Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Fujifilm 2GB xD Card



Here's good news for all of you Olympus + Fujifilm digital camera shooters (and you know who you are): Fujifilm has just announced that their 2GB xD Memory Card will be available in September. Those of you with legacy Fujifilm cameras (anything over a year and a half old?), take note - some models will require a firmware upgrade, some models may not record movies properly, still others will say "2 GB? Why on Earth would anyone need all of that storage?", chase you out of their yard, and die quietly on their settee in front of the wireless.

BTW, why are they still called Fujifilm?

Nikon D80, two new lenses announced.

Of course, this was the big day that Nikon unleashed the full details of their D80 Digital SLR upon the world, and every blog and their mother had to have something to say about it, so why should I be any different? Really, the D80 does deserve the attention it's getting - it seems to be a perfect blend of high-end features passed down from the D200 and D2X/H family, and user-friendly elements from the D50 and Coolpix cameras. Here's the bullet points:



- 10.2 megapixel Nikon DX CCD sensor
- New Nikon image-processing engine (Whites whiter! Color-safe!)
- 3D Color Matrix Metering with variable-size center-weighted and spot metering (which can be coupled to the...)
- 11-point AF system
- Pictmotion slideshow allows for various fades between images and music to be added (as seen on the Coolpix S6)
- In-Camera Retouch Menu includes D-Lighting (from the Coolpix cameras), Red-Eye Correction, and Color Filter effects
- Fuel Gauge provides more accurate battery life information
- Accepts SD cards (SDHC compliant)

All this for an expected price tag just short of $1000 when they hit the stores sometime in early September.



Nikon also announced two new lenses today. The first is the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor. For those not familiar with Nikon's own special brand of gobbledy-gook, that's means it's near the 35mm equivalent of a 28-200mm focal length, a relatively decent aperture range, Extra-Low Dispersion glass (and here you thought ED meant erectile disfunction), Internal Focusing, Silent Wave focusing motor, and a smaller image circle exclusively for the Nikon DX sensors in their digital SLRs.



Perhaps even more appealing is their 70-300 f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor. All the same abbreviations apply, with the addition of Vibration Reduction to minimize the effects of camera shake. Expect to plop down about $400 and $560 respectively.

Make that two weeks with...

Yes, so my plan to put the Pentax Optio T10 through its paces ran into a slight snag, namely real life. Never enough hours in the day to do all the things you want to do, and this was no exception. Still, I intend to give a report on this camera - it may just have to wait a week. My time spent with the T10 so far has not been all that pleasant - the touch screen interface is quite nice, but it seems Pentax forgot to spend much time on the camera part of it. Still, I want to give it a fair shake, and I just haven't had the time to do it yet.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

A Week with...

Today we provide the first of many installments of hands-on camera reviews, A Week With..., where Photowonk will spend a week putting a current digital camera model through its paces. Hopefully, we'll provide something different than just the standard, anal-retentive camera review we all know and love. What makes one camera great and another suck goes well beyond just resolution and zoom, and often has more to do with the experience of using it. Are the various settings where you would expect them to be? Is it too light/heavy? What about the software that comes in the box? Was it worth the amount you paid for it?

And so, Photowonk starts A Week with the Pentax Optio T10. Here are the basics:

optioT10

- 6.0 Megapixels
- 3x Optical Zoom
- 3.0" LCD display

What sets this camera apart from a lot of the other compact, 6MP cameras is that 3.0" LCD doubles as a touch display, thereby eliminating almost all of the buttons from camera body itself. Will this feature make the T10 a winner, or will not having dedicated buttons for specific features (like my beloved Canon Powershot SD450) make every little setting a pain in the butt? Stay tuned...

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Crowns, Trains and Autoexposure


One of things that fascinate me most about photography is that it is a medium so familiar to everyone. Much how most everyone doodles in the margins of pages when they're on the phone, but then swear they cannot or do not draw, almost everyone takes or has taken photos at some point in their life, but so few people would claim to be photographers, either for fun or for profit. This has always been one of the hurdles photography has had to clear in being considered a fine art - the fact that anyone can take a photo or use a camera (although my experience in camera retail might suggest otherwise). Particularly now in the age of automatic metering and focusing, taking a minimally well-exposed photo is quite easy - it is what to photograph and how that still seems to separate what we consider art and what we consider document.

What got me thinking on this tangent again is two recent instances where I was asked about particular photographic techniques in quite different fields. In one case, a customer asked if I knew anything about pinhole lenses for model railroad photography. In another instance, Erin was wondering what constituted clinical photography, and a Google search yielded one of Dine Corporation's many products for dental photography. In neither case is the resulting photograph an end unto itself, but rather a document of a particular hobby (model railroading) or process (dentistry). And yet, I think I would find the photograph, and the means by which it was made, to be vastly more interesting than model trains or someone's mouth.

Anyway, what all this rambling is about is that most of us, in one way or another, use a camera on a regualr basis, whether for family or vacation snapshots, documenting a process or interest, or simply to create a photograph. What I want to know from you, dear reader, is the ways you use cameras that I might not know about. Do you use a camera for work? Does your hobby often require some specialized piece of photographic equipment? Let me know!

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Food Porn

The other day I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about food porn. This article was quite a revelation to me; it made me realize that I am not, in fact, a freak for photographing my food. You see, this is something I've been doing for quite some time without even thinking about it. It most often occurs when I travel, but has been know to happen at home as well.

A friend of Neil's, after looking through my photos on Flickr, asked Neil why I always photograph my food. I'd never given it much thought before and I quickly realized that I didn't have a concrete answer. Why wouldn't I photograph my food? I photograph other things I find enjoyable or interesting, and food definitely fits into those catagories. I want to remember it. I want to share it with my friends, and assuming they're not sitting across the table from me, that's the best way to do it. Sometimes I want to try to duplicate it. But mostly, I think, I just feel compelled to capture something so wonderful yet so impermanent.

Here are a couple of photos from a great food city, Philadelphia:

Not a great photo - but a great dessert - from Morimoto


















Philly cheesesteak, the likes of which can't be found 'round these parts

PingPongPixel


The next time you worry that your digital camera isn't as fast or high-resolution as it should be, take comfort that at least it doesn't take 2 + a half hours to generate an image, and is more than .0027 megapixels. Of course, your camera also isn't powered by ping-pong balls.

Two Media Technology students from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands created PingPongPixel for their graduation project as an example of "interactive non-luminescent display systems." In English, this means a shelf of six different colors of ping-pong balls, varying shades of gray, being processed and dropped into place 45 at a time, until 2.5 hours later, a picture of Elvis emerges. Or perhaps you would prefer Gandhi, or Margaret Thatcher - it's a very versatile system.

The inventors promise a home version by 2007. Okay, not really.

PingPongPixel

Friday, July 28, 2006

Nikon D80


Hello all! Neil here, with the first of many posts. I might as well chime in on the topic du jour (or perhaps yester-jour), that being details and images of Nikon's upcoming D80 DSLR being leaked out into the blogosphere (are we still using that term?). From the images I've seen, it looks like the body is a nice hybrid of the D50's simple layout, the D70S's more prosumer-aimed features (second control dial, dedicated buttons for flash compensation and metering options), and the D200's higher resolution CCD sensor and ginormous LCD screen. Based on these photos, this is the second Nikon DSLR to make the move to SD cards, a move I expect more and more models to make in the future. Of course, this could all be proven incorrect when we get the official skinny from Nikon on 9 August. Oh, I can't wait!

Welcome!

Howdy. Welcome to PhotoWonk. This is a collaborative blog between Erin (that's me) and Neil. Neil is the one with all the photography knowledge; he has a degree in it, he teaches it, he freelances, and he manages a camera store. What he doesn't do, however, is get much pleasure out of writing. That's where I come in. Through some as-yet-undetermined manner of shared entry-writing, we aim to bring you a comprehensive photography blog that offers lessons, product reviews, some amount of editorializing, and, of course, photos. If you're a photography newbie, hang around and pick up some of the basics. If you're a serious amateur or a professional, you could probably tell us a thing or two. But that won't stop us from forging ahead and spouting off the very crème de la crème of our photographic knowledge.

So please, bookmark us, add us to your RSS, or do whatever else you do with blogs you want to read all the time. Because you'll want to read us, oh yes. Just you wait.