Unclear on the concept

[plonq]

We live in a wonderful time when many of the mundane chores of the past are automated. Our modern cameras border on being magical - if I could ask for one more feature, it would be a delayed shutter that would hold the shot until the picture was well-composed. I envision being able to set it for "scenic", "comedic", "touching", etc.

One would expect that being the lazy, ease-loving blob that I am, I would treat the camera like a point-and-shoot, but this afternoon I disabled as many of its automatic features as I was able and took a picture of my rechargeable speaker. The only part of this picture that I left as automatic was the colour correction, and that is because I was more interested in examining the picture for noise and distortion than for colour integrity.

Also the automatic colour correction in this little camera is remarkably good.

You can check the Exif data for yourself since I uploaded the unaltered Jpeg image as it came from the camera, but I shot this with the following settings:

Flash: off
ISO: 80
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 2.0 seconds



I am going to play around with the RAW image when I get home, but here are my initial thoughts on examining the Jpeg.

The colour-correction on the foreground subjects is darned near spot-on, which is pretty impressive with the terrible lighting conditions in this office. The displays on the monitors in the background are both very cool, but that is to be expected when it is compensating for the lights in here, and I probably would not have noticed that they were pushed into the blue if I did not have them both right in front of my nose while I was looking at this picture.

While I am very pleased with the detail and clarity of the foreground objects, you can really see the error correction and Jpeg artifacts in the background. They are especially apparent at contrast boundaries. The light rings of the speaker almost seem to have a halo against the dark monitors. One of the reasons that I seldom post pictures in full resolution is because down-sizing the image helps to mask the noise and detail lost by the camera's attempts to reduce the noise.

That said, I think that this level of noise and artefacts is acceptable for about 90% of what I tend to shoot on a day-to-day basis.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

How long can you make the canon open up for, and what's the smallest fstop available?

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

So you have a pink desk?

[plonq.livejournal.com]

f/8.0 is as small as it goes. It maxes out at 15s -- not sure if it has a bulb mode.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

No, it's an off-white beige, very much like it looks in the picture. If you want to see how it would have looked uncorrected, load the picture into an editor and adjust it until the lower part of the requester on the screen in the background is white.

The office is lit with those "soft", off-white fluorescent bulbs, which is an ugly light source for most cameras to try and balance around - especially when the computer monitors in the background are competing with properly-balanced whites.

[fuzzytoedcollie.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of a camera with error correction in the background. I could, like, point it at a screen full of buggy code, walk away for a soda and, *poof*, the code would be error corrected when I returned to my computer. Nice :)