Peter's Blog

Since I have been doing predominantly cameo photos with my Nikon D80 DSLR and I intend to do proper posed family portraits with it I decided I would like a decent flash gun to get better lighting. The built in flash is ok but typically the background of the subject is dark and the subject itself looks flat. The solution would be a flash gun, something that could bounce more powerful flash off the walls/ceiling for nice diffuse lighting.

I decided upon the Nikon SB600 SpeedLight since it would work best with the Nikon camera. Amongst it's many features are the following that are useful to me:

• The flash can be fully automatic and controlled by the camera using Nikons iTTL system.
• The flash can be rotated through 270 degrees and tilted through 90. You can put it on the camera, aim the camera down at sleeping baby and bounce the flash off the ceiling above you.
• It comes with a little stand so you can also set it up remotely. The camera's built in flash the provides direct lighting and the remote flash provides fill-in light.

Here is a photo using the built-in flash:

cute baby but flat. Mum is wearing a dark brown top.

Here is a photo using the SB600:

Is it the same baby? This one is three dimensional, she has a furrowed brow. The flash was mounted on the camera and bounced off the ceiling.

I got a good deal on the flash from Clifton Cameras for £175 (Jessops = £217.99). This price included the flash and these free goodies:

• a Nikon lens cleaning brush
• a wireless remote control for when I have to include myself in family portraits
• a CD on how to use my Nikon D70 which might help me with my D80
• a diffuser: expands to about a foot diameter, shiny one side, white the other. I'll have to figure out what to do with this e.g. how to hold it while taking photos.

The flash is quite big, and taking four aa batteries makes it heavy. Mounted on top of the camera it feels a bit fragile as if it would be too easy to snap it off. Also makes the camera top heavy. The whole setup seems rather delicate.

Using the P mode on the camera (semi automatic), when you take a snap the flash does a series of pre-flashes to test the lighting before taking the photo proper. The whole thing takes a couple of seconds which is annoying if the subject moves (the main reason I got the D80 was to be able to catch fast moving toddlers). In fully auto mode it doesn't do this for some reason. There is also a flash lock facility so I may be able to take one photo, lock the flash settings and take subsequent photo's instantly.

More examples:

Been taking many photo's with the Nikon D80. It is a very good camera. I've only just had to recharge it since my daughter was born on wednesday morning, five days of intensive photography, mostly flash, maybe two hundred photos. Twice as many daughters to take photos of!

What makes it so good is the speed that you can frame a photo with the zoom and take the photo. It focuses in low-light situations where my old canon would have given up. I don't think the Canon could have caught this:

Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/pinkblob

So why buy the nikon D80? To take pictures of Elizabeth Wilkinson, born 4:30am 29th November 2006.

Recently taking photos with my Canon Powershot S1 IS I had become frustrated at how long it took to focus on fast moving toddler daughter. I felt I was missing lots of good pictures. Also there is an imminent arrival that I want to take pictures of.

Latest overindulgence: Nikon D80 camera with 18-135mm lens. This is a DSLR, a cut above the powershot.

I spent a while torn between this and the cheaper Canon EOS400D. My research told me:

• Canon was cheaper
• the Nikon had more things to fiddle with
• it came with better lenses in the kit
• Nikon has better build quality
• the canon had better windows software but since I can just plug the SD card into my monitor and get the photos with Picasa I'm not sure I need it anyway.

Final clincher for me was looking at the two in the shop: the canon reminded me of the powershot, the Nikon was more sexy.

Good things:

• Very fast: focuses and takes photo so fast you wonder what has happened
• Very easy to use: wife took photo of me and daughter with no assistance. It focuses and takes the photo before your fake smile has time to harden (NOT uploading it here: makes me look old). End up taking endless photo's, all very good.
• 10 Megapixels: fine quality jpegs come out at about 3Mb. High resolution, crisp photos. Can see every hair.
• something I never appreciated about DSLR's: because they have real lenses, you zoom and focus manually by twisting the rings on the lens. This is MUCH better than fiddling with +/- buttons. Your left hand is holding it by the zoom ring. UPDATE: clarification, it does have auto focus but you can set it to manual and adjust it with a ring on the lens. The 'in-focus' status light even comes on when you have it right.

Bad things:

• big
• didn't buy a camera bag, now feel it needs something soft to carry it around in as it is so precious.
• it has a light to help auto-focus in the dark but it is obscured by the lens which sticks out about six inches most of the time
• no video: DSLR's don't do this. It was handy on the powershot.
• When I say easy to use, that's in the default auto mode. Everything can be overridden. The manual is not very explicit, it doesn't explain things very well. Still this makes it interesting, it's a challenge and a learning curve.
• Lens when zoomed is too phallic. Ok when set to wide angle.
• To my eye the flash shots seem a bit dark. Easily fixed in Picasa, in camera I think it can only be fixed in manual mode but not sure. UPDATE: in manual mode you can adjust the brightness, you can even set it to bracket, e.g. take three pictures at three different flash levels (it doesn't take the three automatically, bang-bang-bang, you have to trigger it three times and it alters the level each time).

See following examples for:

• dull flash
• capturing toddler in mid-cuteness.

Conclusion: very good camera.

Been experimenting with the focusing of my new Canon Powershot S1 IS. I am working out how get good autofocus. I have discovered the following:

• The autofocus struggles at maximum (10x) optical zoom. It locks on better at lesser zooms.
• It is also worse when close to the subject (< 1m) which may be below the min autofocus distance.
• Autofocus triggers in ernest when the shutter is pressed halfway down.
• There is a white square box within the viewfinder that turns green when the autofocus locks and yellow when it gives up.
• I have seen it turn green when the picture was blatantly out of focus.
• It is possible to focus by finding a high-contrast edge a similar distance away to whatever I am trying to photo, locking on it by half-pressing the shutter, moving to my subject and fully pressing the shutter.

I am not so worried about the focusing as I was in my last post. It is not so totally automatic that you never have to think about it.

More notes:

• It was not unknown for my old Nikon Coolpix 2500 pictures to be out of focus.
• Forcing the Canon to 400 ASA it is possible to take acceptably grainy photos indoors with no flash. The resulting pictures are nicer as the lighting is more natural.
• The batteries go flat in about 2 hours. Will buy an alternate set of 4xAA NiMH's for it, maybe two sets.

New camera came today Bullet points:

• the reviews I read mentioned poor autofocus in low light conditions. This is worse than I expected, low light seems to mean indoor, it's about 50-50 whether the autofocus will mess up and give you a blurry picture. All is not lost as the camera does have manual focusing but it would be nice not to need it so much. This is the main problem with the camera.
• flash is very powerful: lights the room, yet catches skin tones and does not make subject look pale
• Zoom does not really magnify, it's not like a telescope zoom even if it is 10x optical.
• came with batteries which lasted about two hours playtime. May be because I was running it with both the LCD and Electronic Viewfinder running at the same time, showing the same picture.
• lots of buttons dotted around means a lot can be done without using menus: e.g. manual focus button under 2nd finger left hand. Quicker to set things up than my old Nikon.
• supplied software for pc is unimpressive assortment of utilities. Dialogs display with gross text positioning errors, you select an option from a menu and things appear to freeze while an application slowly launches another application, the utility I found to download pictures does not seem to let you pick which you want to download or here to put them.
• can change shutter sounds etc to silly birds tweets, boing noises and the like.
• nice pictures (when they are in focus):
  

Verdict: I am happy with it so far.

Want new digital camera. Tried a Canon Digital Ixus 40 in the shop, here are bullet point impressions:

• Very small
• Nice big LCD on the back, very crisp picture
• Nice build quality
• It has 3x optical zoom, some more digital zoom (and digital zoom may be worthwhile on a 4M pixel camera) but from what I saw in the shop the zoom took the picture from wide angle to normal, it didn't go into telephoto territory. My Nikon Coolpix 2500 has useful zoom, if limited wideangle.

I'm tempted by the Fuji S5500, a larger format camera with 10x optical zoom. Thoughts:

• far too big for pocket
• complements my old Nikon better, I can keep that for snapping and portability and use this for real photos.
• 4xAA batteries so won't have to worry about battery life while out and about
• flash has got to be more powerful than coolpix (3m range) and being further from lens won't be so poor for red-eye (PaintShop Pro 9 and PaintShop Album and different red-eye removal tools that are quite effective but it would be nice to avoid it in the first place).
• takes videos at 30fps
• uses weird fuji/olympus XD Flash format which my TwinMOS 8 in 1 card reader cannot handle. Do they do a 9 in 1?
• could buy cheap from hong kong via ebay if I was a more trusting person.

Background, taking lots of baby photo's and not happy with results from Nikon. It's flash is weak.

Bought my mother in law a Kodak EasyShare CX7220 digital camera for christmas. It was reduced by £50 because it is an oldish 2M pixel model coming to the end of it's life. I found it interesting to compare it with my 2 year old Nikon Coolpix 2500 which is also 2M pixel. Here is a bullet point review:

Kodak pros:

• Kodak easier to use: I didn't need manual
• Starts up quickly and ready to fire compared to Nikon which takes annoyingly long (damn baby stops smiling by time it's booted).
• Kodak uses AA batteries and can take NiMH's. Compare to Nokon with proprietary (aka expensive) NiMH which goes flat 1/2 way through a day out.
• Kodak has a cool orientation sensor: take photo in portrait orientation and it displays it and outputs it as 1200x1600, instead of 1600x1200 landscape which saves a rotation operation when copied to computer.
• Kodak takes videos with sound.
• As you switch modes the screen explains what the mode is for

Nikon pros:

• Side-by-side comparison of the same scene (baby, what else) the Nikon picture looks a lot better. The kodak picture seems noisy: on the Nikon baby's skin is smooth while on the Kodaks the skin seems pixellated, even though both photos are 1200x1600. To me it was hands down to the Nikon. (I won't post the pictures as they are big files and I'm not sure anyone cares enough to download them).
• The Nikon had better pictures and the jpeg it generated was 1.44Mb compared to 1.92 Mb for the Kodak. Maybe the camera finds all that pixel noise harder to compress? As well as making the pictures look worse, it increases the file size by 33% (i.e. your memory card holds 3/4 the photos of the Nikon).

Conclusion: Kodak is easy to use and Mum-in-law is delighted with it. I'm not sure I'd buy a Kodak.

I bought a copy of Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album online. It's a decent enought program and using Paint Shop Pro has made me a fan of their software. I have tried Picasa for organising my photo's and it is free and very flashy looking but I found it to be too restrictive, it's like a lot of google stuff in assuming you are a moron and that configuration options will confuse you. It hides grubby details like where on the disk it has put your pictures because you are too dim to understand the concept of files and directories.

Things I like about it:

• Adjust Wizard: shows you your photo and previews of what it will look like after various enhancements. Go through, accepting the previews you like.
• Easy to use Redeye correction. The Paint-Shop Pro redeye is very powerful but fiddly: you have to figure out the exact colour of someone's eyes, size of pupil, stuff like that. I use an old Nikon Coolpix 3000 camera which often produces redeye.
• Organises and nags you into making backups. Not a bad thing for irreplacable family photo's.
• Can quickly find photo's, rotate portraits etc, and quickly drop into PSP if a photo needs advanced editing.

However, after purchasing, attempting to get my licence key gives me the following error:

Internet Connection Failure

The product you are attempting to run is unable to connect to the Internet to
obtain a license key. You may not be able to run this program fully until a
connection is made.

Please check that you are connected to the Internet. If you have a connection
already, please check that your firewall settings will allow this software
program access to our servers.

Error code: -1

I've been trying this for three days now. I sent a message their customer service two days ago and have had no response. I tried turning off the Windows firewall but this made no difference and their online FAQ does not mention any specific ports that should not be blocked. The key retrieval thing asks for a password that I entered when I bought the software. I'm pretty sure I'm putting the right password in but their system does not give the option of emailing me a reminder.

Most registration systems I have used email you a key that you enter into the software. It looks like Jasc are using some outfit called Digital River for their software licensing and a system that downloads the key for you. It would save you a small amount of hastle except it is broken. I've had hastles at work with Pro/E CAD software licensing (Macromedia Lice) and when trying to add reliable dongle support to software.

Open Source software has another subtle advantage: a flaky copy protection scheme won't break it.

Blogging has a less subtle advantage: you can vent about something to hundreds of millions of potential customers. My Iotech diatribe got a response from their web master who was doing some market research using google.