Fuji Finepix S5800

Well, I’ve had my ‘new’ Fuji Finepix S5800 camera for a little while now and played with it a bit. I’ve come to the conclusion that it serves a completely different purpose to my trusty little Finepix F700. I’m also very glad that I didn’t put the F700 on Ebay and sell it because I’m still carrying it in my handbag … something that I definitely can’t do with the S5800!

On the other hand, the S5800 has the 10x optical zoom and the macro/super macro features that I particularly wanted. I take quite a lot of close-up photos of my plants and this is where the bigger camera really comes into its own. The wider range of pre-sets for things like landscape, fireworks, snow etc are pretty useful too but I really need to explore the manual settings on the camera. For some reason, it seems to struggle with high contrast – a bright background and a darker subject. Things end up looking washed out or poorly contrasted. This is something I need to work on.

I’m also having real difficulty adjusting to the size and bulk of the S5800 over the slim oblong shape of the F700. While it does feel solid and comfortable in my small hands (I was very wary of large cameras for that reason), I’m always having to be extra careful in case I drop it. It’s not as easy to grab in a hurry if there’s a good shot. It’s much better when there’s time to compose and set up the shot properly.

I got a proper bag for it but the camera, spare batteries, battery charger, cables and manual makes it rather a bulky and heavy addition to carry around if you’ve already got a handbag in tow.

I need to spend more time with this camera and learn how to use it properly.

A New Year

Well, it’s been a long time since I updated my T189 blog but I have a few minutes spare this evening

I did save up my September birthday money and finally bought myself the Fuji Finepix S5800 digital camera together with a 2Gb SD card and a Tamrac bag. Christmas brought a travel charger set together with four 2700Mh rechargeable batteries so I can keep the camera ‘well fed’.

It’s a really nice camera and I’m glad I bought it. But I haven’t had much opportunity to get ’serious’ with it since I actually got it I did take it on a short break to Lisbon in Portugal in December and took about 200 pictures with it. I’ll try and post some on Flickr soon.

Of course, after the compact, relatively lightweight Fuji Finepix F700, the S5800 feels both bulky and heavy (the latter due mainly to four AA batteries instead of an internal rechargeable cell). But it suits my small hands and the controls are pretty intuitive after getting used to the way Fuji organises things with the previous camera.

I’ve also got so used to the small F700 living in my handbag, available to whip out at a moment’s notice and snap a quick shot, that the more ‘prominent’ S5800 feels much more conspicuous. I’m not overly keen on wearing it around my neck on the supplied strap but said strap isn’t really long enough to sling over one shoulder so I can carry the camera on the opposite hip.

I hope everyone who reads this blog had a merry Christmas and a pleasant New Year – I know I did!

Some Images from the ’summer’

While I’m still saving up and lusting after the Fujifilm S5800 (as explained in the previous post) I’ve still been using my trusty little F700 to take photos this ’summer’. Actually, the islands have been very fortunate and had much better weather than the mainland. Even when the rain was pouring down and the floods were rising on the mainland, we were having our rain at night and then the clearance came along at about 11am – visitors had a leisurely breakfast and lazed around until the weather improved before going out.

So, here are some photos I took:

First, a red hot poker, but this is the bigger, fatter, autumn-flowering Kniphofia rooperi.

This is a close up from underneath of one of the flower spikes on our yucca

This one is a fluke shot of a housemartin returning to one of the nests under the eaves of our house

And this is the beautiful and unusual flower of Stapelia variegata – a small variety of Carrion Flower

I hope you like the photos. I tend to be much more ‘picky’ about images since I took T189 but I’m still not a skilled user of Elements despite all the work we did with it. Cropping, sharpening, levels and straightening tend to be my stock tools.

Now I must go … we’re out to dinner with friends this evening and I don’t know WHAT to wear!!!

Quandrary!

Oh Fuji, what have you done???

Thrown a spanner in my works, that’s for sure *sigh*

I was almost settled on the S5600 over the S5700 when I found that there was a brand new S5XXX camera just released – the Fujifilm Finepix S5800 which is SOOOO tempting! It’s supposed to be available from October 2007 but the first ones are now appearing on Ebay and a seller has it for sale on Amazon as well.

It’s around the £150 mark at the moment but I’m waiting to see what price it will be from Amazon itself a/. because it will be post free and b/. I do value Amazon’s customer service. I bought an Archos Gmini MP3 player last year and it went wrong within a week – I was able to print out a personalised returns label from the Amazon site, send the faulty player back and subsequently received a brand new one in less than ten days.

So, not surprisingly, I’ve put my new camera plans on hold for a little while so I can save up the extra cash to get the S5800

Not feeling QUITE so down :-)

My disappointment at my T189 marks is now mellowing and it’s certainly NOT going to stop me taking photographs! *lol*

Having a Fuji camera, I signed up with the MyFuji website and registered my camera. They send monthly emails and stuff, run competitions and forums, have useful Photography tips etc. Recently I received an email offering a 15% discount on Fuji refurbished cameras It’s valid to the end of the month and I have some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket so what to buy? I think a bridge camera would be the best option and, hopefully, nothing too bulky or heavy that would make it difficult to carry around. So …

Fuji Finepix S5600 Zoom

OR

Fuji Finepix S5700 Zoom

(Sorry Georgy, I really can’t afford a proper DSLR – in fact, I think it would be wasted on me to be honest!)

Decisions …. decisions …. decisions ….

Almost crunch time!

Trust me, it’s a challenging process trying to whittle down your T189 portfolio to just ten images to submit for the ECA!

I selected about fifty images that I thought had potential, trawled OpenStudio and Flickr to glean further inspiration then narrowed the choice down to about twenty. We aren’t compelled to submit ten images using completely different techniques but I felt it was probably best to select ten that illustrated various important aspects of digital photography.

My problem was a portrait image. As I’ve mentioned before, my family runs a mile if I point a camera at them so I had to resort to an archive image. Christmas proved a particularly good source of images because people are generally relaxed and happy, less likely to bolt at the sight of a camera. I narrowed it down to about four images … then two … then put them up on OpenStudio for other students to comment on … then narrowed it down to two … tried some of the editing techniques suggested to improve them … failed dismally on one but succeeded on another.

So, if you visit my Flickr photostream you can view the ten images that I think will probably be my final panel for the ECA submission. I say think because I’m well aware that an unfavourable response to any image may well see me reviewing my choices again.

Aqua Marina’s Photostream

But, since I’m away from home tomorrow evening until Wednesday lunchtime (and I intend to take my laptop so I can show my prospective ECA slideshow panel to family members to gather their opinions), I am planning to chill out a little, enjoy a few days away (collecting autistic daughter from college) and then return ready for the final push. So the ten images aren’t absolutely definite but they are pretty certain.

Let me know what you think of them, please?

Refreshing the memory

I decided this morning that I would revisit my OpenStudio weeks and re-read the comments that students made on my images just to refresh my memory. I also went through all the images on my Flickr photostream as well and did the same. It’s interesting that there isn’t necessarily a correlation between the two – an image that was liked on Flickr and got several comments might be languishing un-commented on OpenStudio. I’ve now got a good selection of ECA ‘possible’ images and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to choose between them.

I’d like to get a fairly broad selection of images rather than mainly macros or mainly landscapes. One of the trickiest subjects has been portraits which have been common amongst other student images but which I find very difficult, not only because I feel self-conscious about photographing other people but also because most of the folk I know would run a mile rather than let me take their photo! If I do manage to ’snap’ someone it’s usually a spur-of-the-moment candid shot – grabbing the opportunity when it arises – so the images tend to be less than perfect technically but usually capture a great expression or a special moment.

The other problem I’ve had has been weighing up one image against another and trying to determine which one should be included in the ECA panel. It’s very difficult to make a decision when you’re comparing two very different images. Adding the potential for editing in the Elements digital darkroom just complicates the issue for me especially since I’ve not mastered all the techniques in the tutorials, especially the more complex week 8 techniques. Anyway I’ve always had problems making decisions and the final ten images for the panel is going to take a lot of time and deliberation.

We’re also going to be away for four days over the weekend so that raises the prospect of taking more photos which will then throw all my ECA panel plans into disarray!

Being organised

Having now reached week 9 of the course (glad to hear I’m not the only one behind in the schedule, Wanda!) it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that ‘Being Organised’ is a very good idea if you’re doing T189. Not only will you have the photos that you have already taken and stored on your hard drive (some of which might be good subjects for editing once you’re more familiar with the digital darkroom techniques), but you will also have the images that you take during the course of T189 – which could be quite a lot. I was astonished to discover than I had about 5000+ images before I even started the course! The first video tutorials are actually devoted to the important task of ‘Being Organised’ and there is one actually titled “Now where did I put that rhino?”

The Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 software provided as part of the course is not only used for the tutorials but also incorporates an ‘Organiser’ so you can keep track of all your images using tags and collections. It stores images by default in My Pictures …. which is NOT where I store my digital camera images unfortunately. I have a separate folder called Cameras inside which are two folders, one for my Fuji Finepix images (my current camera) and the other for the Kodak DX3500 (our previous camera). I also back these folders up frequently to DVD and to ‘Goliath’ our Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive.

Even more annoying, once you have PSE 5 on your computer, it likes to have total control over your images and gets really cross if you start reorganising folders and images outside its interface. It is, of course, possible to use PSE 5 to move images around and create folders but it’s not as simple and straightforward as using Windows Explorer. If you move images outside its interface, it complains bitterly that images have become disconnected from the catalogue and displays a grey box broken in two just to confirm the fact. Furthermore, any drive or media that you connect to your computer or insert into a CD/DVD/Zip/Flash drive is immediately subject to scrutiny by PSE 5 to determine if there are any images on there. Then it offers to catalogue them for you … whether you want them catalogued or not!

The only way I’ve found of squashing this annoying ‘bossiness’ of PSE 5 is simply to single right click on the little camera icon in the taskbar and select ‘disable’. This means it’s loaded but not active and you don’t have it popping up intrusively every time it detects an image that it wants to catalogue. Then, if you re-enable it before you connect your camera or card reader, it can do its stuff and then you can send it back to its slumber again.

My advice, if you want to keep your T189 coursework images separate, is to be pro-active from the beginning and create a folder in My Pictures called ‘Elements’ or ‘T189′ with subfolders for the first eight weeks when you’ll be taking images as part of your assignment. Weeks 9 and 10 are devoted to the ECA so they will probably contain a selection of images from the other eight folders anyway. Then you can point PSE 5 to the correct folder for the week when you are downloading your images from your camera or card reader. You might even create subfolders within each week folder for images straight from the camera with no editing (so you can preserve your original images) as well as another for images you are working on and possibly even another  for the actual images that you submit to the OpenStudio website. It will also make it easy to back up your T189 images to external media like a CD or DVD for safekeeping.

Don’t forget that Elements will catalogue ALL your images and, when I checked the first catalogue it created on my computer, I found it was even adding website navigation buttons and animated gif graphics. There may be an option to prevent it from including .gif images but I hadn’t found that when I installed Elements and it compiled the catalogue.

So, to summarise, my advice is to make sure you create folders so you can specify where your images are saved, use tags and collections (as explained in the video tutorials) to organise and catalogue your images, disable PSE 5 when you’re not using it to prevent it being intrusive and BACK UP your T189 or existing image collections regularly to external media so you don’t lose them.

Now I’m off to my digital darkroom to practise some of the interesting new techniques introduced in week 8 …

Sunday Gardening

I spent this afternoon gardening and was hoping to take my camera with me to catch any inspiration … unfortunately it poured with rain for most of the time so I was stuck in the greenhouse, taking cuttings and potting up young plants. Given that my greenhouse isn’t watertight, the rain was hammering on the roof so hard it felt like it was trying to break the glass and the drips were multiplying exponentially, I decided to leave the less-than-waterproof camera back in the house.

So this is one I took earlier …

“Heart of Fire”
Close-up of one of the huge blooms on my Benfica amaryllis – the colour has proved really difficult to capture effectively but I think this is a reasonably good result

Feet … meet ground …

Yes, it’s been one of ‘Those’ days today – up earlier than usual, getting stuck into work two hours ahead of schedule, lots of running around, galloping up and down stairs (four flights …) and barely snatching half an hour for lunch. Even this evening hasn’t panned out as arranged (no studying or T189 tutorials) and I’m conscious that I still have quite a lot of catching up to do over the weekend. So I haven’t even touched my camera today and it’s sitting alongside the computer looking rather forlorn. It’s the first day in quite a while that I haven’t used my camera.

The weather hasn’t been conducive to taking photographs anyway because we’ve had lots of heavy showers, however the skies have been very dramatic. The torrential downpours speak of thunderstorms in the vicinity although we’ve not seen any lightning or heard any thunder. Right now we have towering ominous steel-grey clouds marching ponderously over the northern sector of the sky but overhead it’s a pale clear blue and the birds are all still singing loudly in the trees.

It’s Midsummer’s Day so tonight will be the shortest night. It never feels like this is the halfway point of the year because July and August are still to come…. but then, I’ve always preferred spring and autumn to summer

Hopefully tomorrow will present more fruitful opportunities for using my camera … the agapanthus are beginning to come into flower and I fancy trying to get some abstract close-ups of those intricate blue flower heads.