Miscellaneous Photos

I've been playing with a few different cameras this morning and, for the most part, I'm left feeling disappointed by the quality of the photos.  Well...  really...  I'm left disappointed with the quality of the cameras I used for a number of very good and valid reasons.   

To be fair, these cameras I've been playing with this morning are ones with the smallest sensors (four-thirds inch sensors) of all but one of my cameras.  And, with the amount of experience I have in photography, I would rate this four-thirds format as the poorest quality I have ever had the displeasure to use.  Being disappointed by my photos from these cameras isn't much of a surprise.  

Ironically, the one camera I have and still use regularly with a smaller sensor (a 2/3 inch sensor) is far better than these four-third cameras (some with four-thirds lens mount and newer ones with micro four-thirds lens mount).  Even though it is no surprise that I'm consistently disappointed by these cameras, it is still quite frustrating.  I occasionally pick up one of these little cameras in the hope that I might be reminded of something good in them but, instead, I feel like I'm always left disappointed.

Contrary to what most people would do when disappointed (drop it and move on to better gear), it is this consistent feeling of disappointment that prompts me to often grab one of these cameras for the challenge to capture an image I like with a tool that I find unreasonably limiting, frustrating and simply rather poor.  When I have the energy for it, I like a challenge.  I also like to be well versed in the limits of all my tools including photography gear.  And, unfortunately, the limits here in this four-thirds format are unusually hard limits.  With a lot of cameras in other formats, you can often push the limits but that does not work with this rather lousy format.  

All of these images below were shot through our open living room window but this first one is of a tree that is a good distance from our house rather than right next to the window.  The icicles, however, are hanging right over the window.  

I like the clarity of the bare branches against the dramatic darkened sky in the first image.  The lighter clouds were in the perfect spot to contrast nicely with the clarity and darkness of the bare branches.  This contrast of light and dark being in the right spots is what immediately caught my eye so I instantly pointed my camera there and captured a photo.  The other contrast in this image is the softness of the overcast sky compared to the sharp hardness of the bare branches.

This first one was a really easy shot to capture and it is not bad at all for what I would call a snapshot.  As much as I like this shot, I attempted to do some additional dodging and burning to make the image only slightly more dramatic and the digital image started falling apart.  This is what I absolutely abhor about this format.  

This next photo was a little more difficult to capture because I had to guess when the drop of water would fall from the icicle.  This particular camera has close to zero shutter lag so it was pretty easy to get the timing correct after a few tries.  And, the photo is fairly sharp too so this isn't so terrible for a camera I don't particularly like all that much...

This last photo was a real pain in the butt to capture.  

For this photo and only for this photo, I was using my oldest digital camera which is from 2005 and the shutter lag is painstakingly long.  Because the lag between the moment you press the shutter release button and the moment the shutter actually responds is so long, it is incredibly difficult to capture something like a drop of water falling from an icicle!  Trying to get the timing just right is a serious exercise in frustration.  To make things even more frustrating is that this camera only captures one photo and then needs a few seconds to write to the memory card so I can't fire off two images in quick succession.  Even when getting my timing close to being right, there is no burst mode to help me capture one good photo in a burst of approximately ten photos.  With this camera it is just one photo at a time with a few seconds of waiting between shots.  

I chose to capture a photo with this camera for two reasons...  First, it is my oldest digital camera with a shutter release that lags more than any other camera I own and it is always good to brush up on old skills.  Second, this camera has a very unique Kodak CCD sensor that typically produces lusher images but, since there is no color in this image, there isn't really anything lush about it.  This is one of the last digital sensors that Kodak made when they were still in business and some photographers still rave about this particular sensor.  At times, I do rave positively about this sensor despite all the camera's shortcomings.  Still...  although very old digital technology, this is a nice photo but it was very frustrating to capture it!

So, at the beginning of this blog entry I wrote how I was always left feeling disappointed when shooting with any of my cameras with a small four-thirds sensor but I only had rather kind words for the images as I described them which can be construed as conflicting information.  I'm still feeling frustrated and disappointed because it took too much effort to capture only what I would call "good" photos.  These aren't photos with "outstanding" quality.  They aren't even photos with what I would call "excellent" quality.  They are "okay" or perhaps "good" but it required far too much effort to capture this quality with these cameras.  That is disappointing and frustrating.  

I could have picked up one of my Sony cameras and captured excellent photos in a few short minutes with great ease.

In the end, I'm sure someone reading this is wondering why I simply toss these cameras in the trash bin.  Believe me, that thought has crossed my mind many times.  There are two reasons for keeping these cameras for now.  

First, one of these cameras has been converted to infrared only.  Until I have a better camera converted (which isn't happening anytime soon), I won't part with this IR-converted camera.  

Second, when we go on trips with the grandchildren (which is happening more and more recently) or have an event at our house with the grandchildren, I need enough cameras to go around so the grandchildren can get useful experience in photography.  Again, so until I replace these crappy cameras with better cameras (and again, which isn't going to happen anytime soon), I am stuck with them.

There is just something about these four-thirds sensors that I really do not like.  Lack of bit depth perhaps...  poor noise control perhaps...  lack of resolution perhaps...  bad ergonomics perhaps (for me)...  poor menu systems perhaps (for me)...  a feeling of abandonment by the manufacturers of this format perhaps...  terrible, overly bright and overly saturated colors perhaps...  very blue white balance in most situations perhaps...  and basically inferior image quality when we combine combinations of all these complaints.

Still, I managed to eventually, capture a few good images this morning.  Uggg...  there is just no joy in using these particular cameras so they actually push me away from a hobby I have loved since early childhood rather than draw me in, get me excited and inspire me to shoot more photos.