Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Photography, Revisited

As a child and right up until the age of about 22 I was interested in photography, starting out with a little Kodak 110 point-and-shoot camera and then moving on to various 35mm reflexes - a Praktica LTL followed by an EE3, and eventually I got to play with my father's Nikon FG-20. Along the way I also briefly dabbled with Super 8 as well as doing my own black and white processing with noxious chemicals that stripped my nasal linings (never stick your nose in a just-opened bottle of concentrated stop bath to see what it smells like). When I first started getting paid for doing work (the grand total of 400 quid a month net, wow!) I decided to rebel against my upbringing by going autofocus and bought a Canon EOS 1000F. The lack of expandability of this range (no cable release socket, for starters) was a problem for me but I still had fun tooling around with infra-red film and the like.

This was the time of the rise of the autofocus compact, and after a while I tired of lugging an SLR (a camera you don't carry is one that doesn't get used, after all) and bought an Olympus mju Zoom 105. After a while, the hassle of getting photos developed kind of made me lose interest entirely. There are still quite a few cassettes of unprocessed film sitting around from years ago - I'm not sure whether I should get them processed or fog them as I've got no idea what's on them and I'm not sure I want to know.

I've played with various digital cameras over the years but have only just acquired one of my own, a Nikon Coolpix 8700. For my assessment of the joys of digital, read on.

Firstly, the thing feels nice. It has a nice heavy feel in the hand and in use feels like an SLR with a chunk missing on one side, which makes for a comfortable shooting position. The electronic viewfinder (proper optical viewfinders on a camera with a zoom range as long as that of the 8700 are almost impossible to build) is sharp and bright and better than most I've seen before, and the rear LCD panel has a nifty hinge-and-swivel arrangement so it can be stowed face-in to protect it from damage and dirt. This suits me no end as I usually review shots in the viewfinder anyway. It can be turned to be visible from the front (great for self-portraits or self-timer shots) and top, or stowed face-out against the back of the camera in the traditional position for these things. It's a credit to Nikon's designers that the body of the 8700 is virtually unchanged from that of the 8700's immediate ancestor, the 5-megapixel 5700, which was released in 2002 and still sells extremely well.

Controls mostly fall under the hands nicely, although there is a learning curve due to the emphasis on buttons rather than dials. This is particularly an issue where the buttons on the left side of the lens barrel are concerned (flash mode, image resolution and quality, and so on). Connectors are all on one side under a rubber flap.

The built in Speedlight (what Nikon always say instead of "flash") is useful at close range but loses power quickly over distance, which is par for the course with integral flashes. However, unlike a lot of digital cameras the 8700 has a proper Nikon hot shoe on the top, so this problem is easily fixable. The flash pops up when the camera thinks it's needed as well as when light's low enough that the AF assist lamp mounted next to it is needed, and a nifty but not encouraged-in-the-manual feature is that if you simply hold it down the camera will get the message that you don't want to use flash for the shot and meter accordingly.

As far as shooting controls are concerned I won't bore with long lists - it's got everything I feel the need for including full program, shutter and aperture priority, full manual for perverts, bulb and timed exposures, various drive speeds and short movies including time-lapse and audio, a best shot selector which helps take camera-shake-free photos at slow shutter speeds, blah blah. For the full details of all these things, dpreview has a useful page.

Enough of this - let's take some pictures.

The 8 megapixel CCD means that the maximum image size is 3264x2448 pixels, enough to print a 10x8 print at 300dpi, so as far as I'm concerned this is getting close to a 35mm negative in resolution. Having printed out a few shots on a HP inkjet with snazzy paper the results agree with this. For the genuinely quality-obsessed, RAW images (in Nikon's NEF format) are basically raw data straight from the CCD with no compression or postprocessing. In reality, it's generally hard to tell the difference between a raw image and a high-quality JPEG, and you can fit a lot more of them onto a CF card.

For an example of the kind of detail that's possible, here's a standard test subject:

This is a handheld shot which originated as an 8MP RAW image, using the inbuilt flash and manually focussed with the aid of the nifty edge-detection focusing aid the camera has to make manual focusing easier. The subject shown is a very difficult type of subject for modern autofocus to deal with due to the subject's general fuzziness and lack of sharp lines (Maybe fuzzy logic in the focusing system would help?) so manual focus was the only option. It's not a fantastic image (clutter in the background doesn't help), but it's useful for our purposes. Higher resolutions are available too - 640x480, 1600x1200 and if you really want it, the full resolution 3264x2448 version is a 6.1MB download. None of them have had anything done to them other than conversion from NEF to JPEG and rescaling using Nikon Editor.

Now, let's take a look at some detail, and in particular at the subject's cute ickle fuzzy nose, cropped from the original RAW image at full size:

Given what a small portion of the original image that is, the resolution's pretty damn impressive, giving us a great view of the subject's nostrils and even of a faint scar which shows that the little scrapper has been getting into fights.

When printed full-size on A4 photo paper, it's hard to tell the difference between the digital image and a 35mm camera. Technology's moved on so much since the last time I looked at these things that it's taken me by surprise - all of a sudden digital photography really is a viable alternative to 35mm.

This has really helped restore my interest in taking photos of things, as now you don't need to build a home darkroom to manipulate images - all you need is a Mac (or a PC if you must). For general-purpose archiving and basic manipulation, iPhoto does a wonderful job, but for advanced manipulation (and converting RAW files to something usable by iPhoto) external software's necessary.

With domestically-priced inkjets now providing things like eight-colour output (although HP's six-colour output is extremely impressive) for use on photo paper and even supporting direct printing from memory cards plugged into the printer, the days of home photography meaning either splashing out a fortune on darkroom equipment or going to Boots are finally over. Now, amateurs have access to all the resolution and manipulation capabilities they'll ever need at extremely low prices, and that can only be a good thing.

Okay, so maybe I'm a little behind the times with all this stuff, but still. Can I say I'm impressed, please? There are so many things to say about this marvellous new toy that if I didn't stop myself writing now I'd probably blether on for the length of a short novel.

Posted by mpk at April 19, 2004 3:08 PM | TrackBack