Tuesday 18 May 2010

My photographs

I've placed my photos on many sites, but today I've added my own site to showcase my swim photos. www.channelswimphotos.talktalk.net doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it's free and it's a start.

New Camera

If you've read my other blog, you'll know that I spend the summer observing channel swims. These are quite challenging photographically, because:
The observer is on a small boat bobbing up and down in the English Channel.
The swimmer, who is the main subject is also bobbing up and down and usually moving forward too.
Swims often start in the middle of the night, so there is little light and the weather can change from one minute to the next.
My trust Panasonic cameras (DMC-FZ20 and LS80) have given good service, but neither gives good results at high ISO settings and the DMC-FZ20 is only 5 megapixels. I therefore started looking for a replacement and instead of just diving in and buying the first camera I saw I did lots of research.
I was looking for 12 megapixels, good high ISO/low light performance, 12x zoom, manual, or at least versatile controls.
The first candidate was a Fuji S8100fd, which I actually bought, because it seemed to have a good spec and the price was reasonable. Unfortunately both examples that I tried suffered from a weird fault. As soon as I pressed the shutter release the viewfinder (or the LCD screen) went blue and fuzzy, so that it was impossible to see whether the subject was in focus. The camera was returned to the shop and I went back onto the internet to carry out more research.
The Canon G10, or G11, are highly rated, but only have 5x zoom. That's less than half the range of the DMC-FZ20, which I felt was too limiting. The Nikon range has the P100, but the reviews I read didn't rate it very highly.
In the end I just had to buy another Panasonic, the DMC-FZ38 (FZ35 in the USA), which ticked most of the boxes. The only things that let it down are the low light performance, which blurs details at ISO 800, or more.
The biggest drawback is that all Panasonic camera number images from P100000, so I now have at least 3 files with the same file names. Panasonic please take note!