Straight from the camera, this is a backlit Morning Glory (Ipomoea purpurea) taken with the Kodak EasyShare Max Z990. It demonstrates why this has become one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite cameras for botanical photography.
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Category: Cameras
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How Many Pixels Do You Need?
A picture of a house in Mount Lebanon, an inner suburb of Pittsburgh. Enlarge it and admire the sharp detail. It was taken with a Canon PowerShot S45, a camera advertised as having 4-megapixel resolution, which is rounding up from about 3.9. Father Pitt often brings out cameras from the Neolithic era of digital photography, when digital cameras had settled down in large communities but had not yet learned to smelt bronze. Why? Well, there are several reasons, and some day old Pa Pitt will devote an article to them. To summarize:
1. Pocket cameras of this era often allow more manual control than later cameras.
2. Older cameras can be found very cheap in thrift stores and online auctions—often for less than the price of a paperback book.
3. Therefore, if you lose one on an expedition, you can just buy another one.
4. And therefore, you can have a wide range of cameras, which is a good thing because every camera is a different way of seeing the world. Any photographer will tell you that, when you pick up a different camera, different pictures happen.
But one thing these cameras obviously lack is the resolution of more modern cameras. As a rough guide, what Father Pitt thinks of as the “Neolithic era” of digital photography was the period when digital cameras had resolutions from two to five megapixels.
Is that enough? Well, as old Pa Pitt has pointed out, the very finicky magazine National Geographic decided that digital cameras were good enough for its pages when they reached five megapixels.
But that was almost a quarter-century ago. How about for today’s uses?
For most purposes today, the resolution requirements are even less. Last month, Marc R. at Open Source Photography published an article on exactly this question: “The Pixel Paradox.”
One thing professional photographers worry about is other people stealing their work, which Father Pitt has not worried about in a long time. People use his pictures all the time, with his blessing, because he has a notice on his site that says “Steal my work.” All his pictures are released under a CC0 public-domain donation, so anyone can do anything with them without permission. So Father Pitt isn’t interested in how to balance size with the possibility of theft, which is one of the questions Marc R. addresses.
But his practical answers are interesting. He gives us a table with the recommended maximum number of pixels for the longest dimension of a photograph for various purposes. The longest recommended dimension, for any online use including photo contests, is 2048 pixels.
Now look at the picture at the head of this article, which was taken with a 2002-vintage Canon camera. Its 3.9-megapixel resolution means that its pictures are 2272 pixels on the long side. You would have to crop or shrink those pictures to fit them in any of Marc R.’s recommended sizes.
So a camera that is nearly a quarter-century old is more than adequate, in terms of resolution, for any use in which the pictures will be published on line.
As for other considerations, you would have a hard time finding a camera as good as the Canon that fits in your coat pocket the way the Canon does. It has manual control of everything, it can save raw picture data, it has an excellent lens for such a small camera, and it’s built like a tank.
All other things being equal, it’s always better to have more pixels to work with. But all other things are never equal. If you find an old camera like the Canon PowerShot S45 in a thrift store, pick it up and bring it home. Spend a few more dollars on extra batteries and a 2-gigabyte Compact Flash card (no bigger, because the camera can’t read a bigger card), and you have a picture-taking machine that slips into a coat pocket but gives you admirable results. And don’t worry at all about the low resolution. You’ve got all the pixels you need for most purposes.
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Quirks of the Nikon COOLPIX P100
This was a pretty good superzoom fifteen years ago, and it still can produce good pictures. It takes more effort to get those good pictures than with most of old Pa Pitt’s other outdated cameras, though, and sometimes he wonders whether the results are worth putting up with its eccentricities.
First, this camera takes a proprietary battery. Almost all cameras these days do. Camera manufacturers were shamed out of using AA batteries by online rants, but all the online rants Father Pitt has read against AA batteries in cameras start from the same premise: rechargeable AA batteries do not exist. Father Pitt does not know how that incorrect assumption became accepted dogma in the photography world. With good AA batteries, the number of pictures per charge is comparable to what proprietary batteries can do, and the advantage of having one kind of battery for every camera becomes more obvious the more cameras you have. Father Pitt has a lot of cameras, so he tries to look for cameras that use AA batteries. But this camera came at a very low price, so it was worth trying out.
A more serious difficulty is that the separate battery that runs the clock and keeps the settings is defunct, and it cannot be replaced. With most cameras, this means the minor inconvenience of having to reset the date and time with every battery change. With this camera, though, all settings are reset to defaults with every battery change. That would not be a problem if the default settings were reasonable, but they’re rubbish.
First of all, this is the only camera Father Pitt owns that does not default to its highest-quality image setting. Fine, Normal, and Basic are the three settings available, and the camera defaults to the middle one. At the “Fine” setting, the camera can store more than six thousand pictures on a 32-gigabyte card, so there’s no good reason to skimp on quality.
Next is the “AF area mode.” At the default “Auto” setting, the camera hunts around for things to focus on and picks a different one each time, usually the wrong one. Setting the mode to “Center” makes autofocus work reliably.
Then comes “Distortion control.” Like most superzooms, this one trades a fair amount of lens distortion for its long zoom range. You can set the camera to correct that distortion—but the setting is off by default.
And here we run into one of the other odd quirks of this camera, which is that you can’t have distortion correction and exposure bracketing, or a number of other things. You must choose one or the other. The manual has a two-page chart, in small print, of “functions that cannot be applied simultaneously”—and it leaves out a lot of things, which you can only find out by experiment. For example, it doesn’t tell you that you can’t use distortion control with auto bracketing.
Next on our list of bad defaults, we go to the “Optimize image” submenu. Here we ignore the second level of options and pick “Custom,” which allows us to adjust the contrast, sharpening, and saturation, all of which are much too aggressive by default. Father Pitt sets them all to the lowest levels.
Because the settings are lost every time the battery is changed, this routine has to be repeated every time the battery is changed. To be fair to the camera, it was not designed to lose the settings; they were meant to be kept by the clock battery. But it is also fair to point out that the clock battery was designed not to be replaceable, and online chatter indicates that it failed early in a large number of these cameras. And it is also fair to point out that other cameras do not lose settings when they lose the date and time; other manufacturers found a way to store those settings in nonvolatile memory.
Finally, one other annoyance: the camera is not smart enough to take the zoom into account when using Auto ISO mode, and the image stabilization is unimpressive. To get a sharp picture at the long end of the zoom, it’s necessary to set a higher ISO speed by hand, and then remember to set it back after retracting the zoom.
All right, but what about the pictures?
Well, they’re kind of lousy at the default settings, but once the settings are tweaked, they’re very good for a superzoom. The camera will not save in raw format, but the CMOS sensor compensates for that somewhat. Father Pitt likes to use exposure bracketing, and the three exposures are taken quickly, with the camera ready for another three in a second or two. These bracketed exposures can be made into HDR pictures that preserve a high level of detail in shadows and highlights.
So, for the shopper looking for a cheap used camera, is the P100 worth it?
If you have a choice (and that’s what online auctions are for), old Pa Pitt would recommend something else. His Fujifilm FinePix HS10, for example, has the same resolution and came out at the same time, but it is far better at everything it does, and it has more capabilities, including saving in raw format. Also, its internal clock still works.
But if you see one of these Nikons in a flea market for $5, well, you can get some very good pictures out of it.
A few pictures taken with the Nikon:
Highland Towers, Shadyside.
Lonicera periclymenum.
St. Peter’s Church, North Side.
Lutz’s Meat Market, Hill District. This is one of those HDR pictures made from three bracketed exposures. The speed of bracketed exposures is one of this camera’s chief recommendations.
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Easy to Use
A pocket digital camera was sitting around, and Father Pitt picked it up to see whether it might be worth using. Here are the Modes:
Scene Recognition Auto
Auto
Program
Natural & Flash
Natural Light
Portrait
Baby Mode
Smile & Shoot
Landscape
Panorama
Sport
Night
Night (Tripod)
Fireworks
Sunset
Snow
Beach
Party
Flower
Text
But you can’t control shutter speed, aperture, or focus, because that would be too hard to figure out.
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Meet Frankencamera
If Victor Frankenstein had a camera, it would probably be put together like this. The camera is a Sony Alpha 3000. The lens is German and more than seventy years old (probably; old Pa Pitt is not sure about its date). It’s a Wirgin Telepar 105mm lens, which makes it the full-frame equivalent of 157½mm on the Sony with its APS-C sensor.
Wirgin Telepar lens mounted on a Sony Alpha 3000 camera Father Pitt picked the Sony because its image quality was said to be excellent (and it is), but also because its E-mount, with inexpensive adapters, could accept a wide variety of ancient lenses that he happens to have sitting around. The Telepar is a 42mm screwmount lens, and the number of lenses made for that mount is staggering. Father Pitt has half a dozen of them from the days when he used a Praktiflex and a Zenit.
Now, what is the point of using a lens like this when there are modern lenses that are better and more adaptable? Well, for one thing, every lens sees the world differently. You won’t get the same picture from this lens and from a modern lens at the equivalent focal length. You might get a better picture from this lens. You might get a worse picture. But you’ll definitely get a different picture.
Second, attaching a manual lens to a modern camera wrests control of the camera from the electronics. The camera doesn’t know there’s a lens at all: it has to be told to fire the shutter whether it sees a lens or not. The photographer has to set the aperture on the lens itself, and he has to focus by hand and by eyeball (and with the assistance of focus peaking, which he does not disdain).
Third, a prime lens—one that has only one focal length—makes one think about composition differently. Old Pa Pitt makes full use of zoom lenses when he has them. But that laziness comes at the price of some second-rate compositions. When the only way to change the composition is with one’s legs, one puts more thought into the composition.
Father Pitt spent an hour in the Union Dale Cemetery with this camera and lens, and he was pleased with the results. Here are a few of them:
The Telepar will get more use. When it is not in use, it will continue to live in the tube in which it came to Father Pitt: a tube labeled “CLOSTRIDIUM HEMOLYTICUM BACTERIN… For Use by Qualified Veterinarians.” It fits the lens perfectly.
