Point the figure-head at the glass. Smash! Smash! Into shards.

[reddragdiva]

B-Movie was the Night of the Living Ixus. I took the Ixus 50 to use and the Ixus i to show people (goth_twiglet was really quite taken with it). hazyjayne or someone near her had an Ixus 750, which really is very 'l33t and the huge LCD is actually useful. kjersti bitched at length about her crappy Casio and wished she had an Ixus again. I severely tempted hsw to just get an Ixus 30/40/50. eyeliner297 was going wild with her shiny new old Ixus v2 as well. Hey kid, yer first Ixus is cheap!

This person was heard to claim, wearing this outfit at this club, that she really wasn't a goth.

I was doing a lot of continuous shooting (hold the button down to get several shots), which worked really well at ISO 400 outside. I got somewhere over 200 shots, will probably put up about 100-150 and am increasingly concluding that flash just plain sucks and should be avoided as absolutely far as possible. The pics won't be up for a while — the host reddragdiva.co.uk was on is still offline, and I want to move it to the new server properly then start adding new stuff. (I have all the pics on hand, but not a backup of the MySQL data.) Actually, I should just switch to the new host and put a "restoring soon" notice on it. Hmm.

Everyone stayed home to avoid the stifling saunalike heat ... what this meant was there were few enough people that the sauna effect didn't happen. Mind you, I spent most of the evening outside anyway, with Abi and secretlondon. With vampwillow and abigailb in attendance, helping represent the Wikipedia Cabal.

Tonight is Swarf at Slimes and Antilight. arkady is still completely buggered from the heat, so I fear Antilight is looking much less likely. But I am about to start getting ready properly for the gig. How did it get to be six already, and why is it still so buggering hot?

Update: Liz is too unwell to be left tonight, so I'll need to stay home. Ah well.

Comments

[zotz]

Yes, but it wouldn't take any extra space to put a bounce flash in a compact - therefore, what really sucks is the manufacturers' decision not to do so.

Their decision may be a good one commercially, of course. Photographing clubbers may not be a big market.

[reddragdiva]

Many larger 'compacts' include a swivel flash, but this definition of 'compact' is getting toward being "not SLR." The cameras I'm talking about are really rather small.

Clubbability is actually an increasing market for these things - almost any digital ultracompact does fine in daylight, but low-light performance is markedly different between models. However, the clubbing market requires a camera to be tiny.

In any case, anyone can do well with a great big light bucket on the front of their camera. There's hack value in getting the often really rather nice shots I do with something small enough not to piss me off ;-)

[zotz]

There is a fairly inherent conflict between a camera being small and having good low-light performance - the obvious exception being making the flash head swivel upwards. I can see that it's not something that makes a big difference to manufacturers, but it's the easiest way to make it easier to take good pictures in the dark without making the camera bigger or vastly more expensive.

The other two ways are to increase the width of the optics (expensive and bulky) or to increase the quantum efficiency of the sensor (also expensive, but without the size penalty).

[reddragdiva]

The sensors are getting better. The latest Fujifilm sensors have usable ISO 800 and claim usable 1600 and 3200. (Noting of course that it's "ISO emulation" by just amplifying the CCD output.) ISO 1600 in a club, I might never need flash again.