camera on Oxymoronical

A review of the Canon EOS R7

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 20:42:21 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed photography. I’ve had a Nikon D7000 for nearly 12 years and apparently I’ve taken some 80,000 shots with it. But over the past few years I’ve been taking less and less photos and finding I wasn’t enjoying it as much. I’d rarely take the camera out with me and even when I did I found I was throwing away most of the photos I took. I finally decided it was time to try something new.

Professional photographer for a day

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:25:14 +0000

A funny thing happened last weekend. I got to pretend to be a professional photographer and did a photo shoot. Ok it wasn’t highly paid (actually it wasn’t paid at all so technically I wasn’t professional!), but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

I had only just got my new camera (the Nikon D7000 for those interested) so this was my first chance to really play with it and as it happened my girlfriend needed some shots taken of t-shirts and things that her company were selling. Luckily her sister (who is ridiculously photogenic) was also in town and agreed to be a model.

Do I need a new camera?

Sun, 15 May 2011 21:53:49 +0000

It’s been about a year since I last went through this. The result of my last plea for help was a number of recommendations and I ended up buying the excellent Canon Powershot S90. It really is a great point and shoot and I think pretty much exactly what I needed at the time to help me learn a little more about photography. I always figured it would be good test to be able to play with and figure out whether I eventually needed to move onto something more. I guess the main thing that disappoints me a little about the S90 is its slow speed, it can only take about a shot a second in RAW. I often could do with something faster. Also while its low-light performance is better than anything I’ve ever used before it still isn’t as good as I’d like. I could certainly do with a longer optical zoom but that’d have to be combined with something that used faster shutter speeds I guess.

Shooting fireworks on New Year's Eve

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 03:55:00 +0000

There are many blog posts on the subject of how to best set up your camera to shoot fireworks but I was so surprised at just how well it worked out for me that I thought I’d add mine to the pile. Also I wanted to make sure I remembered what I did right and wrong here for next time I try. You’re going to need three things really:

A camera that is up to the job. Perhaps surprisingly you don’t need a full SLR for this, but you do need something that will let you manually adjust the aperture, ISO and exposure times. Shooting in RAW is vastly preferably. I was using a Canon Powershot S90.
A basic tripod. Exposure times will need to be long so you won’t be able to manually hold it steady and you’re shooting upwards so not much other than a tripod will do the job.
Lots of luck. How much really depends on the fireworks display. The longer it is the more time you’ll have to refine your timing and aim. In my case our display was at home one with just 4 fireworks going off, ridiculously I managed to get the setup pretty much right first time.

The basic setup is straightforward. You want a small aperture, apparently somewhere in the range of f/8 to f/16 is golden, my camera limits at f/8 though so that is what I used. You want a fairly low ISO value too, I shot at 100. In an ideal world you’ll want a camera where you can manually hold the shutter open for however long it takes the firework to fire off. I didn’t have that though so instead I just manually set an exposure of 10 seconds which I figured was a long enough to capture a full rocket. Then set up on the tripod, point in the direction you think the firework will go and hope. Remember that fireworks go quite far and your camera will probably capture a decent area of the sky so chances are you’ll get it in frame, whether it is way off to one side is pretty much luck the first time though.

Time for a new Camera

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:54:19 +0000

I’ve never been terribly impressed with my current digital camera. It’s an Olympus FE-280 that I bought on the spur of the moment in Boston a few years ago when my previous camera decided it didn’t want to stay charged any longer. Feature-wise the Olympus probably has almost everything I want, but its menu system is so convoluted that I can never find how to enable the things I’m after in a reasonable amount of time. In the past few years it has slowly developed some bad pixels (both on the view screen itself and on the CCD cell and now the battery charger is starting to flash ominously suggesting that the battery is about to go to a better place so I think it is about time to start looking for a replacement and this time I want to do some research.