Been spoiling myself

[cdukino]

... with a new camera. Ok I didn't take the bees knees (or whatever the expession is in english... salmon's nose in Dutch if you translate it), meaning a top proffesion camera with a bezzilion functions for a truckload of money... but I sure did get an upgrade of the one I did have. Been playing a bit with it and the macro function (after a bit of practice) and the white balance and sharpness blows my old cmera out of the water and then some. And that's just after 10 minutes of practice and basically not really having a clue yet.

Here's an example (cut out of a unaltered picture) directly out of the camera. They are grains of suggar on a blue printed piece of paper:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v502/cdukino/suikertest.jpg

Now to get a decent light set up, some practice time and I should be able to upgrade my crappy pictures :)

[Ritual]

Now, most of us here are guys and guys NEED to now what type of camera it is!! ;) As much technical stuff you can possibly give us! :D

[Malebolgia]

Amen Ritual! We don't need no girly sugar stuff! Technical information...that is what we need!

But okay I now what camera it is: a Canon powershot A710 IS

[gi6ers]

I've just bought the exact same camera, it's the nuts:

link (http://www.customhobby.com/forum/index.php?topic=219.msg2964#new)


Cindy, find your custom white balance settings, you can go very cheap on the lighting.

[green stuff]

Arrggg! That's what I need!

Thanks for sharing Cindy :). I'll be looking into this camera soon enough.

[Duende]

I need a new camera myself too. What I've been using is actually my work camera that's on loan from my boss which is an older Olympus Cammedia C-4000. I'd like to get my own, but having difficulty deciding what's good for an amateur like me to get. Thanks for the sugar shot, Cindy (why does that sound like porno jargon?), I'll have to look into this camera.

Also, "cream of the crop" may be a better term to use than "bee's knees" ;) That's an expression my grandma might use. But "salmon's nose"??? You Dutch are a weird folk. :p:

[Maestro]

And here I was, reading it wrong and thinking you had peed your pants and wanted us all to know about it...

That is an impressive picture! Where'd you get it??

John

[callumrice]

Think Ill need to upgrade my camera, I take pics of sugar and it just looks like a canvass of white!

[gi6ers]

"Been spoiling myself - here is a closeup of a gram of coke I just scored."

[cdukino]

hahaha... bit of a rough cut for coke isn't it.

And maestro, don't worry if ever soil instead of spoil myself I am not very likely to publically show that.

[gi6ers]

Oh, make sure you change the image stabilisation to shoot only as it eats batteries!

[cdukino]

Thanks for the tip.

[Wren]

Interesting coincidence to see several others buying cameras. I had to buy a new one last week as well. Apparently dropping cameras on the ground is not so good for them, and the lens on my Nikon stopped telescoping so it couldn't focus at all. :-< I had liked the Nikon for macro, and apparently Nikon is still the king of macro. But I hadn't liked it for other stuff much, it seemed particularly poor at pictures of people indoors even in decent lighting, and there were a few other things I didn't like. The reviews I read of the current crop of Nikons suggested they had similar strengths and weaknesses to my older one, so I started looking around at other options. Seems you can get a decent camera for a pretty reasonable price now, and there are plenty that are nice and compact.

But then I saw the sexy 'super zoom' models. 10-12x optical zoom seemed cool and potentially handy. We looked around for a bit and settled on the Fujifilm S6000fd. FD stands for face detection, though I haven't quite mastered that feature yet. Not as inexpensive as the compact digital cameras, but not far off from what I paid for the Nikon, and packed with features. (Though made a little more expensive by the accident protection warranty I felt it prudent to purchase...) It's a larger camera, sort of an SLR lite. And it has a larger CCD card than many, which apparently is more important than megapixels and helps it capture much better in low light situations. You can run with everything automated - like Cindy I was snapping away bare minutes after getting it out of the box. But it also lets you control shutter speed, exposure, all kinds of stuff I'll be figuring out as I go. Another cool feature is 'natural lighting' mode. You can set that one to do two shots in a row, one using the ambient lighting then a second using the flash, so later you can choose whichever of those looks best for the situation. I'm still mastering the macro, though as gi6ers recommended, I recently started playing with the white balance, and that has made a huge difference. Even in regular picture taking, I liked the results better when I started going in and selecting white balance modes.

In the event that there are other folks out there looking for cameras, here are some sites I found to be handy resources.

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/cameraList.php
http://www.dpreview.com/

The second one is pretty slanted to SLR users, but the reviews on all the cameras that have them are very thorough, there are also user comments, and picture galleries for shots with each camera. The first link also has very nice reviews, and includes studio and macro shots that are useful comparisons for our purposes.

And now for some trivia, courtesy of Discover magazine: "The term "bee's knees" was coined by American cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who was also responsible for "the cat's pajamas," "the flea's eyebrows," "the canary's tusks," and (apropos of nothing) "Yes, we have no bananas."