The happiest emails I get usually have this in the subject field somewhere.
Archive for category camera
The new camcorder came on Wednesday. I haven’t had a whole lot of chances to mess with it, but here’s some initial thoughts:
Depending on the shooting conditions video ranges from very, very good to pretty fucking sweet. I’d have been entirely ok with it and regular prices. For under $700, I’m estatic.
The thing is built like a tank – solid and wider than it is tall.
At the full 1920 x 1080, the hard drive holds around 15 hours of video. That should work until I’m able to finally upgrade my PC (long overdue). Right now I can store the video on one of my external drives if I want, but I’m not able to edit in any reasonable fashion. (so no samples for a little while)
It’s a consumer level Sony product, not a lot beyond pointing and shooting. It literally has an “easy” button on it…for real. A button labeled ‘Easy’. That’s ok though, I only need to point and shoot. There is the cool CAM Control button/dial on the front that you can assign a few functions to (focus, exposure, etc) that offer a bit of manual control. Using that and different shooting modes, I was able to get a pretty shallow DOF that looked kind of nice.
It records in 5.1 which is fun to say.
Probably lots of other little things that I’ll think of, find or use as time goes on.
I’m a happy boy.
Jeff just posted about having the urge to buy something and the various degrees of (and reasons for) apprehension in doing so.
I, on the other hand, am an asshole and proudly yell, “Get the fuck out of my way, I’m buying shit because I want to!”
I’ve been wanting to go HD with my camcorder. Face it, the world is there. Using a standard def camcorder for both personal things and for my coaster stuff seems silly. I don’t need a big honking professional piece of camera, just a cute little consumer cam that’s easy to use and makes nice video.
Basically I wanted a Sony HDR-SR12. (Yeah, more Sony. I’m like an abused girlfriend who still sticks with the guy claiming how great he is.)
I am Sony’s bitch.
So I bought one. But here’s the kicker – I got it for an outstanding price. Right around $680. Yeah, go look it up and find one for that…you won’t.
I got it thanks to a 10% coupon and a cashback promotion that Microsoft is doing to get people to use live.com.
Sure, I had to get it via ebay from one of those Brooklyn dealers who sell grey market stuff, but I just couldn’t pass it up at that price. And yes, they call to do a hard sell on a warranty and accessories, but I politely resisted and they were cool about it. I should have it in a couple of days.
The price, the idea that HD is the new standard, using it for coasterimage, Christmas, Disney trip in February, some other things that I’ll be sharing here when the time is right – it all fell into place for me to justify the purchase.
So yeah, I wanted to buy something and I didn’t hestitate. You shouldn’t either.
Looks interesting. Might be fun to play around with.
I’ve (we’ve?) always had smaller (read: cheaper) little point and shoot cameras that I carried around in addition to the whichever ‘big’ camera I had. I like the convenience and face it, sometimes the big camera is overkill.
I recently gave away all the little cameras I had lying around. I got them in a plethora of places – I won one in an online photo contest, I was given one as a gift, I bought one five years ago. I gave them to family and friends who would appreciate them. My son was pissed as he’s the only one who doesn’t have his own camera, but I figure I can throw a cheap (but still better than the ones I had) one his way the fall for his birthday or X-mas.
My goal was to get a nice P&S camera that would essentially be Jamie’s, but that I could also slip into my pocket as a secondary camera if I felt the need.
After looking around a bit we decided on the Canon SD1100IS. Just a middle-of-the-road camera that had some decent reviews. We went with brown because we’re that damn cool.
It came this past Tuesday and with my family visiting it was a prefect trial for the camera.
I don’t have an samples available and ready to go right now, but it takes pretty nice pictures.
I also haven’t gotten to mess with it much, but there’s tons of settings to play with (I think you can even go manual) and the image stabilization and face recognition make it a great camera to stick in auto and let Jamie shoot away all day.
At least now we’ll have some photos of the family instead of just thousands of amusement park photos.
I have a confession to make. Until I got the XSI – I shot only JPEG. Honestly, I’ve honed my JPEG manipulating skills to the point where there isn’t much I could do to a RAW image that I couldn’t to a JPEG. Photoshop has tons of tools and you have to miss a photo pretty bad to be stuck with an unusable JPEG.
With the XSI, I got a big honking 8GB memory card. It was capable of holding something like 1500 JPEG’s. I knew I’d never need to hold 1500 JPEG’s so I figured it might be a good opportunity to start shooting RAW and messing with the format. (Actually, I Now shoot JPEG+RAW)
The catch was that I needed to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 to handle the files coming from the XSI. My aging PC barely handles CS2. No biggie, I suppose. I bit the bullet and made the change.
On and off for the past month or so, I’ve been taking photos of mundane things (trees, birds, grass, cars) and playing with the RAW tools in CS3 to get a feel for it. Honestly, it was a lot like I expected – you had to miss a shot pretty bad for the flexibility of RAW to really feel more useful than just shooting JPEG.
I kinda dragged my feet on it. I’d force myself to mess a little with it every now and then. Over time it sort of started to grow on me.
Finally this past weekend I saw the light. I shot a bunch of stuff at Kings Island and upon dumping it onto my PC started playing.
It wasn’t the exposure or color correction tools that won me over (for the last time, I can do pretty much the same crap with a JPEG), it was the clarity, the sharpness, the quality of the RAW image that was a noticable improvement even after I compressed the image to JPEG that got me. Things seems more vivid, more crisp, more defined than before. I was sold.
The final validation came just a few minutes ago. I stopped by CoasterBuzz and saw that the KICentral guys had gotten their photos from the weekend up. I’m always interested in how other people see the same event I attended so I headed over and took a look. Tons of coverage…and uncannily some very similar photos to a few of mine. Naturally, I couldn’t resist some comparisons. I opened their gallery in one tab of my browser and my pics in another and flipped back and forth.
Did I mention I’m now totally sold on shooting RAW?
Everything I said earlier now seemed more true – my photos felt more vivid, more clear, more “you are there” than they ever did to me before. Some comparisons:
Flag Jumper – Flag Jumper
Sky Jumper – Sky Jumper
Clown Band Guy – Clown Band Guy
That’s not to take anything away from the guys at Kings Island Central. They just happened to put a ton of photos up and I just happened to take some shots similar to theirs of the same subjects.
They have great coverage of the day – WAY more photos of the jump than I bothered to take. I encourage anyone reading this to head over and look at all of their stuff. They got it covered.
I’m just excited because it feels like I might be taking my photos to a new place and I have to admit, it’s been fun to switch up my workflow a little too. It’s been a while since I’ve been excited about post work on my photos. I had it down to an assembly line-like process. Now it feels fresh again and I really feel like the quality of the photos are higher than they’ve ever been.
So yeah, if you’re not shooting RAW, it might be something to look into. This curmudgeon was sold.
I just realized I haven’t take a single photograph this year. Not one. (not counting my phone – I’ve taken two on my phone)
The last picture I took was on New Year’s Eve.
I wonder how long I can go without using my camera?
As much as I would have liked to get a new camera this year, I’m not going to. I’ve had the XT since 2005 and this spring will make 3 years – the longest I’ve used a single camera since I bought my first Pentax SLR back in late-2000.
The truth is, there’s lots of little things I want/need to upgrade, but have better thing to do with the money. I want/need a new camera. I’d like to upgrade the video camera to an HD model. My computer is becoming woefully underpowered with each passing day and it’s time to build a new one. Hell, I even want to upgrade the audio half of the ‘home theatre’ – we’ve had this receiver and speakers since May of 1996 – how fucked up is that? It’s not even 5.1 – it’s old school basic first gen dolby surround.
Anyway, I decided to try to hold off on all of those things (and more) in lieu of some responsibility – mainly paying down some debt we’ve been riding on various things.
But then Canon drops a little advertisement into my inbox. The Rebel XSi drops in April – right around my birthday. Granted, it’s far from top of the line stuff. In fact it’s pretty much bottom of the line shit. But the old XT has worked just fine and in the three years since I got it – it’s paid for itself time and time again. Why drop more cash on tools I don’t necessarily need? Why buy the $50 hammer when the $8 hammer will drive the nail in?
I passed on the XTi as it offered only marginal upgrade over the XT – not enough added or cheap enough to make me bite. But now another generation later and the XSi offers enough over the XT to pique my interest. I clicked on the email from Canon and start reading through the info on their site.
Amazon has it listed for $799 (body only) or $899 with the 18-55mm kit lens (which is now apparently an IS lens). Shit, that’s chump change for this thing. It looks to be a hell of a camera for that price.
Hmmmm….that’s a pretty tempting cheap upgrade. One that I could score just in time for the summer.
We’re going to check out the Haunt at Kings Island tonight.
Looks like a good time. I’m debating on whether or not to take my camera. Halloween events offer fun photo ops, but they also are more enjoyable overall if you’re not dragging a camera around.
It always seems like a lose/lose too. If I don’t take it, I’ll see 1001 great shots and regret not having the camera and if I do take it, I’ll be annoyed that I’m carrying it around and it’ll be in my way all night.
Bah!
Doesn’t Kings Island have a Starbucks? (smile)
Everytime I get a new camera the first thing I do (and presumably most people do as well) is get into the menus and set it up to my liking. Among those settings is always some method for file numbering.
I always set mine to continuous. This means the first photo I take is numbered 0001, the second photo is 0002 and so on until 9999. Then it rolls back around to 0000 like an odometer.
Today I officially ‘rolled’ my camera. That means I’ve taken over 10,000 pictures with it. I’ve had the this one a little over two years now (27 months to be slightly more precise) and as of today have taken 10,037 photos. That works out to 371 photos each month since I bought it.
I might have a problem.
Amazing the way digital has changed the way we shoot.