAW and applying a small amount of noise reduction in Adobe Camera RAW removed the grain. Response times are very fast. The Leica branded lens, with its modest zoom range, is superbly sharp with insignificant distortion at 24mm.

Dislike: The lack of an integrated optical viewfinder is a disappointment. We would have settled for a smaller LCD and an in-body OVF coupled to the lens zoom.

Verdict: Only 10 megapixels? The Nikon P6000 has 13.5. Only a 2.5X zoom? You must be joking! That may be the reaction of any ill-informed customers looking for a top level compact, but not from photographers who understand that big numbers do not equal top quality. Panasonic deliberately constrained the pixel density on the LX3 to improve picture quality. They chose a limited zoom range in order to increase maximum aperture and resolution. The company has dared to do what serious photographers have been requesting, and they have ignored marketing focus groups. Bravo!

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[THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY]

 

Imitation, it is said, is the sincerest form of flattery. But what about that chap who loved the electric razor so much that he bought the company? And what about the gadget reviewer who can’t bear to send back the thingy when he has finished testing? That’s an occupational hazard in this job.

When we look at the things we have added to the bag in the past twelve months we can make a little inventory of the doodads that really impressed us.

2008 was the year when we made the trusty Nikon D80 move over and make way for the Nikon D300. From the moment we first held this wonderful camera in our hands at a pre-release product presentation we knew we wouldn’t rest easy until we had one. It just feels right. Every control falls under the fingers where it should be. Images are brilliant and noise free up to astonishing ISO speeds. The camera is so responsive and the viewfinder so fine that it feels like an extension of the eye – just see the picture and it’s taken!

The Nikon D300 has become our benchmark against which other cameras are judged. We have handled fine DSLRs from Olympus, Pentax, Canon and others, but as good as they are – and they are generally very good indeed – we have not been seduced away from the Nikon.

Our joy was complete when, around the middle of the year, the Sigma EX HSM 10-20mm zoom came to live with us. This well made beauty puts to rest any lingering doubts you might have about the quality of third party lenses. Its auto focus is lightning quick and its sharpness and contrast are superb. A lens like this changes the way you see the world through the viewfinder, forcing you to walk up close to the subject on the one hand or opening up spaces on the other.

Our old cable release from the Nikon D80 no longer fitted the D300 so we went looking for an alternative and found the very reasonably priced Phottix wireless release. This little two-part gadget consists of a transmitter for the hand and a receiver that plugs into the D300. We haven’t tested the limits of its range, but so far we haven’t been disappointed.

When you start accumulating all this gear you need some way of carrying it around, so we indulged in a LowePro Mini Trekker camera back pack. We chose this model from the big range of LowePro bags because it had what we wanted – room for two DSLRs, plus lenses and things like filters, remote releases and so on. It has more straps and strings and pockets and dividers than you can poke a stick at and it is far from clear what many of them are supposed to do. But as a bag that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside (or at least that’s the way it seems) it suits us down to the ground.

Mind you, we didn’t keep everything we lusted after. One can’t be totally indifferent to credit card limits and the disastrous trade deficit.

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December 11, 2008

[REVIEW–FUJIFILM FINEPIX F60fd]

Price: $400

Strictly point and shoot

The low-down: This is a 12 megapixel camera with a 35–105mm (film equivalent) zoom lens. Image stabilisation is by CCD shift and, in dual mode, ISO increase. There is face recognition and in-camera red eye removal. There are limited manual controls, but in use we found that the N setting on the mode dial (“retains natural ambience without flash”) gave consistently good results. The 7.5cm LCD screen is acceptable as a viewfinder but for reviewing images it is a little misleading in colour and contrast. There is a 25MB internal memory, supplemented by either SD or xD cards. The battery is proprietary rechargeable and a 230 shot capacity is claimed. The printed Basic Manual is just that – basic. The camera has the usual credit card face area and is 23mm thick.

Like: Image quality is generally good with some tendency to underexpose in dim light. Skin tones are fine and faithful. This is one of the better cameras for auto-white balance. We found that using the N setting we got good results under a mix of available window light and florescent. Noise and noise reduction artefacts are visible at full enlargement, but generally handled well and won’t show up in standard prints. Image sharpness is good with little loss of detail from noise reduction.

Dislike: The lack of an optical viewfinder is always annoying. Sony and Canon can fit OVFs at this price point – why doesn’t every manufacturer?

Verdict: We like the Fuji look, particularly for skin tones. It took some trial and error before we settled on the N setting and decided it was best to let the camera make the decisions, even if it does mean occasionally hitting ISO levels too high for clean pictures. As a simple point and shoot we rate the F60fd as commendable.

 

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[PHOTOSHOP – Noun & Verb]

Here’s a guess, based on very limited personal observation – more people use photoshop as a verb than use Photoshop as a noun.

Everyone seems to be alert to the fact that photographs now not only lie, but that they have lost all value as a reliable record of a moment in time. Not only can pesky letter boxes and pimples be removed from a photo at a single key stroke, but cousin Esmerelda can lose several kilos of lard without going on a diet. We call it photoshopping.

Photoshop CS3 was such a powerful, mature application that exceeded the dreams of most image editors, designers, illustrators and manipulators that you pity the development team that had to dream up new features for a successor. Well, they’ve done it. Photoshop CS4 has arrived. The bit question is, will CS3 users think that an upgrade is worth the price ($300) and will first-time Photoshop buyers be prepared to lay out the $1148 for the full, standard version?

CS4 has one astonishing trick that will take photographs even further away from the ideal of incontrovertible evidence of the moment. It is called Content Aware Scaling and dpexpert has already used it in an editing job and wonders how he lived without it.

Let’s take a mundane example of CAS use. You have a photo of your beloved ankle-biter playing in the shallows at the beach. The sky is really nice, but you would like more of it to fill the format of your Christmas card. Easy! Copy the original image and paste it onto a blank New File. Choose Content Aware Scale from the Edit menu, grab the resize handles and drag the image to fit the new space. Lo and behold – more sky and sea but the little tacker remains perfectly proportioned where he was in the original. It must be seen to be believed. How do they do this? Is it worth $300?

CS4 has a new interface that includes tabs for open files. We like this very much because it makes it so easy to locate a particular file when we have a stack of them open all at once.

Depth of Field blending is another gee whiz trick that will be more of interest to product photographers than it is to dabblers. Imagine you have a line of objects sloping away from the camera and you want everything, from front to back, to be in sharp focus. Simple. Take a set of photographs, using manual focus, in which every part of the picture is sharp, at least in one frame. Then, under Edit, choose Auto-Align and Auto-Blend and Photoshop merges the images, detecting and keeping the sharp bits and throwing the rest away.

Other new features in CS4 make editing a little quicker and more efficient, but looked at dispassionately it is hard to see the value in the upgrade. And for most of us mere mortals Photoshop Elements 7 will do everything we want.

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December 03, 2008

[REVIEW—NIKON COOLPIX P6000]

Price: $750

Superior compact

The low-down: This is a 13.5 megapixel camera with a 28–112mm (film equivalent) zoom lens, which is image stabilised. There is a 75mm LCD screen and optical viewfinder. Construction is rugged and appearance is austere. Accessible functions are similar to an SLR -- this is not intended as a point and shoot. The external flash shoe takes Nikon Speedlights – we tried the Nikon SB600 and it works well. GPS location recording is built in. There is a LAN socket for network connection allowing transfer direct from camera to internet. Images can be recorded in RAW and RAW to JPG conversion can be done in-camera. Why?

Like: Image quality up to ISO200 is very good, with excellent exposure, resolution and white balance, Colour fidelity is exceptional. However the best results do depend on shooting in RAW and converting the images with an application such as Adobe RAW converter. Controls and menus are like those on Nikon’s SLRs, which means they are clear and intuitive. Auto focus is fast and accurate, even in macro mode.

Dislike: There is some noise visible at ISO400, and in JPG mode it tends to clog into ugly black patches in open shadow. We consider ISO speeds above 400 just about unusable and the vaunted 6400 is a laugh.

Verdict: We like the design and construction of the camera, and we found that up to ISO200 and shooting RAW we got excellent results. At ISO400 the pictures are acceptable for standard size prints. We couldn’t get the GPS to work but we couldn’t imagine when we would need it. We suspect that the LAN socket is Nikon’s admission that they couldn’t get the wireless connectivity of their compacts to work properly. But all in all, a superior compact and good value.

 

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[TEACHING GRANNY TO SUCK DIGITAL EGGS – Part 2]

Last week we cogitated on the concept of the f stop in photography, and observed the relationship between aperture diameter and depth of field. All other things being equal, the smaller the aperture the greater the front-to-back distance that will be in sharp focus.

There are other variables that appear to affect depth of field, such as distance from the subject and the angle of view of the lens, but for the moment we will stick with the relationship of aperture to DoF.

The diaphragm and the shutter work together to control the amount of light entering the camera and this means that the smaller the aperture the slower the shutter speed must be to let in adequate light.

This survey of the basics of photography was inspired by a reader who has had some disappointment taking close up photos of flowers. He finds that with his compact camera he gets better results using the fully auto point-and-shoot setting than by setting the camera to A and taking control of the process.

“The second issue for me at the moment is my difficulty in taking satisfactorily sharp pictures on my camera in aperture priority mode. The other day I took about fifty pictures around my garden of plants and flowers that I had previously photographed in auto mode, generally in super macro. It was a lightly overcast day and I adjusted the aperture to ensure exposure times no slower than 1/30 second. Camera was hand held, as it had been when I took photos in auto. These pictures were distinguished by the fact that nearly every one was not sharp…”

Our technique for photographing small objects, such as flowers or insects, is based on a set of rules.

First, we use a tripod. Even with image stabilisation we can’t hold a camera still at exposures longer than 1/60 second.

Second, we bracket shots – at least three different exposures and even up to five or seven. This gives a choice when we get back to the computer. Most, but not all, cameras will bracket three exposures. Some DSLRs allow for brackets of five, seven or nine.

Third, we set the camera to Aperture priority and select f22. And as we have also selected the lowest ISO speed for the best quality this means long exposures. We use a remote release or the timer delay to fire the shutter.

Fourth, we use manual, not auto, focus, and we focus on a point just a little forward of the half-way point in the subject we want in sharp focus from front to back. Some compact cameras allow manual focus. Cameras set to autofocus will focus on any distinct point nearest the camera, not what is wanted at all.

Fifth, on bright sunny days we use a polarising filter to cut the reflections from leaves and petals. This appears to increase the colour saturation.

Sixth, we always shoot RAW to allow maximum post-camera adjustments.

Simple, really.

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