State of the Camera 2012: Part 1
It’s been exactly two years since I last wrote about a camera on this blog. A lot has changed in the camera scene over the last two years and I fell in and out of love with the NEX-5 during this time as well. In this post I shall begin with talking about the recent trends in the camera market followed by short reviews of a few new generation cameras that I have tried or bought.
NEX-5 Early Impressions
It’s been a week since I’ve had my baby camera, i.e. the Sony α NEX-5 and I’ve been enjoying it so far. Here’s a quick low down of the ups and downs I’ve encountered with the camera.
The Good
- Outstanding IQ in any shooting conditions that can only be trumped by careful, deliberate shooting with a DSLR equipped with high quality optics
- Small enough to fit in my laptop bag, if not the jeans pocket
- Excellent iAuto mode for quick snapshots
- Fairly easy to use controls, esp. with button customisation offered by Firmware v03
- Auto HDR and Hand-held Twilight Modes really work!
- Sweep Panorama works really well for hand-held shooting. You can’t do better with a DSLR until you mount it on a tripod.
- Focuses almost as fast as an AF-D type Nikkor with D80/D90 body
- Optical Steady Shot (OSS) on the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Kit Lens is outstanding
- Movie making is super easy and fun!
Top Left: ISO 12800 shot. Top Right: “Hand-held Twilight” shot @ ISO 6400. Bottom: Sweep Panorama
My Imaging Tools and Workflow
As my photos get backed up and burnt on to a DVD, I thought I might just do a quick cataloguing of the software I’ve found useful for developing my photographs and what each does. I’d also outline my workflow as I present each software in the order in which it appears in the workflow. Just to set the context, I use Microsoft Windows 7 for my imaging tasks, and my camera is a Nikon D90, so I do use a lot of Nikon software.
Which Compact Interchangeable-Lens Camera?
These are exciting times for DSLR enthusiasts. We’ve all marvelled at the creative and operational flexibility afforded by the large dial, switch and button infested DSLR bodies and interchangeable purpose-built lenses. We’ve been spoiled for the impeccable image quality afforded by the 8.5-15x larger APS-C sensors (upto 34x larger if you’re a 35mm shooter). It’s impossible to look back at compacts. Or is it?
Most DSLR shooters sooner or later realise that their beloved hunk can’t be their only camera. They can’t carry it all the time to family events. They can’t do anything about it if they happened to dine in a fancy restaurant on impulse. Carrying a DSLR has to be planned ahead, owing to its bulk. In the last couple of years, though, the B-level interchangeable lens system manufacturers (anyone other than Canon and Sony) had been pushing the boundaries of how small an interchangeable-lens system could be made. While I’ve followed this category (dubbed EVIL — Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens), it’s right about now that I have finally settled on a system. It’s going to be none but the Sony α NEX-5 for me. If you follow me on twitter, you’d already know about this. Here’s a brief overview of stuff that I considered and what sold me on NEX-5.
Creating Hand-held HDRs
On my recent vacation, I took a bunch of bracketed exposures to turn into HDRs. Before this trip I only used a tripod for bracketing. This time around, however, I had to deal with hand-held bracketed shots. To make things a bit worse, these shots included foliage, which isn’t always stationary between shots. Picturenaut utterly failed to align these images. I tried Luminance HDR (qtpfsgui) for Windows 7 (64-bit), and it simply kept crashing. Then I tried Hugin, which too failed to do much. Besides, it was extremely confusing since it is a tool for stitching panoramas, with HDR and alignment being a part of the whole.
Capturing Rain
With the monsoons doing their usual thing and I having the luxury of a not-too-bad view of the rains, I had been itching to capture a shot of the rain in all its glory. Earlier this year I made a capture that brought out the rainy-ness in the scene but didn’t have any rain as such.
Online research about shooting the rains didn’t bring much enlightenment because there’s no “formula” for making rain shots. It all depends on what you want to portray. For me, that would be about the prominence of the falling streaks of rain. All I knew was that I had to shoot a somewhat low shutter speed for that.
Shooting in the Dark
Digital sensors have made a lot of progress on the light efficiency front. The Nikon D3s sensor, currently the most efficient sensor available, offers amazingly clean images at crazy high ISOs. Something that film shooters could only dream of. There is still some time, however, before a D3s calibre sensor makes it to consumer bodies. Meanwhile, it will help knowing the tips and tricks of shooting in the dark for the win.