More perfect camera

On the trail of the perfect camera, maybe Sigma will be worth keeping an eye on...

The perfect camera

The perfect camera: Pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, cheap reasonably priced.

Ricoh came close except for the noise thing.

Canon arguably got closer.

But what I was really waiting for was a digital something that crossed an XA with an OM-4, only 'more so'.

Then I realized that the real advantage of a pocket sized camera is that it's with you all the time: in your pocket. And while you're waiting for the perfect pocket camera, it's obviously not, well, in your pocket. Thus, waiting for the perfect pocket camera defeats the whole objective of a pocket sized camera.

So I bought one of these & happy I have been.

There's a moral there somewhere...

Flash is bad

Actually, it's not flash that's bad. It's on camera flash that gives flash a bad name. After all, just what is natural light?

Two steps to getting flash off camera:

1. One of these for the flash bit

2. A set of these for off camera bit

Now, if only I could remember what I learnt about lighting at college...

RAW Windows

One of the problems with RAW formats has been the need to use specialized tools to work with the files. Pro photo tools now typically understand many RAW formats, but that doesn't extend to all the other apps that I want to use with photos, or use photos in. In Windows Vista (or more precisely, WIC) that's been made a lot easier by support for image codecs for RAW formats. You can grab a codec for the RAW format used by your camera and then any app that uses WIC to access images gets automatic support for that file type. Great for users and also great for developers, who no longer have to worry about loads of complex code changes just to support the latest RAW format variant.

There's a list of codecs available from different manufactures on the Microsoft Professional Photography site [link] which, interestingly for me, also includes a link to a DNG codec.

Although I shoot with Canon (and therefore .CR2 RAW files), for various reasons I convert to DNG. At the moment that results in a hybrid workflow where I shoot RAW+JPEG because some apps I use don't like DNGs. Looks like we might be getting closer to the time where I don't need to do stunts like that :-) so I'm off to play with codecs for a bit!

Digital Lomo?

Nik's been playing with a Lomo with some results that reminded me of playing with pin hole photography with an OM-4 (the joys of Off-The-Film-Plane metering ;-).

I'm not sure I quite get the 'getting away from digital thing', but that's probably because for me the whole renaissance thing was getting into digital with a DSC-V1 having burnt out on photography. Probably one too many wedding. So I'm quite intrigued with the idea of sticking a lomo-lens on the front of a DSLR body. Litratista has the details on do it yourself, or you can grab a pre-built one for a variety of lens mounts from holamods.