5 posts tagged “s550”

Yeah, I know, for now this personal-personal blog of mine continues to mostly rely on photo updates, now that I finally own my first-ever decent digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix S550) and have been shooting just a ton of shots around the city for the last several months. And hey, I guess that's not so bad, to just rely for a little while on mostly photo updates to this personal blog; I spent four years when younger, after all, primarily expressing myself through images instead of words, so I guess that's not such a bad thing to rely on again for a bit, while I go through an especially productive time in my professional writing life right now. (I'm managing to get four to five book reviews written per week these days, each of them a thousand words long, plus a new guest essay for the HarperCollins UK blog twice a month, plus am working behind the scenes a lot right now on the next couple of CCLaP's original books, coming out this March and April, as well as a virtual book tour for the center's first published author, coming later this month.)

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that I got a new photoset up at my Flickr account recently, a collection of random shots during a winter walk this week through the Uptown neighborhood here in Chicago where I live; they came out really nice, I thought, so wanted to let you know about them. Here's what I have to say about the set over at Flickr...

"Can I just mention again how flabbergasted I am by the richness of this camera's black-and-white mode? Maybe it's because I shot almost exclusively in black and white in college (for financial reasons, natch), which is why I think about it a lot more often than others; but the fact is that my little Coolpix just on any given day can naturally capture the kind of super-rich range of graytones I would've killed for most of the time in my old film-and-paper days in the '80s. The fact is that almost no 'digital darkroom' work was done at all on these images; that's a far cry from my old physical darkroom days, when extensive work would have to be done nearly every freaking time I walked in there."

Anyway, hopefully more personal updates coming here more regularly this winter; but for now, at least lots of new photo updates regularly. I hope you enjoy.

Okay, one more thing before hopping into bed, curling up with the freshly-arrived Dark Knight DVD (thank YOU, Netflix!), and seeing if I can't get a whopping 13 hours of sleep the first day after my oral surgery, and thus stay on my usual sleep schedule...

I keep forgetting to take these while I'm out, but I finally took my first series of photos yesterday for use in panoramic software, resulting in the stitched image you see above. Do make sure to take a look at it in its biggest size; that's the precise thing I'm excited about with this S550 and panoramic shots, is that I can finally do ones that are high in quality from one edge to the other, ones I could actually print and frame if I wanted, after doing a fine-tuning of the settings and getting a really smooth shot (which admittedly today's example is most certainly not). I've got to get more into the habit, but I'm really hoping to present a lot more of these, and to hopefully take more care with future ones and get the elements more perfectly aligned.

This is the 3300 block of North Clark (north to your left, east to your right), halfway between Belmont and Roscoe in the Lakeview neigborhood on the northside, or in other words three city blocks (six human-sized blocks) south of Wrigley Field. It's precisely because this block is so typical, I think, that makes it a perfect example of why nearly every block on the northside sometimes seems cool and unique; notice here the great combination of old Industrial-Age buildings and modern, how several have been gussied up in a "Painted Ladies" style color scheme, how many of the first floors have been renovated into very contemporary pubs and restaurants and boutiques, how the entire thing is surrounded by tall, mature trees. Chicago is a very thriving, very alive city, in an American Midwest full of dying Industrial-Age cities; and you can see that even on just random corners of residential neighborhoods, which the block in this image very definitely is. I have to confess, I really loving in a section of an urban environment where I'm surrounded by scenes like this, an active city environment that relies on the cultural, architectural, and culinary diversity of immigration combining with the jobs and money of the creative class, sitting on a broad sturdy base of history and gravitas. Maybe that's a bit too flowery a way to put it, but you hopefully see my point.

I can manually set this film speed on my Nikon, actually; although of course with this all being digital, what I'm really doing is telling my camera's computer chip to electronically adjust itself in a way that mimics the way physical film works. So to begin with, I thought I'd see what would happen if I deliberately used a high-speed setting in a low-speed situation, a fairly sunny morning in my neighborhood under an ISO of 2000 (2000! sheesh). And as the above photos show, sometimes I got the exact desired look I was going for -- a very gritty, grainy, urban look, the same thing that slick magazine photographers do when wanting to attain an edgy "city" look.

But then here you see the problem with forcing a high-speed film in a low-speed situation; that since such film needs such profoundly less light, it tends to get severely overexposed in bright situations like the sky. That's why one generally uses slower speeds in daytime situations, because the grain of the film is more suited for bright surroundings, and thus you're given more leeway for capturing a richer range of grays.

And then just to drive the point home, here are a couple of sky shots from the deliberately high ISO of 2000, compared to the same situation at a film speed of 100, a dramatic difference.

So then if you want to compare all this to the wonders of the modern world, these next several shots were all taken under the fully automatic mode; where I simply ran around pointing the camera at crap and pushing the trigger, and the camera itself in a tenth of a second would instantly analyze its surroundings and adjust all its settings for what it thinks is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing combination for human eyes. And you know what? My little freaking camerabot ain't that bad! All of these photos here, I think, are just astounding in their complexity; a much richer range of graytones than I was usually ever able to coax out of my physical film, back in the '80s when I was a photography major and developing my own film in the student darkroom every evening. plus with the perfect amount of light let in each and every time. Why would anyone complain about these functions on modern cameras, when in the old days you could easily waste half of your entire roll on pictures that didn't have these exact right manually determined settings?

So then, that night, the opposite test; forcing a film speed usually used in bright daytime situations during a night shoot, in this case an ISO of 100 because 64 was just too low to even register. And again, as you can see by this next little run of photos, there were indeed a number of shots that came out exactly the way I meant by deliberately using this setting; high in quality, rich in grays, with a deliberate blurriness to the moving elements since the shutter speed has to remain so slow with such fine-grain film.

But then as these photos show, there's a problem with this as well; that since slow film needs so much extra light, using it at night means sometimes insanely long shutter speeds, meaning lots and lots and lots and lots of blurry, jittery photos, especially when running around without a tripod. Again, that's simply the tradeoff, and why one usually shoots instead with much higher film in such situations, at least an 800 ISO when outside at night, if not more like 1600.

Ah, but none of this takes into consideration the best option of all, the one that didn't exist when I was a photography major in the '80s, and that we would've killed for; the ability to just open these photos in a piece of software and tweak the damn thing yourself long afterwards! Astounding! Check out all three of these photos, for example, all of which came out less than spectacular when first out of the camera (two too bright, one out of focus), but that I was able to fairly easily save simply by going into Photoshop and playing with the settings afterwards. Remember, though, that any digital manipulation done after the shot is the literal permanent playing with pixels, degrading the quality more and more with each tweak; always better to get as close to the shot you want right within the camera itself, so that as little digital darkroom work as possible needs to take place afterwards.

Thanks for sticking in there with this extra-long report!

I'm always forgetting about this, since before this week I'd never owned a camera that could take advantage of this -- but it turns out that more and more modern ones are now embedding information about themselves as metadata within digital photos, in a way so that a service like Flickr can scan an uploaded photo and tell automatically what kind of camera was used to shoot it. Whenever Flickr determines this, in fact, it runs a mention of the camera brand in the lower-right corner of the webpage; and if you click on it, it will take you over to a centralized page at Flickr concerning just that camera itself.

The page is cool enough just for the interesting statistics it presents -- how many fellow Flickr members own that camera, how many photos from that camera brand were uploaded yesterday, how fast new people are buying that particular camera -- and of course it's very smart of the Yahoo-owned Flickr to link on each page to the section at Yahoo Shopping where a person can actually buy the camera, as well as read consumer-style reviews. But here's the deal-maker, and why it makes so much sense to go automatically to Flickr anymore when wanting to know more about a particular camera; on the same page, they also display a good 10 or 20 thumbnails of photos taken with that camera, sorted by what other members find to be the most interesting images in the system. And this is just so much better a way to instantly and profoundly understand what you think of that camera, and whether or not you should buy it -- by simply getting a broad cross-sample of actual images shot with that camera, from a variety of people with different skill levels, just about the only really important aspect of a digital camera altogether. Believe it or not, for example, all five photos shown above were taken with the exact same Nikon Coolpix S550 I now own (shot respectively by Flickr members sefosse in Italy, NANIPOLLITO in Spain, rumble maso in Italy, cocoi m in California, and .stephen. in Canada); and that means that I too now have the theoretical opportunity to shoot photos just as cool as these, for the first time in my particular life since way back in the early '90s when I was a film-based photography major in college, running around with a Pentax K-1000 and a box full of Ilford Extra Matte.

Anyway, just wanted to point this out, for those who didn't realize this existed at Flickr, and who are currently on the lookout for a new camera themselves. It's a great place to get an instant and powerful look at whatever particular brand you're thinking about getting.

I just got back to Chicago a couple of hours ago, not long enough yet to have actually gotten out and done anything, and hence taken some photos along the way with my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550, which I received a few days ago as an early Christmas gift from my parents down in suburban St. Louis, specifically so I could go out with them and actually help pick it out; but I did shoot a 30-second video during the plane ride home earlier, so thought I'd go ahead and upload it while I'm sitting around my place this afternoon unwinding.

Oh, did I not mention that this new digital still camera of mine actually shoots full-motion, full-sound, low-light-capable videos too? It does! In fact, with the 4-gig memory card I currently have in there, I can technically shoot a full half-hour of such video before having to sync with a computer, at a quality even higher than what you're seeing here (but more on that in a moment). Yes, I know, ever since getting this camera, I've been raving about stuff that a whole lot of other people now take for granted with their digital media devices (and I'm sure to keep doing a lot more); but all this crap is new to me, damnit, and I'm simply astounded by the quality these tiny little decently-priced little devices all have! What you're looking at above, for example, is WAY MORE than enough quality I need for most of the amateur videos I will be shooting in my life -- artistic events, holidays, little mise-en-scenes like you're seeing here -- a quality at least as good as old tape-based videocameras from the '90s, back when they were the only home option available; and since you have just an insane amount of manual controls over that video image as it comes in, too, plus a device that automatically makes a series of "smart adjustments" to whatever conditions it's in, technically you're actually recording a better-quality video than most '90s tape-based cameras, not simply equal.

All us multimedia artists were dying to each own such a videocamera back in the '90s; and the lucky friends of mine who actually did ended up shelling out $500, $600, $700 or more for the privilege, and of course don't forget still with no way to actually edit such videos at home. So how absolutely mindblowing, I think, that this ability now essentially serves as a little-advertised freebie fringe benefit of purchasing what is mostly advertised as a still-image camera, with photographs that are literally five times higher in quality than what you're seeing here; and now combine that with the fact that all these functions all wrapped together in one device still costs less than $200, and can be slipped into your pants pocket. And now add to THAT that you can now cut all these videos together on your home computer, in a way almost as professional as full-time studios, with software that comes for freaking free when you buy the operating system. BLERGH. Careful, don't slip on all my brain pieces splattered across the floor.

If you're under 30 and take all this stuff for granted; SHAME ON YOU, or I guess congratulations for living in a wonderful brave new world of the arts, and how I wish I could put you in a time machine and bring you back to the '80s when I was in high school and college, and access to even the most basic professional equipment was such a privilege and rare pleasure and something you would literally beg, borrow, steal or whore yourself to keep getting to use. No wonder there are tens of millions of people in this country now releasing their own short videos and movies on a regular basis; I guarantee you there'd be that many doing it twenty years ago too, if simply all this technology had existed then as well.

*Oh, and the technical note I was going to mention as well: For those doing research about the S550 and who have come across this randomly, know that the camera originally outputs videos in a Quicktime/Mac-friendly AVI format, 640 x 480 pixels, at a fairly high 1 megabyte per second of footage; the 33-second video today, for example, was originally 33 megs in size when first coming out of the camera. I then not only compressed it into an MP4, but also lopped off the top and bottom to make it 16:9-friendly; that brought the total size down to a much more reasonable 6 megabytes, but of course also dropped the quality quite a bit. I don't mind so much, because I knew I was only going to distribute it as a much smaller streaming video online; but do understand that this video looks dramatically better when watching the original AVI on a television screen.