When you're twenty-one you're no fun.

[reddragdiva]

• George Carlin's last interview.

• The perfect monument to George W. Bush.

• Colour my underwear important (courtesy sly_girl).

• Can I call it or what.

• DIY solid state drive. Put your desktop OS and apps on this and watch your system fly.

I have a new toy: a Fujifilm FinePix F20. I really wanted an F30 or F31fd — the miracle compact for low light — but they are going for stupid prices (was £125-150 new, going rate is £175-£200 second-hand on eBay) because the replacement, the F50fd, is mediocre rubbish owing to megapixel mad cow disease.

The F20 has the same sensor, body and optics as the F30 and slightly less whiz-bang. The old F10 is actually as good as the F20 or F30 for low light, but, as DPReview said, "the user interface appears to have been designed by someone with either a very cruel sense of humor or a serious sadistic streak." So when I spotted the F20 in the runout section of PC World Tottenham Hell, I checked prices online (£100-130 new, £70-80 second-hand on eBay) and grabbed it this morning for £70 new.

ISO 1600 sample. The 100% crop looks like a pointillist watercolour. Still better than ISO 400 with the Canon.

I'm the happiest girl in the whole USA! And I will be giving this new shiny toy a serious workout tomorrow at Vagabonds. "All those embarrassing photos of your drunken friends will be sharp, detailed and colourful"? We'll see! Who else will be along?

arkady secured a bit of work sysadminning from home, which pays for the camera (as I'm in the background supplying mentoring and Freda-wrangling) and a small dollie for her. And eating and stuff. I suspect I'll be sponging drinks furiously tomorrow evening.

Freda has been having a marvellous time playing with steer's old MP3 player. It looks like my work phone, so she holds it to her face and babbles into it, and finds it vastly amusing when I talk into it going "Freda? Hello? Hello, Freda!" Or when I pick up my phone and talk into it while she babbles into the MP3 player. And it has a speaker, so she can press the button on the front and it makes noise. I'll have to bring my old one back to life after all, 'cos this one's hers whenever she gets her hands on it.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's a grave and undeserved insult to the valuable work done by sewage plants!

[reddragdiva]

"Hi, I'm from the Child Rapist Anti-Defamation League. I understand you compared us in some way to spammers."

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Take photos of Freda doing this with the new camera! And post them here.

[reddragdiva]

Fanclub shots to come :-)

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

She is so beautiful! Nice camera :)

I've found my Fuji FinePix A900 to be quite suitable for a variety of uses. I am glad to hear positive news of the other models as well :)

I'm going to take it on a ferry ride and find out how it handles vibrations and motions before I fly to Convergence. Being able to take photos through the window of the plane would be awesome indeed.

I find that I take pictures frequently, even though there really isn't anything interesting around here, simply because I love using my camera. Digital FTW!!!

(BTW, it's totally your fault that I bought a digital in the first place. Thank you :D)

[reddragdiva]

Fujifilm are also anecdotally (i.e. I don't warrant this in any way!) pretty tough in the difficult environment of goth rough-housing ...

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Fast cycle times are a good thing.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I've always liked Fuji digital cameras (my first was the MX-700) and I now use a... (wait for it)

Fuji F30.

I sort of got it by accident; I had been wondering for a while whether digital cameras had started to deal properly with low light (because, essentially, all snapshots in the UK are taken in bad light), and I asked in a shop. They said 'oh, you want the Fuji F30' and I went home, read the reviews, and went straight back and bought one. I think it was more than £150 though; that must have been the end of line price. £179 maybe?

I love it to bits. In particular, its ability to shoot still pictures and video footage in concerts is fucking amazing. Here's a fairly random example: Jon Boden at the Union Chapel (http://pics.livejournal.com/bohemiancoast/pic/000742sp/) taken with zoom from about four rows back. I wish I'd bought two. If it breaks I'd be sorely tempted to get another on eBay.

[reddragdiva]

The harsh truth about compacts and high ISO. Precis: get an F30 or F31, they're better even than yer pseudo-SLR-shaped "superzooms".

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

dSLRs are much better. However, if you try to use a dSLR at a concert, you will be asked to delete your pictures or escorted out. For the most part, people who take photos with 'cheap compacts' can do so unmolested.

Meanwhile, famed duckspotter drplokta has been taking great pictures at 180 zoom or something with a Panasonic pseudo-SLR. Not, obviously, in low light. So it's very important to work out what you want to do with your camera before buying.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

When you're twenty-one you're no fun.
I need to ask - which song. I can hear it, but I can't pin iy down.

[reddragdiva]

Ladytron, "Seventeen." My subject lines these days tend to be whatever line I remember from whatever's stuck in my head most recently.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Aha! No wonder I can't recall.
They are coming to Perth. Playing the Bakery (next to the old -new- CES in Northbridge).

I will miss them like VNV and Covenant. 17 and 'Wired for Sound' were the only songs by them I even remotely cared for.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

The F50fd isn't half bad. The difference between an actual photo which is a bit noisy and an indistinct dim blob should not be underestimated.

It does, however, have a habit of, when not explicitly forbidden from use of the higher film speeds, selecting them even when it ought not. Thus, this bit of graphical commentary. (There's also this commentary on the photographer.)

Olympus SP-510UZ

[vicki-t-veg.livejournal.com]

What do you think of the new camera I ended up with?

Re: Olympus SP-510UZ

[reddragdiva]

No idea, I know nothing about it! How are you going with it?