kzeise.com

We live in a golden age of photography, with a lot of different options available, from very small sensors in phones to large ones in medium format cameras. We still have the classical mirror design, but now also modern options with pure electronic viewfinders, eliminating the chance of mistuned autofocus thanks to using the sensor for it.

Also thanks to better computers we now can get much better designed lenses and which are also purer with corresponding higher optical quality. This has made zooms with astonishing sharpness possible, as now all the elements can be positioned exactly, and so the penalty for having many more elements in a zoom has been greatly reduced.

But with all this choice comes the question how to choose from all these options, to know what you need. I always look at the following characteristics when deciding on a camera.

Weight

Never underestimate it. You can only take a picture if you have a camera with you, and you will only have it with you if it is light enough to just be there. The lightest camera by far is the phone, as you carry it anyways. Above it are four classes of carry-ability:

• fits into a shirt or trouser pocket, e.g., the Sony RX100
• fits into a jacket pocket, or hand bag, e.g., the Fujifilm X100, or a 4/3rd with a pancake lens, maybe even a Leica M9
• camera on shoulder or neck strap still light enough to hand hold shots
• so heavy that a tripod is required, e.g., the fast long tele-lenses like the 400 f/4, or large format cameras

The first two classes are realistically the only candidates for a camera that you will always carry. For me, the X100 just fits a jacket pocket, and is just that tiny bit too large to always be there.

The other advantage of a small package is that it is not perceived as professional, and makes it a lot easier to get good spontaneous shots of other people.

Low Light and Flash

To get good shots in low light, you have four options: increase the exposure, use a wider aperture, crank up the ISO and provide your own light. Increasing the exposure is the best option, but it only works with a tripod and requires a static scene.

A wider aperture comes with a shallower depth of field, which is often helpful for composition, but requires more discipline to focus correctly. It is often the best option, and you should first try f/2.0 or faster before thinking that you need to change cameras.

Cranking up the ISO’s will reduce the quality of your image. For indoor images, you will typically have ISO 3200 at f/2 with 1/40 s shutter. From my experience, the Nikon D90 was too grainy at these settings, and the D7000 just about acceptable.

You can reduce the ISO by adding your own light to a scene, which typically happens in the form of flash. You will want a standard xenon flash, as the light from the LED flash on a phone still has a unnatural feel to it. You will not want to use too much flash, so that the lightning does not look too artificial. This limits the gain to about 2 exposure steps, aka ISO 800 must look good. If you use a big camera, it its advisable to use a separate flash unit for the ability to bounce the light from a wall, as well as the longer battery life.

Nikon and especially the Fuji X100 have a good reputation for automatically getting the fill flash right.

Size and Resolution

To get high resolution images, you need high resolution optics. Digital cameras have now come so far that sensor resolution is no longer the limiting factor, it is again down to optics. And because a larger sensor can use larger pixels to get the same resolution, they can reach higher resolutions before they reach the optical limits of the lens.

But this only matters when you want to print huge sizes, wider than a meter. The largest size you will have on a desk is a two page spread, roughly A3. At 264 dpi this is 13 MPixel, so practically even 8 MPixel are enough for almost all normal uses. Beware that noise reduction at higher ISO settings will also reduce the effective resolution, this is a problem for most compacts for photos not taken in bright light outdoors.

Mirrors or Electronic Viewfinders?

Mirrors are a leftover from the analog days. They are loud, and cause unwanted vibrations for longer exposures. They are inaccurate in showing how the final image will look like as the eye has a higher dynamic range than the sensor. They limit the speed with which you can take consecutive photos, and interfere with autofocus. They cost space that makes lenses larger. They need autofocus fine tuning. They will die out in a few years.

But at the moment mirrors are still just a bit better. The main problem with the electronic finders is their higher energy consumption, in resolution and color accuracy they will soon be good enough, and they are much better at providing context info then the optical finders with the tiny LCD line at the bottom.

Also the cost for sensors have now come down so far that again the lenses will dominate your budget. Get the right lens for what you want to shoot, and get the corresponding body.

Ergonomics

This is a tricky one. The best interface I know is the iPhone. Just tap where you want your focus and exposure, and the rest is done automatically. Compared to this, almost all cameras are overloaded with options, and can be difficult to learn. To deal with this complexity, two features are very useful, first a custom menu where you can place the settings you actually need, and second the ability to quickly recall settings, to optimize the camera for differrent situations quickly.

Recommendations

If you want a good camera to upgrade from your phone, the Sony RX100 is a very good choice, light and with very good quality for everything apart from low light shoots.

As a separate camera for people, the Fujifilm X100 is excellent.

If you do not need telephoto reach ( or can wait for the lenses to come out), the light weight Fujifilm X-E1 is probably the best camera to buy when it comes out in November.

For the budget conscious, the half format cameras from Nikon, Canon and Sony are a good choice. Sony stands out with very fast frame rates, and continuous autofocus even during video. Nikon has the 18-200, which is the highest quality all in one zoom currently on the market for half format. You might want to check out used bodies and lenses, the mirrors on these bodies are rated for at least 100 000 activations, and you can often find bodies with less than 10 000.

You should not need to go full format. They are better in low light, and have a large selection of lenses available because it is the professional de facto standard, but they are overshooting in quality for most people. You should only consider them or even larger formats only when you find a problem with your photos that it would resolve; often you will be better rewarded by investing in your photographic skills.

Sony has released a new compact camera, the RX 100. Impressions are at the Verge, and dpreview. It looks like a great camera, with a fast lens, fast shot times, and relative good low light performance in a very small and light package. Its sensor is roughly a third of the size of a DX camera like the Nikon D3200, 3 to 5 times larger than typical compacts and 9 times larger than an iPhone. But because the lens has such a large aperture, it should have low light performance at the wide end a bit better than the D3200 with a 1/3.5 kit lens.

The main competition would be the Fujifilm X100, with even better low light performance, but at almost twice the weight. And it will be difficult to decide between the two, between lower weight, extra zoom range, and fast shot speeds on the one hand, and better low light performance / shallower depth of field and the brilliant hybrid viewfinder on the other hand.

It definitely has the ingredients to become a very popular camera.

After John Gruber pointed out a very nice article about the web site optimization for dConstruct, with his special emphasis on image size, I was reminded of the appalling state of sharing images that we have on iOS. Take emailing for example: the only place where you can adjust the size of the images you are sending is from the photos app. No control from either the mail app, or the standard mail dialog. Not even iPhoto offers any control about file size. And this even though the image size dialog is done very discreetly, it shows the email size, and pressing on it gives you access to compression options.

Would it really be so hard offer the size controls from the photos send dialog everywhere? Or even have a context menu where you can select the output size per image? In the presentation for the new iPad 2012, Apple showed that LTE was the answer for downloading huge images via email. Wouldn’t the right solution be to compact the images? Images can compressed down to around 100 KByte ¹ and still look very acceptable even on the Retina iPad, you do not need to send 4 MByte full camera resolution images.

I do understand Apple’s desire to keep things easy by not burdening the user with decisions, but if you email images, aren’t they for viewing on screen, and wouldn’t it be more important to have the images load quickly instead of being super quality? So why not adopt the image size dialog from photos systemwide and make it default to 1024×1024?

iPhoto on the iPad is a brilliant piece of software that allows for a remarkable amount of editing, pretty much covering all the basics that you would want to have to get a quick appreasal of your photos. Of course it is still far from what you can achieve with Aperture on the desktop, but even so the portability of the iPad should mean that I would use it regularly. But I am not using it, not because it does not work, but because I cannot get the edits out into Aperture.

What I would like to use is the following workflow, so that I do not need a MacBook around while shooting:

• Shot images

• Import to the iPad

• Use iPhoto to do a first round through the images, rating them and inserting the basic event data

• Maybe do a bit of editing to see the effect of some basic changes

• Transfer the images with all info ( including edits) to Aperture for archiving and fine tuning the keeper images

There would be a few functions that would make using iPhoto for this goal easier, like

• Allow you to delete images on the iPad, so that you can already destroy the awful images.

• Allow better marking of images, like the colors / stars in Aperture

• Allow you to modify meta data for the images, like position and keywords, so that you can have them easily marked with the shot info on the iPad, instead of having to do this on the Mac.

But all of these improvements are irrelevant as long as you cannot get your changes out, and iPhoto insists on being a data silo.

After having complained about the lack of wireless support from Nikon, they announce the WU-1a wireless adapter. This is brilliant, especially if Nikon will provide a good iPad and iPhone experience with it. The main benefit is that it is so small that you can easily put it into your bag, not costing a lot of weight. At the moment the only camera that is supported is the D3200, which is a pity. It should work with the D800 as well, given that it was only just released. Their current solution, the WT-4,¹ is not only expensive, but it is also large, and not easy to use thanks to a lack of mobile support. The adapter for the D4 is better, because it is smaller.

The irony is that with this adapter the D3200 will be the best DX camera you can buy from Nikon, even though with only 12 bit readings the image quality will likely be a bit lower than the D7000. But that matters less than the improvement to shooting you will get from the adapter, which will finally be easy enough to use that you will actually want to use it in the field.

I have never thought about how available colors influence painting over time, even though it is quite obvious in hindsight that artistical expression is also a function of the tools available. Very curious how the iPad will influence this, and when we will see people creating new software based brushes, with new interactions with the “paint” already applied on the canvas.

The Nikon D800 is a great camera with respect to the photos it takes, but it has a few issues with usability. The problem is that to a large extent the camera has not yet arrived in the iPad/iPhone age, and still tries to do everything in body, instead of allowing us to use our much more usable touch screen phones and iPads.

Indeed the manual controls are pretty ergonomic, apart from a few issues:
More »