by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 17, 2005 | Photography Equipment
I recently subscribed to The Digital Photography Weblog and I have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of really good stuff I came across there.
People often go on at me about my poor 6 mega pixel camera compared to their 7 or 8 meg pixel point and shoot and why I bother with this expensive camera with such low pixel count.
Well in this article they explain the difference between a DSLR’s 6 meg pixels and that in the shiny point and shoot or worse camera phones, check it out:
The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they capture only monochromatic light intensity, and due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy – really – the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.
Well said, sums it up pretty well. They also point to a nice glossary of terms for DSLR’s.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 30, 2005 | Photography Equipment
Digital Photography is great in that you don’t need film, but it also is part of its problem, if you only have a few media cards like most people then you need to drag a laptop around with you if you are away for a few weeks to empty your cards onto.
A year or two ago companies started introducing portable storage devices, basically just a portable HDD to dump photos on, these all have built in card readers for multiple types of cards.
I have been looking at these products a long time and they all seem to have issues, mostly the card readers in them are slow, transfer speeds as low as 300kb/sec has been noted in some of the most popular devices.
I read a review of the Transcend Digital Album and was immediately impressed with it. I bought one early January and only had chance to use it last weekend. I have to say I really love this device it is the perfect answer to the storage problem while on the move.
Read the Steve’s Digicams review for all the details about it I agree with most of what is said there. The only irritating thing is that even though I bought it in the UK it does not come with a UK plug, only a European 2 prong and the same as used in South Africa, so I needed an adapter to get it going, other than that it is fantastic.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 12, 2005 | Photography Equipment
I recently bought a Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC lens. It cost me just over ยฃ200 which is dirt cheap for a good range Zoom lens.
My initial reaction to the lens is favorable – though I have not used it much – it is a good zoom range and the optics seem to perform well. I did notice some barrel distortion and vignetting but this is to be expected on a low budget lens. The vignetting is easily fixed in the Photoshop RAW plugin.
I do not really have a good sample to post that was taken with the lens, the weather has been bad here for some time and I have been spending some time off work and off life in general being incredibly lazy at home.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 12, 2005 | Photography Equipment
Nikon announced a new version of the “B” firmware for the D70 digital SLR. The fix is pretty small and not something I have noticed:
When the mode dial was set to an exposure mode (P, S, A, or M) and II selected for the Color mode setting in the Custom item of the Optimize image menu, and then an option other than Custom (such as Portrait) selected from the Optimize image menu, JPEG images captured after this procedure were recognized as having the Adobe RGB color space when opened in applications with a color-management function such as Adobe Photoshop. This problem has been corrected.
The firmware can be downloaded for Windows users here and for Mac users here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 30, 2004 | Photography Equipment
Nikon today released updated firmware in all its regions for the D70. The firmware is user updatable and fixes the following issues.
Issues addressed with A firmware version 1.01
– Images captured in Continuous mode at high shutter speeds sometimes displayed vignetting in upper portions of the image. This problem has been corrected.
– When the built-in Speedlight was in its raised position but did not fire, the Automatic Sensitivity Adjustment function (ISO Auto: CSM 5) sometimes failed. This problem has been corrected.
Issues addressed with B firmware version 1.02
– The camera now supports CompactFlash™ memory cards with a capacity greater than 4GB.
– When images were captured in Continuous mode at an Image size setting of M and an Image quality setting of FINE, the memory card access lamp sometimes glowed continuously and the camera could not be turned off with the power switch. This problem has been corrected.
– Text errors in display of Chinese menus and messages have been corrected
American copy of the firmware here. European users will have to register with the Nikon site and then enter the camera serial number. Once this is done you will see the files in the support site. People on the forums say that the firmware files are identical regardless of the country you get them from.
by R.I. Pienaar | May 22, 2004 | Photography Equipment
After my recent purchase of the Nikkor 70-300mm lens – which was intended as a cheap way to find out if I would like a zoom lens – I now purchased an upgrade on this based on my experience with it – the Sigma 28-300 Hyperzoom.
The Nikkor is a good lens though it suffers from heavy Chromatic Aberrations, especially at 300mm and in high contrast areas. The problem with a 70-300mm lens is that it does not start wide enough for holiday or walk about type shots, I often found myself wanting to change lens to my 18-70mm to get certain objects in frame that was too close or too big.
The 28-300mm is a good middle ground lens, I used it a bit today and found that I was unable to produce any CA and that I was not tempted to swap to a wider lens ever. Lens swapping on DSLR’s are notorious for getting dust on the CCD which requires rather scary cleaning using expensive CO2 based systems or cleaning swabs. The 28-300mm gives the equivalent of a 10x magnification when quoted in the typical digital camera speak. The lens was a bit hard to find, but eventually I found a dealer with stock and paid £200 for it.
View the full entry for a photo of the lens, also my first attempt at a studio type shot using some black cloth and a desk lamp, will need to get some velvet.
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