Got a new camera!

Panasonic LUMIX dmc-LZ2.
Price dropped from 300 to 180 swiss francs that's about 140 $.
5 megapixels, optical 6x zoom, optical picture stabilisation.

A bargain. Ok, the case is made of joghurt beaker plastic, and all in all it isn't designed for eternity, but it's pure pleasure noless. It makes collecting texure base material much more fun.

I recently got a new camera myself. Canon Digital Rebel XTi, 10.1 megapixel. Came with an 18-55mm zoom lens. Also grabbed a 70-300mm image stabilization zoom lens for it.

Quick camera lesson:

The numbers above are the focal length, but all you need to know is that the smaller the number, the wider the view angle. 35mm for example is your standard camera, and 18mm is wide angle. BUT, with digital cameras you have to multiply by... 1.5 I think... to compare the focal lengths (what those numbers are).

So, my widest lens is effectively a 27mm on a regular camera. And that means it can see (35/27) 1.3x more at once than a regular camera on the widest setting. And that produces some pretty nice looking photos and lets you get all of a small room into a shot.

The 300 on the other hand will make things 12.8x larger than a normal camera. And the image stabilization which uses a little gyroscope inside the lens to stabilize the image optically allows me to keep such an image about as stable as if I was trying to take a picture of someone standing just a few feet away from me, which means I can get sharp handheld shots that would be impossible when zoomed in that much otherwise cause the view would be shaking like mad.

Oh and btw, when you see a camera afficionado refer to a zoom lens, he doesn't mean a lens that can zoom in on a distant subject. A zoom lens is the opposite of a fixed lens. A fixed lens cannot zoom in or out at all. A wide angle lens can be a zoom lens even though it only goes from wide to 35mm.

One other neat thing I learned recently among all this other stuff is that the f numbers on a lens tell you how big the "aperature" is... the hole in the lens that lets light in. A smaller number means a bigger hole. I think my lenses are like 4.5-5.5f, which is an average speed for a consumer level lens. A lens with a larger hole is referred to as a "fast" or "bright" lens. They're fast and bright because the shutter can stay open for less time which means sharper pictures. And that means they can take pictures in darker conditions that are sharper than a slower lens would take in the same conditions.

Those f numbers by the way... They're half binary! The aperature numbers go 1, x, 2, x, 4, x, 8, x where the x's are logarithmic numbers that are in between. I have no idea why they chose to use logarithmic numbers cause they're impossible to memorize and have decimal points but that's what they decided on back in the 1800's or something.

One other thing you should know. The pictures this camera takes are DARK and fuzzy. Much darker than I was used to with my Kodak. But the Kodak is a consumer camera and this is a prosumer camera. The Kodak does a lot of in camera sharpening, and brightens the image up so it looks good on a PC screen. The prosumer camera does not muck with the image like this. You can SET it to muck with the image like this in the camera, but once you do that there's no going back. So this camera captures all the details in bright areas, whereas the Kodak blows all those details out before saving the image and they can never be recovered.

So if you just want to point and shoot and have nice looking pictures on your PC then you might not want a prosumer camera, but if you want pictures you can edit in Photoshop to make them look as good as or BETTER than the ones you get from the consumer camera then you want a Prosumer camera like the Rebel XTi, which is Canon's latest low-end prosumer model.

Btw, I chose Canon because it has a small camera body, and has a slick design. The Nikon's are much bulkier and look like they haven't updated their design since the 80's. Also the Nikons take sharper photos out of the box, but that means they produce unrealistically sharp highlights and give a bit of a painterly effect to images when you look closely, so I thought the Canon's image quality was better.

Oh and unlike JFK's camera, mine was NOT a bargain. And the dark pictures left me a bit dissapointed with it actually, but if I want the better quality pictures I need to learn to live with that and edit them in photoshop. Or I need to learn how to set exposure times manually and take better photos. I'm not sure which yet. :-)

One last thing. A 4GB CompactFlash card will give you 1000 photos with a 10 megapixel camera if you use jpeg but little to no compression, and that's more than enough photos for a whole day of constant rapid-fire photo snapping, assuming you don't take three exposures of every shot with the automatic exposure bracketing. I recently went to Maine and the York zoo for a day and even though I took six photos of everything I still had over 250 photos remaining.

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Heh, more text there than I thought, but there's lots of useful info if you're looking to get a nice camera so I'll leave it as is.
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Actually the standard lens on a 35mm film camera is 50mm. It's calculated by measuring the diagonal of the film negative which in the case of 35mm is 36 x 24 giving a diagonal of about 46mm - 50mm is the nearest lens focal length. It's supposed to be the same as what the human eye would see. A shorter focal length lens will include more but will also distort more as things closer to the lens will be proportionally larger and things further away proportionally smaller. Peoples noses will appear bigger than they should for instance. Press photographers very often used this effect to add impact to their pictures. The shorter the focal length the more pronounced the effect until you get the 16mm lens on the 35mm camera which is the fisheye lens - a completely round picture and people whose noses look like pelican beaks! Shorter focal lengths also increase the depth of field - the amount of distance in front of the lens that is in focus. This is also effected by the apperture of the lens. The f stops refer to the ratio of the apperture to the focal length of the lens which is why long focal length lenses have smaller maximum appertures - a long focal length plus wide apperture would need a lens with an enormous diameter. The wider the apperture the lower the f number - so f5.6 is wider than f11. The required exposure is a mixture of shutter speed and apperture. As apperture is doubled - f11 to f8 - shutter speed needs to halve - 1/250th to 1/500th. There's more to it of course. As the apperture is increased the depth of field is reduced. So to take landscapes you want wide angle lenses with small appertures - f11 or f16 to get as big a depth of field - and therefore slower shutter speeds but to take head and shoulder portraits you want longer focal lengths - 80mm with large appertures - f5.6 and therefore smaller depth of field. This throws the background out of focus leaving the subject highlighted. For sports events where you want to freeze the action big appertures and at least 1/250th shutter speed are best.
Regards

"It's supposed to be the same as what the human eye would see."

Ha! Not even close!

I suppose if you don't count peripheral vision and count only a single eye, but I can see nearly 180 segrees looking straight ahead if you count the ability to percieve my wiggling thumbs. :-) I can't tell exactly where the peripheral visions starts and the regular vision begins but that's not how one sees a scene so it doesn't look at all like what a human eye can see.


"The f stops refer to the ratio of the apperture to the focal length of the lens which is why long focal length lenses have smaller maximum appertures - a long focal length plus wide apperture would need a lens with an enormous diameter."

They have new lenses out that have the label DO for "diffractice optics". They make the 70-300 lens in a DO version. As a result the lens is no longer than the 18-55 lens I have, whereas the normal 70-300 extends from twice the lens of my 18-55 lens to a whopping 3x the length of it when fully zoomed in.

I think there is some debate about the quality of the image produced by a DO lens with some kind of distortion at the edges or maybe it was in areas that were out of focus, but I bet they'll fix that issue eventually. I wonder if this setup allows one to produce such a lens that is not only shorter but has a larger aperature as well?


"So to take landscapes you want wide angle lenses with small appertures - f11 or f16 to get as big a depth of field - and therefore slower shutter speeds but to take head and shoulder portraits you want longer focal lengths - 80mm with large appertures - f5.6 and therefore smaller depth of field. This throws the background out of focus leaving the subject highlighted. For sports events where you want to freeze the action big appertures and at least 1/250th shutter speed are best."

So you're saying that my 4.5-5.5 lens has an adequate shutter speed, and will produce a pleasing depth of field as a result, and that if I had a bigger lens even though it would work in darker conditions, the images would get softer than they are now?

Cause I want sharp images. My images with my 18-55 lens were fuzzier than I'd have liked. I thought the images I got with this camera and these lenses were going to be sharp as a tack.

Speaking of which I still haven't uploaded my zoom lens test photos to my PC so I don't know how sharp those are.

A camera is only as good as its lens.

With that in mind try to spend more on the lens than the camera =)

For landscapes you want as high an f as possible ( smallest aperture ) to try and get everything in focus, this is going to mean a slower shutter speed so always use a tripod.

The 18-55 lens that comes with the Rebel is not the best quality, I would have suggested buying the body only and getting a decent lens separately.

If you want a decent lens look at Canon's L series, alot of money but worth it if you want the best optical performance.

I just wish I could afford the lenses I want but another option is to hire them when you need them.

I have the 70-300 DO (112 - 480mm on my Canon 30d). Don't believe all you read about this lens - it's supposed to be near the pro range of lenses afterall.

It has a huge zoom in a very small lens - compared to lenses of the same range. And the image stablilization is incredible - essential in a long lens. I just found some extra sharpening in photoshop was required for the subject - which is very nice against the lovely soft backgrounds it produces.

Sharpening is a great tool, look at 'unsharpmask' filter to really make those pictures look crisp.

...and always use raw - not jpeg.

I spent almost as much for my zoom... er... macro? lens as I did for the camera. (I still haven't learned all the right terminology.)




I wasn't prepared to spend over $1000 on a lens. It's a hobby not a profession! :-)

I'm scared enough of damaging the things as it is. I did spend a pretty penny on the image stabilization one though (But still much less than $1K) because taking pictures with a tripod takes too much time and is too much of a pain to make my photo excursions enjoyable. :-)




I know all about sharpening. :-) I wrote a sharpening filter for my texture generator that works better than unsharp! (no halos) The results of unsharp or any other sharpening algo aren't nearly the same as the original image being sharp though. Sharpening can't recreate lost image data.




You can RENT lenses? How much is that? And wouldn't a rented lens probably be a bit scratched up and not as good image quality anyway than one that has been taken care of?




Well I suppose for the sharpest possible pictures with the best exposure, but RAW takes up like 4x the amount of space and you can't just upload it to your PC and view it you have to convert them all. And as far as sharpness goes, the jpeg doesn't compress at all hardly on this camera, and the softness of the images is already such that I don't think the jpeg really affects the image quality. Not at 10 megapixel.





Well I'll take your word on the quality. But yeah that's why I got the IS version of that lens in the non-DO version. I don't use a tripod unless I'm shooting fireworks at night, so the IS is essential for me to take zoomed photos that are reasonably sharp.

The idea of the standard lens being equivalent to the human eye wasn't to do with how wide a picture you got it was to do with the distortions caused by changing focal lengths of the camera lens. The standard lens gave an undistorted picture where the result appeared the same as you would see with the human eye. A shorter focal length resulted in anything closer to the lens being disproportionately larger and anything further away being disproportionately smaller. A lens with a longer than standard focal length tended to flatten the image. Both these effects were more pronounced the further from the standard lens you got.
Regards.

This explains it well.

http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Exposure/Aperture_01.htm

Others have given some good information and advice above but here are a few more points.


DSLRs do have a tendency to produce darker pictures. There are a few quick things you can try. Firstly, increase the sensitivity. Somewhere in the menus there is an 'ISO' setting. Increasing it will mean you can take pictures in lower light or use faster shutter speeds but the higher the number, the noisier the image will be. Canon DSLRs are about the best at keeping this noise to a minimum though. Secondly, you can apply exposure compensation. I use a Nikon D70 quite a lot and I often have it set to around +1 EV so that it doesn't underexpose every image I take. Thirdly, its worth mentioning that if you shoot raw instead of jpeg, the amount of adjustment you can make to the brightness of your image afterwards is increased dramatically meaning underexposure becomes less of a problem.


Unless for some reason you paid over the odds that is actually a very good value camera. Not cheap, but great value for what you get certainly.

Hey, instead of just talking about cameras, let's see some photos. Here are a few of mine to get started.

http://digitalstudio.gre.ac.uk/exhibition2006/section.php?group=show-graphics
http://digitalstudio.gre.ac.uk/exhibition2005/Exhibition/index.php

"So you're saying that my 4.5-5.5 lens has an adequate shutter speed, and will produce a pleasing depth of field as a result, and that if I had a bigger lens even though it would work in darker conditions, the images would get softer than they are now?"
The principles haven't changed: small appertures give greater depth of field so more things are in focus but shutter speeds are slower and therefore there's a greater risk of camera shake. Large appertures allow faster shutter speeds but the depth of field decreases so that there's less risk of camera shake but you have to focus more accurately. And I've found out to my cost that electronic viewfinders can easily make things look brighter than they are.
Regards.

I just meant that it was pricey, and that I paid the manufacturer's "suggested retail price" for it, rather than buying it online from some seedy outlet to save a couple hundred bucks. :-)

Okay, here are some from the new camera. I have enhanced these by adjusting the brightness, saturation, and sharpness to varying degrees, except the first one, which you can compare to the second to see how the image looked straight out of the camera, and how it looks after basic enhancement.

The images are all at 25% of the original file size.










Everyhting up to the turtle was my first trip where I had a polarizing filter on that I have since returned. The polarizing filter drops the exposure "two stops" which is a lot, and the result was almost all the photos from my first trip which was mostly in the woods, came out blurry. I thought the polarizing filter would make cool looking skies but it's really not worth the money.

I do have a UV filter on there though. That does not affect the exposure, reduces haze, and protects the lens.

The second trip which was to Maine and a second zoo I only put a few photos up of cause I got tired of editing them. :-) I'll put some more up later. That was a neat trip because the buttefly exhibit at the York zoo was new and I hadn't seen anything like that before. And with the ability to get real close to stuff with this new lens, I could get really great insect photos as you can see.

Btw, did you know explorer can rotate images for you? I just discovered that. I compared the images in photoshop to see if the rotated version lost any quality and the difference layer showed that 99% of the differences were only 2 shades off, so it's safe to rotate your originals without worrying about losing tons of quality. There's almost no degradation.

Polarizing filters are mainly for reducing reflections from glass or water. They're kind of cool (a bit like X-ray vision) but there's no need to leave one attached all the time. It is a good idea to leave a UV filter attached though, for just the reasons you mention.


Note that your camera also has an auto-rotation option, meaning images will automagically be the right way up when you open them in Photoshop. Unfortunately, Windows Explorer doesn't seem to read this info, so you have to rotate them manually. And then all your batch resizing operations get screwed up.

Here are some 1/8th actual size...all pictures (c)JMK2006

View from Glastonbury Tor



Avebury stone circle


Rain dripping off the stone close up


Aysgarth falls in Yorkshire, slow shutter speed...


...same scene with much faster shutter speed


And finally a shot of a stained glass window in Montmartre cemetery, Paris

CompuPic, an image viewer I use, also does not read it. I do have that option set as far as I can tell. However, the images are not right size up even when I open them in photoshop, so I don't know what you're talking about there.





CompuPic does batch resizing, and I can specify the maximum size horizontally and vertically. If I want all my images to be 1600x1200 or 1200x1600, them I just set both to 1600 and it will work as expected for both horizontal and vertical images.

Did you alter the images in any way Shambler? Like adjust saturation?

You bet I did =)

In the world of film you develop your pictures in the darkroom and adjust things like sharpness and saturation for maximum effect.

In the digital world the darkroom is a PC.

Both sharpening and saturation were adjusted to give a much more 'realistic' effect.

I have seen pictures where this has been well overdone and images turn out far too sharp and grainy...I have a book full of sites such as Avebury but the photographer went overboard with adjusting the pictures and the result is something that just doesn't look too good at all...very intense to the eye.

You still need a good image to start with, for instance the first picture of the avebury stones is pretty much all in focus and was achieved with a tripod and as high an f stop as I could select.

Don't expect to take a 'perfect picture', taking the picture is just the first step to a beautiful image.

BTW I have the predecessor to your camera, the 8MP version which is called the EOS350D over here.

Your camera has an orientation sensor so it knows which way up it is when you take a picture. Somewhere in the menus there is an 'auto rotate' option, with three choices - camera and computer, computer only and off. With either of the first two selected, Photoshop should indeed show your images the right way up. Only thing I can think of is maybe you have an older version of Photoshop?


That sounds useful. I usually use a Photoshop action to batch resize and save and as far as I know there's no way to make it distinguish which way round the image is. It just squashes any images that are orientated the wrong way. Which is pretty annoying if you've just rotated half of them to look at them properly in Explorer...

EDIT - Shambler, you might be interested in the work of a photographer called Simon Marsden. Have a look here:
http://www.marsdenarchive.com/library/images.php?cat=00000023&THESESSION=7c9ad279f6dc697f1268a2e162fd0df4

I have photoshop 7.0. I have the camera set so the camera and computer icon is selected.

Doesn't really matter though if it isn't supported by explorer or my image viewer because I need to be able to see the images the right way when I want to browse them quickly or show them to people. Photoshop being right way up doesn't matter a whole lot it is trivial to rotate the image in that.



Anyway... I just fixed up several more pictures from my trip. Here they are:















That second one was particularly hard because the foreground was very dark because the camera exposed it so the background would retain detail. I had to use some special tricks for that. Actually I used one of those tricks on the duck pic too to bring down the brightness on the bright driftwood so I could brighten the ducks without blowing out the detail in that portion of the image. But the anteater pic was much much darker.




Ahh! Black and white! Get it away! Get it away!