I want a new camera
A few days ago it occurred to me that my beloved Fuji Finepix F10 with its 3x optical zoom is probably not going to cut it for my upcoming safari tour in Serengeti. I began to research photography on safari tours and I discovered the almost universal recommendation of at least a 300mm lens (about 10x).
Given that I’m already over-budget as it is, a new camera was definitely out of the question and I pulled-out my older Fuji Finepix S5000 with its 10x optical zoom. I looked for some batteries, put them in, set the date, and fiddled around with it. Not satisfied with what I saw, I dug out the manual as well and read through it as if it was a new camera.
And just like that, I suddenly began to grasp the basic technical concepts of photography and how they worked together.
So I’ve spent the past few days playing with my old camera while wishing I could buy a new dSLR so I could really put to practice what I had learned. Today I decided to take some practice shots with passing cars on the road to see the effects of different shutter speeds and aperture sizes and I learned a few more things about my camera, about exposure compensation, and so on. I also became resigned that in sunny Africa, my camera was probably not going to produce the best results at 1/60s ISO 200 as it can only go down to f/9 while zooming. Even in sunny Australia things were over-exposed.
Then I decided to play around with the RAW functionality of the camera and here I was surprised. The resulting images, taken at the same settings, were much better without the camera processing it. In fact, all I can think of is: WHAT THE HELL?!
All the images were taken at 1/60s at f/8, ISO 200 with -2 exposure compensation. Below the images have been re-saved in lossless PNG after a resize.
And after processing:
As is obvious, the original RAW image looked pretty decent as it is whereas the original JPEG image acquired a really washed out look to it. Even after cleaning-up the JPEG image it was still nowhere near the untouched RAW original. I never thought I’d have to shoot in RAW but this looks like it might be a good excuse to do so–good thing I’ve got a 2GB xD memory card coming in on Monday as shooting in RAW is really going to eat-up space!
