Lightning scary.

[reddragdiva]

arkady and I made it to the Dev last night for much-needed medicinal liquors. I also brought the Casio EX-S600 to play with in low light (more test shots for the buyer) and the Ixus 50 for when I wanted a camera I knew. The Casio doesn't do as well in low light as the Canon, or maybe I just don't have the hang of it, or maybe it's its refusal to go over 1/8 second by default (which results in less blurred shots with less light). I couldn't get the hang of the white balance either and would probably need to read the manual.

The Ixus 50 gave me a lot of entertainment as I proceeded to play silly buggers with the white balance. Arkady did similar things with the Ixus 400. You need a slightly bluer than default balance for tungsten, and for dark goth pubs you need even more. So I white-balanced off the reddish-brown varnished bar wood! These are all at ISO 400 emulation.

Is it 4pm or 10pm?

A shot down the bar, and the piece of bar I told the camera was "white."

Of course, you have to be careful to set the white balance back to "cloudy" for the flash:

The custom balance is lovely for no flash in dim light ...

... but you forget it at your peril. That's how biased it actually is.

Flash with "cloudy" white balance, ISO 50. Subjects are Nick, Arabella and Amanda.

This morning I woke at the crack of arse for a job interview, also happening to be hung over. But I applied four hundred and forty volts to my buttocks, made it to the interview and did quite well, I thought. Bumped into zoo_music_girl out in the street — she just happens to work in the next building. Pimp calls continuing through the morning. It's all good.

Update: And another interview (somewhere else) tomorrow at 11am. Whuh?

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Did you see this?

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/FlashNoFlash/

[reddragdiva]

No, but there's a new model of Fuji Finepix that can be automatically set to take flash/no-flash pairs every time. Which is a feature I wanted the moment I'd heard of it. That would be an ideal data source for FlashNoFlash.

[reddragdiva]

Finepix V10 does the flash/no-flash pairs — see bottom of page. 83x63x24mm, which is a bit large for me to be entirely happy with, but I hope this feature proves not to suck and is adopted by others.

Mind you, the ISO 800 and ISO 1600 Finepix F10 test results (the previous year's model) really, really catch my eye. An ultracompact with a usable ISO 1600!

[lastaii.livejournal.com]

I can vouch for the F10, it's a fine camera with a stupidly long battery life. Jodi now has my old IXUS :)

I should warn you tho its latest bretheren, the F30 goes up to ISO3200 (http://www.dpreview.com/news/0602/06021403fujif30.asp)...

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

The first one of the last three does wild things to people's cleavages...

[reddragdiva]

Heh. I think her breasts were in just the wrong position for the ambient light.