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reddragdiva'da Oly safely in place, I took the Ixus 50 for its first serious nightclub workout. Please inform me of missing names, because I managed to forget the names of most of the people I didn't know. If you are a victim of a drive-by shooting, please let me know (unless you're objecting to being a ten-pixel blurred face at the far end of a room shot, in which case, uh, no). Photo policy.
Initial findings:
- I need to practice focus in near-dark.
- Front-fill flash gives some amazing effects with a lightshow, carefully applied — typically a subdued flash and one second exposure. I'll be using it a lot, possibly with a tripod. Note that it seems to list front-fill flash in the EXIF data as "red eye flash."
- The red-eye flash doesn't make a difference: you're going to get red-eye. I had to hand-correct so many of these shots.
- In low light, it seems to drop colour information altogether. This is unexpected and may not be helpful to me.
- Take a spare battery if you're going to take nearly a hundred shots with flash.
- I so wish this camera had IS.
Good examples of point 1 are this floor shot and these girls. It's focusing, but certainly not anywhere I want it to. I've already discovered how to focus it off to one side before taking the shot, but it's annoying to have to do so. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
wechsler points out that this is probably the AiAF, which uses a sophisticated nine-point focusing algorithm to accurately pick the wrong part of the photo to focus on almost every time, and which I will be leaving off next outing.)
Point 4 is of great interest to me in terms of pulling images out of the muck. See this one, which was pulled up out of the noise, but the camera appears to have applied noise reduction in such a way as to have dropped colour information where that would be noisy. This is not unreasonable (we're talking about what to do at the limits of the sensor's abilities), but is annoying as I've relied on pulling colour out of the noise in the past, e.g. this one, which is this one without the flash.
I got a PowerShot S110 (Ixus v) in the post yesterday morning. I might take that out and see how the older generation does; I've had nice results with an Ixus v2 in the past.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 01:11 pm (UTC)Do you have AiAF turned on, and do you want it on?
Do you have the AF-assist lamp turned on?
Are you getting a "focus area" display from the AiAF? It can certainly make some odd guesses at times.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 01:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's AiAF making weird decisions. I'll try again with it off.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 01:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 01:44 pm (UTC)Oh and "?&?" (two girls, one in a gold corset and one in a red corset, 4th page I think) are
L
x
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 10:04 pm (UTC)I dunno if either of them will want their real names on the website I'm afraid. But LJ tags should be fine.
L
x
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:21 pm (UTC)Looks like her.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 08:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 02:49 pm (UTC)I think camera CCDs are less sensitive at shorter wavelengths - note my earlier post about how many don't handle purple well because they only detect down to blue, not violet. And pretty much all camera CCDs actually pick up quite a bit of near infrared and need a filter specifically to avoid this. (So you can make a good infrared camera by changing the filter from one that blocks IR to one that blocks visible light.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 09:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 08:06 am (UTC)Ooooooo that's pr0n. Size is fantastically important to me in a clubbing camera, but that may convince me otherwise for other purposes.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-16 04:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 09:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 11:30 pm (UTC)Canon EOS 350D.
My choice for this kind of shot is currently between a 17-85mm IS f/4-5.6 and a 50mm f/1.8. The former will only open up to f/5.6 at 50mm. The IS does let you get away with longer exposures but (i) that doesn't eliminate subject motion (ii) estimating two stops extra from the IS still only gets you down to f/2.8.
The 17-55 IS f/2.8 looks like might answer (ii) though I've not had my hands on one. Whether (i) is a difficulty in practice obviously depends on what you're doing, but in my case we're talking opportunistic shots at parties etc, and I've often needed some of that extra stop and a third.
(This is slightly post-hoc - I've found what works for me largely by experiment, but the results do seem to be consistent with the above analysis.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-17 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 08:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-18 01:30 pm (UTC)350D body + battery + CF = 540g (dpreview (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos350d/page2.asp))
50mm f/1.8 = 130g (canon (http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=152&modelid=7306))
So 670g total l-)
(Using the 17-85 instead does take the total slightly over 1kg.)