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Any shutterbugs in the house?

"I made a couple 13x19" prints from images shot with the g12. They looked fantastic."

See... you hit it. One of the guys from where I work made a number of trips to Europe to see our new coiler being built and also our new guillotine shear for cutting steel 3" thick prior to entering our finishing mill. He was using a G11 and he made huge prints of the pictures he had taken of the new mill equipment as it was being manufactured and when he went for factory acceptance tests. His prints were stunning in both clarity and in detail. Seeing the prints of his photos had much to do in fostering my desire to get a G12.

How much zoom do I need? I truly don't know. The 5X zoom of the G12 may be plenty. I think about the chance of seeing a grizzly bear fishing upstream from where we are going to fish for sockeye salmon on one of the rivers on the Kenai Peninsula and I'd like the zoom so that the bear will fill the frame if I am lucky enough to see one from a safe distance. The guy who invited me along on the 2013 trip was up there this past July and got pictures of a moose cow and her calf. I felt the camera he used didn't do justice to the composition.

Getting a decent DSLR is on my wish list. Getting the money together for it is another story.

Do you use any of the multipliers with your G12?

Thanks!
 
I learned the 4 color print process. Separate sheet for each color.

Until recently - astronomy buffs used film. CCDs were expensive, and the cheaper ones had too much noise.

I was able to get decent 8x10 from a 3MP Kodak.

As for post processing, sometimes you have to. I had a photo I really liked from kid's wedding. Small room, lots of people, you can't move stuff. I photoshopped the table away from the front of her gown to get what I wanted.
My Canon SX30 has an 800mm zoom. I mostly use it for bird identification. You would be surprised at how much you still have to crop to get a good look at a bird. It also has IS.

If you want bears - check for any articles from Moose Peterson. He has a book out with photos like you want of bears. He will mention distance, lens, etc.
Moose Peterson's Website
 
zuben el genub said:
.... As for post processing, sometimes you have to. I had a photo I really liked from kid's wedding. Small room, lots of people, you can't move stuff. I photoshopped the table away from the front of her gown to get what I wanted...
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So true. At a crowded birthday party I was snapping photos with my little Olympus digital camera with built-in mechanical zoom plus electronic zoom. I happened to catch a shot of a homely/dorky girl and for whatever reason in my picture she looked much less homely.

At the party when we plugged my camera into the projector for everyone to enjoy the pictures, she saw herself better than ever before and asked for a copy of the picture. Only problem was - - she had her sweater on backwards :p :p :p

A little wizardry with PhotoShop and Viola! - - a candidate for Pig-O-The-Month !!

What's the old saying?:
You know it's going to be a bad day when ....
.... you put your bra on backwards and it fits better.
 
Postprocessing -

I know a guy who played a bad guy in one of the Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies. He had his high quality studio photograph - a work in black and shades of gray of a big swarthy scowling tough guy with bushy black hair, a big black moustache, wearing a black suit and black necktie, holding a black machine gun, with two black bullet holes in his forehead courtesy of Dirty Harry.

The photo was badly worn and in very bad condition. It took me several days of hard work with PhotoShop and my Hewlett Packard scanner to produce a restored copy. But I was able to deliver a glorious restoration in every size from poster-size to wallet size.

Hugo is a real-life former badass former Army Special Forces assassin who likes to say that
"he could hand you your a&&hole with a potato still in it".
 
zuben el genub said:
Yep. There's plenty of stars with oddball names to keep me occupied.
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Photographing obects in space is an art all its own. It's not easy to capture photos of those little points of light. And what appear to the eye as just points of light often are actually pretty spectacular and sometimes pretty *wierd*.

The "star parties" on Mount Tamalpias just north of San Francisco attract some pretty impressive telescopes and some pretty impressive camera gear.
 
Extremely long time exposures are sometimes required. Some people at the star parties have motor driven telescope mounts that allow them to track the celestial object as it moves across the sky.
 
Dieben said:
It amazes me how the teeny tiny lenses on cell phones can take as good photos as they do. But they can't do real quality work. The tiny fixed lens on a cell phone offers nowhere near the image quality or versatility of good interchangible lenses or even of a decent zoom lens.

I spent big bucks for fast lenses and long lenses and closeup lenses for my Nikons and Minoltas, It's very rewarding to see the quality results that those lenses can produce.

I spent a few bucks for zoom lenses that are handy for a wide variety of decent informal memorabilia shots at family gatherings, sports events, etc.

Yes, my cell phone snapped that spectacular panorama on that hike in the mountains. But PhotoShop can't enhance that image into the work of art it could have been had I had a Nikon with me.
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On one hand the cameras in cellphones are convenient because they're there when I forget to bring a better camera, have space/weight limitations, or just didn't think I'd need to take a photo. For me it's usually on the job where it's really convenient to take some snaps instead of copying long strings of text by hand, drawing a schematic by hand...pretty much anything that saves me the trouble of writing or drawing. (There are lots of places where I have to leave my phone behind when entering a secure area. I really miss my last camera-free phone!)

On the other hand a smart phone, being a multipurpose device, will never be an adequate substitute for a real camera. Since I'm not taking the kind of shots that Bob takes, and tend to leave my 35mm camera bag behind because it's another large ~25 pound bag to carry, I'd like to get one of those cameras that fit into a jacket pocket, but have pop-out lenses that, while not as good as a "real" lens are at least able to give me a lot more light collecting area than a phone lens, and reasonable optical zoom.
 
I recently ran across this website and now it got me to thinking I should get me a nice point n shoot cam and get into photography more. I just need something better then the phone cam to start. I'm going to look into it more during the new year.

Blipfoto - the daily photo journal

Any suggestions on a nice camera between $100 - $200 for a beginner?

Thnx.
 
Wow, the Fujifilm FinePix S4200 looks very good and reasonable priced.I'm going to keep an eye out for it.

Thnx.
 
Whatever camera you get make sure that it has a way to add attachments to the lens.

My Olympus has no threaded adapter ring on the lens itself, but there is a threaded adapter ring at the base of the lens. So I added hollow extension tube to hold the filter out in front of the lens and also to serve as a sunshade. To the uneducated eye that honkin' big cheap extension tube gives the appearance of a big gnarly multi-hundred dollar lens :p
 
saptech said:
Wow, the Fujifilm FinePix S4200 looks very good and reasonable priced.I'm going to keep an eye out for it.

Thnx.
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I saw the FujiFilm S4200 in a discount store tonight and it is not a camera that I personally would buy at any price.

There is no obvious way to put a protective filter or any other filter in front of the ridiculous mechanical zoom lens that looks like a turtle sticking its head and neck in and out of its shell :laugh:

Of course omitting important features is typical of cost-cutting measures in cameras sold these days, even some cameras costing over $1000. It makes me appreciate my intelligently designed "old and clunky" metal-bodied cameras all the more, even my "cheap" old cameras.
 
Even an older Panasonic Zoom - like the FZ series will shoot auto like a point and shoot, but it also had most of the modes a lot of pros use. Shutter, Aperture, Manual. It did a decent Macro. You could learn how shutter and aperture speeds affect photos. It would also let you control white balance. I had an FZ8 - It would also take 52mm filters which are inexpensive. You had enough zoom to learn about distance without carrying other lenses. Canon and Nikon also have cameras that do this.
The newer cameras also have Image Stablilization or Vibration reduction.

I use the Canon SX30 right now - it has a really long zoom which I only use to identify a bird rather than trying to make an arty type picture. But it takes filters, also does manual and it's good for hiking around with as it's light. Only drawback, it doesn't shoot RAW.

The Canon and Nikon zoom cameras have aftermarket books that explain stuff easier for a beginner than the manual.
 
I bought a Nikon D7000 about a year and a half ago and am still learning how to use it properly. Softly softly catchee monkey. I'm getting some nice pics now. The beauty of digital is that there are no processing costs whatsoever until you have something you want to print, and you can take many many photos looking for that one. I try to capture whatever's around me that catches my eye, from birds and other wildlife (got a nice one of a blue dragonfly last week) through to architectural/art type pics.
 
I've found the 20D and the SX30 to be far different in color. If I try a picture when the rocks in Utah "flame" the DSLR doesn't really see the color. I had to up the reds in settings and use an enhancing filter. I shoot RAW for the simple reason I don't like the camera making my decisons. The SX30 only did JPG unless you used the CHDK hack.

However, the Panasonic FZ8 also shot RAW. It did see the right colors, but just not as vibrant. I just got the SX50 and it does shoot RAW. So far, not too much difference between RAW and JPG. I forget which program, but you can get it from a Linux repository.

I've seen differences in blues and violets in all cameras. Some on the red side, some on the bluer tone

I also don't like the DVf on the digitals.It's slow. I like the optical viewfinder on the DSLR far better.

The SX50 isn't bad. You can lock in if you are using the zoom. This one goes to 1250 which is handy for identifying a bird. The only trouble is Canon opened the lens a little more, making low light shots a little harder. Apparently, Canon did something with locking the ISO on certain shots. CHDK just put out the hack for the 50. I might wind up going that way.
 
Just starting to getting into this... ordered a Nikon D7100 this week and got a nikor 16-85 vr off ebay. Gonna work on getting familiar with the camera when I hike this summer... going to Italy for 2 weeks (Venice, Cinque Terre, Florence, Rome, Pompeii) in the fall and am hoping to get some decent shots.

Pretty excited to get serious about a new hobby.
 
Whilst waking around the Sydney Botanical Gardens looking for photo opportunities recently I heard the sound of a couple of old biplanes over the harbour; looked up and saw to my amazement there was a wing walker on the larger of the two.

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Found out later they were shooting a music video for Pit Bull the Cuban American rapper.
 
I can't imagine getting a serious DSLR that doesn't save photos in uncompressed bitmap format, regardless of the filename extension. Especially when multi-gigabyte storage cards are getting more and more affordable. I especially like that my Nikon body allows me to save in both raw and cooked formats, so I instantly have Internet quality JPEG images to give to family and friends, but still have the full NEF file to work of if I do take one of those "one in a million" shots.

If you're a Nikon D7100 owner, this link might interest you. It's a NEF codec for Windows (must be since it's a .exe file), and it works with a lot of Nikon AIO cameras and DSLR bodies. With this you can view NEF files with Windows viewers, just like other photos.
 
I don't bother with any of the Windows viewers, Nikon ViewNX works for me.

I think taking a good pic often amounts to seeing potential and then taking a few different angles to see later on which one works best for you.

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Those are some pretty nice pictures. We should start a thread were we take one picture per day. It must be a picture taking with a camera or cell phone camera, not web stock pictures, only the ones we take with our cameras.
 
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