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A Love Letter To A Camera
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I have been using Nikon SLRs since 1964, from the Nikkorex to the D90, passing by the FM and F3. My family and friends all know about my hobby, and have always come to me for advice on purchases or methods. For the last few years most of the requests which have come my way have been about using compact digital cameras, and I have come to dread the digging through menus and manuals on CDs instead of the printed versions. Nothing seemed to be simple and I never wanted one or thought I would buy one for myself.
Then I read one of David Pogue's posts in the New York Times called " Love Letter To A Camera"!
It extolled all the virtues of the Canon S95, and sounded so over the top that I decided to look at this marvellous camera. I handled one for a while in a store, all the time scared of dropping this little object, but without reading the manual I was able to find out how to set it up, quite easy in fact, so I decided to buy one for my wife.
I unpacked it when it arrived, set the date and time, set the mode dial to aperture priority, and leaving everything else to factory defaults went out into the garden to make some tests.
What a clever camera it is. Setting the mode to aperture priority automatically set the ring around the lens to the aperture control which is the best place for it, giving f2.0 to f8, and without touching a menu I can change exposure compensation, swap between macro and normal, turn the flash on or off, and delete any bad shots. I normally shoot raw, but using the S95s setting of raw and jpeg I found that it is usually very hard to better the jpegs produced by the camera by taking raws into ACR. It is not even necessary to turn the camera on to view the recorded shots!
So, a confirmed Nikon user, I bought a Canon which lives in my shirt, or trouser pocket, and my wife only sees it when something catches my eye and I whip it out!
As a further comment, the shot which was chosen for the 'Straight From The Camera' challenge was a jpeg taken with all camera settings at factory default, no sharpening or cropping, but taking it into CS5, a small tweak in vibrance, and some sharpening gave me a 18" x 12" print of pleasing quality, worth showing to friends.
Roger
I have been using Nikon SLRs since 1964, from the Nikkorex to the D90, passing by the FM and F3. My family and friends all know about my hobby, and have always come to me for advice on purchases or methods. For the last few years most of the requests which have come my way have been about using compact digital cameras, and I have come to dread the digging through menus and manuals on CDs instead of the printed versions. Nothing seemed to be simple and I never wanted one or thought I would buy one for myself.
Then I read one of David Pogue's posts in the New York Times called " Love Letter To A Camera"!
It extolled all the virtues of the Canon S95, and sounded so over the top that I decided to look at this marvellous camera. I handled one for a while in a store, all the time scared of dropping this little object, but without reading the manual I was able to find out how to set it up, quite easy in fact, so I decided to buy one for my wife.
I unpacked it when it arrived, set the date and time, set the mode dial to aperture priority, and leaving everything else to factory defaults went out into the garden to make some tests.
What a clever camera it is. Setting the mode to aperture priority automatically set the ring around the lens to the aperture control which is the best place for it, giving f2.0 to f8, and without touching a menu I can change exposure compensation, swap between macro and normal, turn the flash on or off, and delete any bad shots. I normally shoot raw, but using the S95s setting of raw and jpeg I found that it is usually very hard to better the jpegs produced by the camera by taking raws into ACR. It is not even necessary to turn the camera on to view the recorded shots!
So, a confirmed Nikon user, I bought a Canon which lives in my shirt, or trouser pocket, and my wife only sees it when something catches my eye and I whip it out!
As a further comment, the shot which was chosen for the 'Straight From The Camera' challenge was a jpeg taken with all camera settings at factory default, no sharpening or cropping, but taking it into CS5, a small tweak in vibrance, and some sharpening gave me a 18" x 12" print of pleasing quality, worth showing to friends.
Roger
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