Superzoom cameras: take me to the bridge

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

There’s an excellent Labs round-up of Superzoom cameras (also commonly called “bridge cameras”) in the latest issue of PC Pro. My only criticism is that it doesn’t makes a strong enough case for its subject.

Most people tend to think that there are only two types of digital camera to choose from: point-and-click compact cameras majoring in convenience, and high-end DSLRs majoring in picture quality. Anything in between is – almost by definition – seen as an uncomfortable compromise. However I think that the vast majority of users would actually be far better off with this intermediate format.

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Why you (probably) shouldn’t worry about diffraction in your photos

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

As most right-thinking people will already know, I wrote an article in the latest issue of PC Pro explaining how to turn your photos into high-quality print-outs.

And I wrote what I considered to be an innocent line: “…for landscape shots, place your camera on a tripod, use a remote shutter release to minimise the risk of camera shake, and apply a small aperture (f/16 is ideal) to get as much of the frame in focus as possible.”

This prompted subscriber Simon Barnes to write to PC Pro’s editor, Tim Danton, to say: “he makes a canard, suggesting f/16 is good for depth of field in landscapes, when in fact, even at full frame this is already straying into diffraction, which will be worse with smaller sensors. He’s not the only one saying this of course, it’s regularly trotted out.”

Quite apart from teaching me a new word, Simon was raising an interesting point, which I’ll attempt to tackle here. I should add that the pratical effect of diffraction in photography is to limit the resolving power of the camera as a whole – in other words once diffraction sets in, your images will in theory be softer, with less detail. (more…)

Why you should shoot in raw, in five pictures

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Digital SLRs have become so easy to use that anyone can take great photos with one. But beginners quickly hit one question without an obvious answer, namely: should I be shooting in raw mode?

It’s an issue we’ve touched on before, and of course it’s covered in depth in our Ultimate Guide to Digital Photography. But it comes up so often that I thought it might be useful to give a simple overview of what raw mode means, and a few examples of its benefits. (more…)

“Big cameras” banned

Monday, June 30th, 2008

I had a parental visit at the weekend, and we decided to take in some of the tourist sites around the capital. On Sunday the itinerary involved a quick spin on the London Eye – it does actually move much faster than it appears to from my office window – followed by a gig in Hyde Park.

To the embarrassment of my family I had items from my bag confiscated at both.

This often happens to me, as an inveterate tinkerer and technology hoarder; bike parts taken by Science Museum staff, USB drives and mobile phones at a laptop manufacturer’s design centre. It’s no big deal to me, as long as it’s justified.

On the Eye it was a small toolkit I carry in case my bike falls to pieces. Fair enough; the spanner could be used as a weapon, perhaps, or to undo the capsule and send it plunging into the Thames. At the concert, though, it was my DSLR which was flagged up, as I was told that on the second day of the two-day event, staff had been told to stop “big cameras” from entering. This has been happening more and more in the last year or two.

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