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| Friday, September 9, 2005 |
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Shootings 
| | Today's my stepdaughter gets married. Here. |
| | Aside from my participation in the wedding (and the guy-work required... moving tubs of ice, hanging lights on trees), I'm doing my usual volunteer duty as a photographer. |
| | One problem: my camera, a Nikon CoolPix 5700, crapped out. For the second time, it's gone back to Nikon for repairs. |
| | So I rented a Nikon D70, a 6-megapixel digital SLR, with a large Nikon 24-120mm zoom lens. Last night at a pre-wedding party, I shot about 300 pictures with it. With many of them I used the Nikon flash I bought for the CoolPix. |
| | It's a damn good camera, but heavy as a storm grate, and far less user-friendly. In fact, it's annoying beyond endurance. |
| | Earth to Nikon: outsource your UI to your photographers. |
| | I know it's hard to distribute several million permutations of variable settings across two displays, ten buttons and two wheels, but there has to be a better way. |
| | I really missed the CoolPix last night. It's not nearly as responsive or flexible as the D70, has 1 less megapixel, and a UI that may actually be worse; but I can take better pictures with it, mostly because the flip-out viewer allows me to shoot candids from all over the place. I don't have to heft a contraption the size of a surface-to-air missle launcher up to my eyeball and set off conditioned responses (Smile for the camera!) in the direction it's pointed. |
| | I almost decided to turn in the D70 and buy the CoolPix 5700's latest successor, the 8-megapixel CoolPix 8800. But then I read the review, and decided that it's not worth $800 more than the 5700 I'll be getting back from the shop in a couple weeks. It's still slow, and retains many of the older model's shortcomings (though it does overcome some of the worst ones, mostly in the UI). |
| | It's a damn shame that they don't put the responsive electronics in "consumer" cameras like the 8800. Also that none of the reviewers give any respect to the requirments of candid (or even field) photography. You'd think, looking at the galleries, that all anybody ever shoots are flowers and buildings. |
| | Okay, rant/off. Gotta go haul some stuff around. |
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