About taking pictures
Dru is looking to buy a camera. He’s been debating between an SLR and a “bridge” camera.
Coincidentally, The gaming site, FiringSquad, did a head-to-head comparison between the 20D dSLR and the Lumix DMC-FZ30 bridge camera. I thought we were over this “Leica sparkle” crap, but other than that, it was a very interesting article.
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A rant based on Flickr threads here and here.
I think my feeling about which dSLR camera someone should purchase is, to apply Louis Armstrong: “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” The simple reality is that after a year and a half, the D70 is still too much camera for me. Maybe one day I’ll reach the point where I am limited by the D70 and not my lack of talent, but it hasn’t arrived. Both the Canon Digital Rebel (300D/350D) and the Nikon prosumer dSLRs (70D/50D/70Ds) have electronics even more sophisticated than Nikon F-series cameras up through the early 90’s. Some pretty amazing shots were taken by pros back then. Have they suddenly lost their value because their camera sucked?
No. That’s because at the end of the day, a camera body is just a light-tight box with a adjustable hole and a flap. Digital sensors may be different, but they are more limited by the state-of-the-art during the time it is built and simple physics than by anything else. What is going to be the most important thing is how it feels to the operator.
That’s why I can be a touch short with people who diss a camera choice with one breath and then take cover by calling anyone who disagrees with them as spewing “cult garbage.”
My second D70 FlipUp LCD cap broke.
Hoodman started by making clever hoods for LCD displays. The most ubiquitous use of a Hoodman is when you see NFL referees peering under them during an instant replay review. In a recent DVD produced by Nikon, I saw Life photographer Joe McNally peering under one for instant outdoor 17″-diagnol image reviews. After the initial, “Gee, I wish I had a six-pack of SB-800s controlled by a Nikon D2X tethered via USB 2.0 to my Powerbook,” I thought, “neat stuff.”
I first heard about Hoodman when they made cloth and velcro shades in the early days of pocket digital photography. LCDs were really the suck back then—they make the Canon 5D’s LCD look exceedingly bright by comparison. People like me were often caught holding our hands up against the screen to review shots. The Hoodman was a great idea, sometimes it even came with a magnifier to make the small LCDs review much bigger.
It was only natural that when the FlipUp cap came out, I bought one:
In November, DxO just announced they will be releasing DxO Optics Pro 3.5.
Maybe a bit of history is in order.
DxO started with DxO Analyzer package used by magazines and websites in order to evaluate the quality of lenses and cameras. Taking some shots of specialized targets at specific distances and camera settings, reviewers to analyze quantitatively things camera design compromises such as image sharpness, ISO noise, vignetting, chromatic abberation, and spherical distortion.
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A beta of QOOP’s website that allows flickr printing is up:
I’ll have to try it out sometime.
Hugh Symond’s photo gallery of pictures taken from a camera phone make me wonder if camera phones are the next Holga.
Ryan found an wonderful set of wildlife photography on the message boards which he mentioned in his blog. You must check this out:
Last week, Bill, our resident Canon guy, mentioned that Tim Burton was working on a new stop-motion animated movie called Corpse Bride using Canon digital still cameras. The attention to detail and imagination in motion animation never ceases to amaze us.
Mark Jen sent me this article confirming the use of Canon digital still cameras and Nikon lenses.
Canon has an EF-S lens series, which is roughly like Nikon’s DX lenses except they won’t mount on their full-frame or film cameras.1
For comparison, here is Nikon’s DX line:
Tuesday, Mark and Joseph decided to attend the John Battelle book signing at Books, Inc. about his new book, The Search. I decided to meet them there.
I was terribly sick that day and Caitlin
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